Every time I come here I see a different city.

The first time I visited New York I was twelve. It was nothing to me but the place of my mother’s birth; and therefore, though my only impressions of it were vague and fluid, like a film, I had some invisible tie to it. I had heard place names. Brooklyn place names, mostly, because that was where she had lived; in a cramped apartment on Flatbush Avenue. I knew names. But I had no capacity to envisage anything.

So it was like being shaken in a bottle and then tipped out onto a map full of foreign words. We took a red-eye from LAX, stopped over in Las Vegas. I remember the glitter of lights, a garish city that looks beautiful only when viewed from above, in the haze of half-sleep. We stayed with friends of friends somewhere in Brooklyn, but I was still young enough not to pay enough attention to things. We took subways and cabs. Towards the evening we rode all the way out to Coney Island. That was another place-name I had known. Coney Island. I hadn’t known how to picture it, but maybe, in a vague sort of way, I had compared it in my head to Balboa Island, because they were both called “island”, because I had fond memories of playing arcade games at Balboa, winning prizes.

Coney Island was dying, dead. A warm, empty wind blew through the streets (this was April, and still cold, but slowly thawing out). The light was yellowish, brownish. We stood watching ferris wheels and roller-coasters decay before our very eyes; then we had a hot dog at Nathan’s and took the train back and I fell asleep listening to my mom describe the wicker subway seats of her childhood.

Later that weekend we visited the Met; I decided it wouldn’t be so bad, maybe, to live in an apartment overlooking 5th avenue, and then you could pop in and out of the museum whenever you wanted, visit each room and lavish each painting, each sculpture, with the attention it deserved. Easy. I liked the thought of luxury, then. We went and used the bathrooms in Saks Fifth Avenue; I was bowled over by the price tags on things. I remember particularly a lime-green silk woman’s suit, priced at about $700. I could wear lime-green silk suits and visit the Met; yes.

We went to the Village, to Bleecker street where I spent some time in a Tibetan shop buying prayer flags, embroidered pillowcases that smelled of incense, blue paper lanterns, and then to a shop full of wooden and knitted things; I bought a hat. At another shop, our friend tried on vintage fur coats, slipping them over her pale Burberry.

But that trip was mostly the Brooklyn Museum trip. We went on what I remember as a dewy day; bits of sunlight, droplets of water on the leaves in the botanic gardens, through which we strolled slowly and deliberately, savouring each springtime smell, feeling the hot, moist air of the greenhouses, until we arrived at the museum, and went upstairs where we looked at an exhibit of Hiroshige drawings. I remember the simplicity, the clean lines and colours. I was entranced. From the gift shop I bought a little necklace, a pink flower on a red beaded rope. I made notes in an embroidered notebook from Chinatown (I probably still have it somewhere, those notes are preserved).

I went back other times after that. I visited college campuses in a snowstorm (my enduring memory of that trip is drinking a hot chai latté from a funny little bar near NYU called the White Rabbit). I went for a spectacular run through Central Park. I sipped Sierra Nevada in a grotty Midtown hotel room with a few college friends. I spent a week on the Upper West Side, taking the subway, reading Don Delilo.

Each trip was made of impressions, of highlights between exhausted nights. Each trip was to a different New York; and I’m still trying to find the general New York, the essence of it, the thing that connects those highlights and impressions.

In the meantime, we’ve had a breathless, beautiful time here.

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There were ukulele players aplenty. I’ve never seen so many ukulele players. There were good musicians and bad musicians. There was bowling and beer. Kids danced, hipsters slouched (and there were a lot of hipsters, because this was Williamsburg, the hive of hipster-dom, the skinny-jean capital of the world). There were women on stage in tutus and leather pants and men with beards and one blonde dude wearing sunglasses playing the sitar. There were guitar cases and songbooks everywhere. It was strange to be a writer, an anything-else, in a sea of musicians. A non-musician in a musician’s world. There were blow-up saxophones (somewhere out there is a video of Ben and Xander and me swaying like big band brass players to our neon pink plastic saxes). There was confetti, flash photography. A good voice carried all the way across the room. Families in bowling shoes forgot their purpose, spilled onto the dance floor, swayed their hips. There’s that Lewis Carroll quote? “We’re all mad here.” We were all mad, there.

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Late lunch followed by a walk in the park. Not just any park. An elevated park. We’re up amongst the buildings–not above them, not looking up at them from the street, but weaving through them, like we’re hovering, like it’s magic. The sun sets behind us as we walk (through? over?) the meatpacking district. We can see into art galleries and meeting spaces, meet the eyes of billboard models. A strange yellow light descends upon the city, then melts away, into the night. We stand watching the long straight lines of the streets, the headlights, the glitter of windows. When we come down, our feet feel heavy. We’ve been floating.

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It’s like a splitting of the self. First you’re there, and now you’re here, only not all of you is here, not yet. The body can cross the Atlantic in seven hours but the brain takes longer. And before it catches up to you, you’re adrift.

Tuesday evening. We’ve been here less than 24 hours. We’ve spent the day wandering through empty industrial alleyways in Brooklyn, standing by the water staring out at the cityscape, taking photos of the graffiti on walls and the abandoned domestic items–sinks, stuffed animals–in abandoned lots. We decide to have a beer, and they’re playing the Spurs vs. Man Utd game on the television and it’s almost like we haven’t left home. Then we come out into the cold street and a woman on a pay phone is yelling, what TV, there is no fucking TV.

Then we head to Shabby Road studios so Ben can pick up a guitar. We sit on the sofa; a fat cat sits on her hind legs, places her paws together in prayer for a little nibble. There are guitars on the wall, magazines and cables on the floor. Four pianos, a drumset, a collection of derelict TV sets, a shiny red accordion. The room is lit only by candles; we stay too long, forget ourselves, and when we emerge it is dark and I am feeling dizzy.

We take a cab across Brooklyn. I am light-headed and ask Xander to talk to me in case I fade away completely. It’s open mic night at the bar and we listen to some bad poetry and then a girl in black leggings gets up on the stage and places an enormous feathery hat upon her head and sings “O Mio Babbino Caro” as if she was in an opera house, spreading her hands, opening her mouth to let loose her voice. Then, hat still on, she stands at the microphone and belts out a pop song, gyrating her hips like an MTV superstar. My mind is somewhere else–half asleep, perhaps. I’m still waiting for it to find me. In the meantime, we have another drink.

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I should write something here. I haven’t in awhile. How about this? We’re in New York. I arrived in a grump and a huff so it’s difficult to speak of the last twelve hours with any particular sentimentality. We got here; I complained; I moaned; I dragged my suitcase up and down some stairs, petulantly refusing Xander’s help; I complained some more; I fell asleep. But now it’s a bright Brooklyn morning, and here we are, five hours behind ourselves, waking early, not in the office, though it’s a Tuesday. Xander’s gone out in search of coffee; most of my travelling life someone has done this, first my mother, waking at dawn and slipping out, returning smelling of latté and buzzing with an energy that had nothing and everything all at the same time to do with caffeine, and now my boyfriend, who wakes later, goes out with less urgency, but comes back just as satisfied.

Here we are (I say again). From where I’m sitting (the couch of a very kind friend), I can see through the skylight that the day is grey and dry. From Xander I hear it is also crisp; the first day of December, all the trees now bare, we’re veering away from the autumnal, heading straight into the heart of another icy winter.

And last night we crossed an ocean. Travel is so funny.

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