I am reclaiming the city. I know it’s always like this in the spring anyway, or nearly always, but this year as with every year it feels different. It’s fun to pretend that no one has ever felt quite like this before, felt quite so viscerally the symbolism of spring; everything laden, ripe, the trees with their plump blossoms, the limbs of the city swollen from all the promise of things to come. Everything seems simultaneously possible and unlikely. The sky is fickle and yet so self-assured; one day it is like summer, all hot and blue, and yet the next an autumnal cloud cover makes you rethink everything, so that you can never be sure whether you feel this way or that.

Mostly it’s like being reacquainted with someone. The word “reclaim” implies ownership, which is maybe not the right sentiment, really, but this is how it feels: as if, in a very selfish way, I am taking something back, closing my fingers around it.

One evening I take a bus into town, quite impulsively, so that I can get a burrito and then wander around, down darkened streets, circle the Radcliffe Camera, where a lone man crouches low, takes a photograph. I pass, or am passed by, merry groups of Americans who are probably as young as or maybe even younger than I was when I first arrived; that is to say, quite young, quite impossibly young. I hate to think of myself as having been that young only because to do so makes me feel very old, even though I’m not at all old, even though I’m constantly feeling hopelessly young. The night falls in a very particular way. Cats dart across the streets of East Oxford and it doesn’t matter who wins, the end of the boat race, when the crews slump forward with exhaustion and elation, always makes me cry.

2.

I remember this time last year; I walked up the Woodstock road one day, in a coat which was not really necessary, with everything blooming pink around me. I was going to a lot of open mic nights at the time, I think because they make me feel simultaneously a part of something and also like an onlooker, which is often how I try to be even though it’s very hard to be both at once. One night, a few days after I had been refused a visa and then written a polite letter back and now was having just to simply sit and wait and wait and wait, there was a transition moment, a moment when things went from feeling truly awful to being bright and hopeful. It did not matter if I was refused a visa, I would go somewhere and write things. I would not starve because no one had ever let me starve before, least of all my own self.

Then after that I got the visa after all and a new job and still I had not finished my book, for which I kept setting arbitrary deadlines and then deliberately missing those arbitrary deadlines because, I suppose, I could not really imagine what would happen after the book, as if it defined me, or justified my being here, though of course it didn’t, I had been here first, then the idea, and not the other way around. For awhile it was a great relief having a visa because I knew that I could stay, but after awhile the relief wears off, or becomes just a part of daily life. The fact of being here ceases to seem so miraculous. And then eventually there is the thought that it is after all only temporary, two more years, as if I am literally buying time (I guess I actually am literally buying time). And now a year later I know to start thinking again about it again.

3.

In the same way that I feel both old and not-old as I’m passed by younger youths, I start to feel that I’ve grown gradually more comfortable in the skin of responsibility, whilst simultaneously finding it itchy, a bad fit. We do things we’ve needed to do for years; we finally buy a bedside table and a real wicker laundry basket and a bread bin and are not so much alarmed by the prospect of having to call a plumber as vaguely inconvenienced. I attach much importance to the bedside table and the bread bin. It’s very hard for me to see that we’ve grown up because it’s happened so slowly and we’ve been so particularly stubborn about it, and because we’re still not, after all that, really grown up at all, but there has been a shift, it’s very hard not to notice that there has been a shift.

It’s sort of an alarming prospect, this gradual change, the way it creeps up on you. Like, will we wake up suddenly, someday, to find that we have bought a house and paid off all our debts and have creaky knees, grey hair, grandchildren?

Maybe, probably, if we’re lucky, I guess.

❧

Every year is the same and every year I think it is different. The blackened trees stand defenseless against a pale sky and the parks are wet and the fog at night lies heavy, suppresses my breathing. The streets are littered with the pieces of plastic and cardboard that the wind stole one rebellious morning and even the shop window displays are bleakly ambiguous: jewel coloured party dresses (for a spring wedding!), bare shoulders, boots, murky raincoats that can’t decide whether to be warm or to be whimsical.

The whole world is brown and made of stone. One Saturday we decide to walk into town because it is sunny and warmer than usual, but there is a wind blowing, and if you sit outside for too long your fingertips start to go numb, so you have to keep moving: through the ceaseless throngs of tourists, the packs of Big Beautiful Blonde Undergraduates, the sporty types in shorts and college sweatshirts carrying lacrosse sticks or sacks of hockey gear. I start to hate them all. They look smug, though I only think they look smug because they look happy. The funny thing is that I probably look happy too, because I am happy, if I don’t think about them; I am in town buying underwear which is something I have been needing to do for a long time, and later the Man and I will go and buy a toilet brush together, and some coathangers, just before nightfall, in the dewey evening, and it will be one of the most strangely intimate moments we have ever had. But right now, in town, watching the parade, I say to the Man: everybody else is dressed better than I am, and what I actually mean is, I’m cold, let’s go into the Covered Market and buy some cheese. But that’s the other trick of This Time of Year: the way it steals the words you want to say and makes you say something else entirely.

I always think that at This Time of Year it would be possible to think that no one really lives in Oxford, that it’s just people passing through. Some of them, like the school group from Spain that cross the street as an unruly army, will be gone in a few days, while others, like the three friends meeting for a sandwich outside the Radcliffe Camera, will be gone in a few years. We don’t even see anyone we know, which is unusual here, because everyone pretty much knows everyone else, in a roundabout sort of way. But everyone is in hiding, or, more likely, is too self-absorbed, too completely engrossed in the drama of early February, or is it mid February, or does it even matter, to notice each other. I know I am, but I can’t really speak for anyone else.

On the Cowley Road, construction begins on a new supermarket, directly opposite the old supermarket. At night the darkness falls tantalisingly slowly, now, and students who have drunk too much in order to feel warm again are sick on the sidewalks. Even the pubs, which gave such comfort in the tilt towards winter, with their wood fires and warm glows and pints of bitter on a Saturday afternoon with a P.G. Wodehouse novel and the falling leaves outside, are now just loud and hot, the glow too bright, the fire a reminder of the cold, not an alleviator of it.

I wear torn tights and worn-out boots, not because that’s all I have, but because that’s all I have the energy to wear. In the mirror my face has become obscured by my hair, not because I have not brushed it but because I have brushed it in just such a way that it falls like a veil. The air inside is unbearably dry; my nose hurts – my nostrils hurt, my NOSTRILS! – and my lips crack. I stop shaving my legs because my razors are all too dull and because I have ceased to be able to remember what it’s like to have bare legs, even though every night I go to sleep with bare legs, even though hardly a month ago I was in California walking on the beach in shorts and a bikini top. I force myself to forget my own proximity to these experiences for the sake of feeling grumpy.

Every year I think this is the first time in the History of EVERYTHING EVER that anyone has been miserable in late winter. Every year I think that only my body aches and only my mind is tormented by the breath of summer’s memory in my ear as I sleep. Every year I think this is the first time I have felt this way, or else I think that I have not felt this way at all, that I’ve escaped! until one night I fall asleep realising that I have felt the same way I always feel at this stupid time of year – right before my birthday, right before the beginning of the period when you are allowed to start to Hope For Spring. Just maybe in different ways. And I start to be annoyed that I have framed even good things so negatively – I want to capture the sweetness of buying a toilet brush better, I want to say how beautiful and blue the sky was as we walked down Queen’s Lane towards the bus stop and what a relief it was to be home in the late afternoon before the darkness had fallen and how we had a cup of tea and cleaned the fridge out and pulled chunks of ice away from the sides of the freezer and laughed. But even being annoyed about that is a form of negativity and I worry I’ve been poisoned by the hot dry inside air.

Is it spring yet?

❧

Do I feel nostalgic here?

1.
At a certain point it occurs to me that I am always looking for somewhere to live.

I don’t need somewhere to live. I already have somewhere to live. I have a house, and a pub where people know me, and a corner shop where I buy cheese and sliced white bread and tinned soup for lazy meals. I have a history with my city, a relationship with it. I have a sense of belonging.

2.
But when I visit other places, I don’t want to see museums or monuments or the street where someone famous once stood naked on his head for twenty minutes or the spot where tourists always get their photographs taken. I used to think that this was because I was more sophisticated than that, or else that a sense of place is not in these things but in the way that people interact with pavements and cafés and in the architecture, the landscape, the things you can see sitting in a park or strolling down any arbitrary street.

Now I see that it is because what I like best when I visit a place is to wander aimlessly through neighborhoods in the evening, peering into the bright windows of other people’s lives, trying to picture myself there. I never liked New York City until I discovered the parts of it that I could conceivably, without too great a leap of imagination, exist happily. Now I say I love New York City but it’s really only because I can see myself living in Brooklyn and running in Prospect Park on the weekends and then having prolonged, bloody mary-fueled brunches. I don’t necessarily want this life, I’m not seeking a change, but “home” seems to be the way, ultimately, that I relate to places.

3.
Last year, on a flight to Kenya, I watched Sam Mendes’ “Away We Go”. And I guess I am doing exactly what Burt and Verona are doing, except without meaning to, and except without any need or even conscious desire to.

I guess maybe I don’t know how to visit a place. Only how to react to it.

4.
I’m in San Francisco. I’m never sure what my relationship with San Francisco is. I came here first with my parents when I was little and it was summer and unseasonably (everyone said) warm. We walked through Chinatown to the City Lights bookshop and yet I did not perceive how this place was much different from any other I had been. Still California, still home. Later I came back and bought a silk robe with an embroidered dragon from a Chinese lady and that night got food poisoning from a Vietnamese restaurant and a few weeks later became a vegetarian, for a bit. Later I came back and wandered around the SFMOMA taking photographs of the way the light – a hot springtime light, though the air itself was cool – came through the building fell in ordered lines on the floor. We spent a lot of time in a Yoko Ono exhibit. There was a telephone, painted white, and the placard said that once a day Yoko would call and speak to whoever happened to be standing there, whoever had the courage to answer when it rang. But Yoko did not call while we were there so instead we wrote wishes on little pieces of paper and hung them on a tree with tiny clothespins.

Now I do not know if the sum of these experiences equals a comfort and fluency with this place or not. Geographically I know nothing of the city; I feel adrift in each neighborhood, not able to picture how it connects to the next, not knowing where north or south is or what I would even do with this information if I had it. But I know that there is a patchy history, which must mean something.

5.
We revisit City Lights. I put my hand on the spine of a book in the Architecture section. Someone says, “excuse me,” pushes past, and it occurs to me – quite suddenly, in a way it has not really occurred to me before -that I am Californian, that I am not an outsider here in the way that I am an outsider at home, in Oxford.

I guess the paradox of this is, in a way, why I like to live abroad. Geoff Dyer writes about the same thing when he moves back to Oxford (of all places!) after a spell abroad: “Back in the land where I belonged, back among my own tribe,” he writes, “I immediately missed not belonging, missed that strange home you can build out of homelessness…And at the same time, coexisting easily with the feeling it apparently contradicted, was the feeling that I did not belong here.”

6.
So do I belong here or not? Maybe every visit is simply a quest to answer that question. And maybe the answer is, at least metaphorically speaking, actually in the wallpaper:

“We are inconveniently vulnerable to the colour of our wallpaper,” Alain de Botton writes in The Architecture of Happiness. He is writing about our houses, the structures that surround us, the buildings we love and abhor – but isn’t this also true of places? We are as inconveniently vulnerable to the metaphorical color of the metaphorical wallpaper of our cities or towns or countrysides as we are to the actual color of the actual wallpaper in our bedrooms. Which in part explains a seemingly arbitrary whim to move to England, for instance, or a sense of belonging in an unfurnished Park Slope apartment overlooking a quiet street. “The tiniest details can unleash memories,” de Botton writes. “The swollen-bellied ‘B’ or open-jawed ‘G’ of an Art Deco font is enough to inspire reveries of short-haired women with melon hats and posters advertising holidays in Palm Beach and Le Touquet.” True too of the details in our surroundings. If “insofar as buildings speak to us, they also do so through quotation – that is, by referring to, and triggering memories of, the contexts in which we have previously seen them,” then also this is the way that whole neighborhoods, whole cities, whole countries, speak to us. Through nostalgia, even if that nostalgia is not fully understood, even if we have never before visited somewhere and so – logically, though this has nothing much to do with logic any longer – cannot be nostalgic for it.

So am I actually asking myself, each time I visit a new place, each time I wonder if I could live here, do I feel nostalgic here?

7.
Somewhere near Nob Hill, we sit in a café and watch people passing by. It is late afternoon. The sunlight is coming through the windows at such an angle that makes concentration on anything but idle speculation impossible.

A girl in a rust-coloured cape and a mustard beret walks past, carrying a bag of shopping. What if I was the girl in the rust-coloured cape and the mustard beret? Walking to my apartment on a sunday afternoon. Unpacking my groceries. Making a cup of tea and looking out of a narrow window to the street below, watering a house plant, stroking the head of a tabby cat, sitting on a red sofa and reading a book and chatting occasionally to the Man and feeling the weight of a sunday afternoon, the pressure to squeeze joy out of the last hours of the weekend. What if I was?

I guess this is the question I am asking of myself every time I go anywhere.

❧

All the leaves have fallen and the cold becomes profound. The newly-naked branches look raw and pink from exposure, like our cheeks. Will it snow? Everybody says excitedly. But of course it won’t, not really, that’s not the sort of place Oxford is, where you get the first snow and then it settles and stays for months. Yes, it snows, in little anxious flurries, the flakes get in our mouths, stick to our backs, and then it stops and we walk to the farmer’s market to buy root vegetables and bacon.

We rocket towards the New Year. Time speeds up, or seems to speed up, but only in retrospect: we were there, now, suddenly!, we are here. There’s a flurry of excitement around Thanksgiving (since I’ve been away, everyone in the USA seems to have met up and agreed to start calling it “American Thanksgiving”) – people start to blog about how thankful they are, how they’ll overeat, how important it is to be with family. I hate the way they say that word, as if I – or anyone else – might not know what it means on any of the other 364 days of the year. Then they excitedly go out and buy stuff, because that’s the tradition. Everything’s about tradition.

I think people think I’m a bit crass about Thanksgiving, that I’m denouncing my heritage or something. But the thing is, what I mostly remember is bad school lunches with too much chalky turkey, and top hats and shoe buckles made out of construction paper, or else red and yellow Indian headdresses clumsily coloured in. I never remember how they chose which of us would play the pilgrims and which of us would play the Native Americans. I think they did that thing that primary school teachers do, which is wave a hand and say, “and everyone on this side of the room, you’re all piiiiiiilgrims!”. Sometimes someone would bring a real turkey in and we would look dispassionately at it and it would look dispassionately at us and then someone would say hey, it’s like a chicken, but bigger! I don’t think anybody ever said, “you’re about to eat one of these,” but it was implicit, and also it was California, so there was a pretty good chance that half of us were vegetarians already.

And later, I remember not going home one Thanksgiving, because if you have ever tried to travel across the United States of America on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving you know that it is not an experience worth $500 and 12 hours of your life. So instead I drove from Boston to New York with my roommate at the time, a Catholic grad student from Westchester County. I read Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall, studied old court cases for an upcoming American Government & Politics exam (the professor was notorious – “oh, you’re taking a Mike Brown class?” people would say, but I had managed to make him like me by sitting up front in the lecture hall and staying awake). We had Thanksgiving lunch with her aunt, who lived an hour away in Connecticut. On the drive up I finished Decline and Fall. On the drive down I fell asleep. The next day we went to Gap and I bought a jumper and a pair of socks. We took the train to the city and tried to go ice skating in Bryant Park but decided the line was too long so instead we had pumpkin spice lattes from Starbucks and looked at the trees and the strings of Christmas lights and later we went for pizza somewhere on the upper east side. One night we just drove aimlessly around, listening to Weezer, ending up in the Bronx, near Fordham University. It was a nice time but I fail to see how I’m meant to be sentimental about it. (The year after, my only concession to the holiday was to buy a pumpkin pie from Whole Foods. I ate it with a glass of vinegary red wine, sitting on the floor next to the heater, and then wrote a few thousand words of my thesis and watched Pirates of the Caribbean on my laptop.)

Anyway, at home we never ate turkey, but ham and salad and pumpkin pie. California is a hard place to be festive; it always shows holidays up, laughs and says, it’s Thanksgiving? Okay. But look at the bright sky, feel the sun on your back. Go for a swim. Have lunch outside. Don’t eat too much, you’ll want to go for a long walk later. The hills are green.

Really it’s just that I’m contrary and I don’t want to be made to feel thankful. And I certainly don’t want to take the Guardian’s poll on whether I nabbed my Black Friday deals online or in-store this year. Here’s what I did on Black Friday: I went to work. I bought a sandwich from the Moroccan deli down the road and everyone said, “ooh, isn’t it cold today!” Later, I went home and we had a glass of wine and watched videos of cats crawling into boxes.

So maybe that’s the thing. We’re marooned in November, in our own present. It’s impossible to look forward, equally impossible to feel any connection to even the recent past – was it last week I stayed in bed with a cold, the week before that we drove to the Isle of Wight? It may as well be last year, or someone else’s memory.

Everybody’s head is down and the trees are shivering. The leaves have formed a carpet over the garden pathway. A sleek black cat visits us nearly every night; we’ve called it Dobson, as in Zuleika, and don’t know if it’s male or female or if anybody owns it, but it seems to get enough food. Still, it likes to be scratched behind the ears and rubbed on the throat and to wrap itself around your legs.

I read: “Thus the minuscule, a narrow gate, opens up an entire world.” But in this strange month it seems the other way round, that the entire world converges in a narrow gate.

❧

We’re no longer in between seasons. The weather has become fiercely autumnal, and from my study window I can watch the steady fall of leaves and feel simultaneously nostalgic for summer, when we sat outside eating roast chicken and salad, taking our jumpers off to reveal almost-brown shoulders, and happy to be here where the air is fresh and the pubs smell of wood fires.

I’ve taken up swimming. I use the university pool because it’s so close to my house; I also like the feeling it gives me, like I’m an outsider who’s made it inside, a spy, a double agent. I don’t know what I look like to them – not obviously old enough to be out of education, not obviously young enough to be a bright-eyed, messy-haired fresher, either. One of my greatest conceits is that I imagine everyone is always looking at me all the time and trying to figure me out. I only think this because it is what I do to people. I’m dangerous to have around; I am constantly making up stories.

On a weekday evening I emerge from the pool and shower in the changing room, next to a small woman with pert breasts. I have never mastered the art of the changing room; I look around too much, my hair drips, I don’t know how to change subtly behind a towel, I don’t know anybody so I can’t have a casual chat as I get dressed again.

Tonight a gaggle of students have gathered and are preparing for a nighttime workout; perhaps they’re members of the swim team, for they speak in phrases like “stepping onto poolside”, which makes it sound like they Know What They’re Talking About.

They’re recovering from a big night out. One of them, husky-voiced, tiny and blonde, is reliving her drunken antics; another of them, also tiny and blonde, has slept with a man called Joe.

“I thought everybody knew,” she says, when the husky-voiced girl expresses her surprise. “But as they don’t, can we just keep it between us?”

And then she says, “did you get with anybody?” and looks a bit crestfallen when the husky-voiced girl says no. Perhaps she wanted a comrade-in-arms. Sometimes long late nights with lots of friends can make you feel lonelier than ever, and she gives off an air of being isolated. Her action has given her something to hide; everybody else is open, unfettered.

One of their friends comes back into the room. “Getting all the gossip?” she says.

“Yeah, I am getting all the gossip,” the husky-voiced girl says, but she doesn’t mention Joe. A closely guarded secret is born.

This is probably how female friendships are broken, I think, but I don’t know for sure.

When I leave, a tall boy holds the door for me. Perhaps he thinks he might later run into me, at a party, at his college. It’s the start of term. People think lots of funny things at the start of term, myself included, although I’m not a student any longer, and I haven’t been for some time.

More likely he doesn’t think of me at all. I get on my bicycle, disobeying the signs that tell cyclists to dismount on the narrow path, because I’ve noticed that everyone disobeys, and I think it must be an unwritten rule. At home the Man has made a butternut squash risotto and turned the heating on. I have that happy sleepy feeling that comes after a swim and we drink the rest of the white wine with our dinner and go to bed early.

❧