We moved from north Oxford to southern California in 1964 – when I was seven – and suddenly I noticed that living in the future tense could be as treacherous as living in the past; it was ideal so long as you were young and on the move, but it could be exasperating if ever you wanted to lay foundations underneath your feet. Small places were more conducive to enmities and smugness, I came to see, as soon as I was in the devouring open spaces of the Far West, but they were also home to idiosyncrasy, a sense of fun and to privacy.

- Pico Iyer

Six years ago, give or take a few days, I arrived in the UK after a red eye flight from Boston. In the departures lounge I’d watched people line up to board; towards the end of the line was a couple, youngish, holding hands, tall and tanned and athletic-looking, the sort of people you imagined went running along the river together every morning, and I surprised myself by feeling envious of them. I was six months single after two years of a college-intense relationship and, I’d thought, enjoying every minute of it, even the slightly abashed mornings-after, the avoiding of phone calls, the hoping for phone calls, the stumbling end-of-night kisses. But here was this couple, and I wanted to hold someone’s hand. Maybe it was a reaction to leaving the city I thought I loved behind just as it was at its most glorious and carefree – the start of summer, the warmth not yet blossomed into unbearable heat, the bars full and spilling out onto the sidewalks at night. It occurred to me, too, that I would miss the friend I’d been casually sleeping with; in the next instant it occurred to me that maybe I didn’t feel as casually as I was acting. So probably it was a good thing, flying off into the unknown: before I let the friendship dissolve or devolve or evolve, before my experience of being single turned messy, or messier, off I went.

When I arrived in London it was morning and raining. I hadn’t been in England since I was twelve, visiting with my parents, and I was ill-prepared. I had no map. My shoes, brand new, purchased for a planned summer of unplanned backpacking around Europe, didn’t fit properly, and rubbed blisters on my toes as I dragged my suitcase out of Paddington. Although I knew my hotel was nearby, I had no sense of how to get there. When I did get there – after about an hour of walking in grey, puddle-filled circles – the woman at the front desk told me there was a problem with the plumbing in my room and I could not check in. So I changed my shoes and sloshed down Oxford street and found my way, by memory or luck, to the British Museum.

And anyhow it all worked out in the end: the hotel gave me an enormous suite to compensate for any earlier inconvenience, and I slept heavily, and I threw the new shoes out, and the sun was shining the next day when my train pulled into Oxford.

The thing is, six years starts to feel like a significant amount of time. It’s approaching a decade. To commit to anything for six years is to show a significant degree of passion, or doggedness, or, ideally, both. In six years your face changes; so does your body. You look demonstrably older. No one asks you for ID anymore, and you can no longer stay up all night drinking cheap cider and then wake up and go for a run and do it all over again the next night – or maybe it’s just that you don’t want to, which means that your demeanor, too, has changed. In six years people have come and gone, and you’re someone who stayed, and this fact starts to define you.

The face of the city has changed, too. By dint of having known them for a long time now, you start to feel ownership of particular street corners and buildings. You like to say, well, I remember it before this place was here, I remember the way things were, I remember the unsavoury old carpet and the pool table and the jukebox – I’m not saying I feel nostalgic, I’m just saying I remember it. In six years two cohorts of undergraduates have done their degrees, been doused with eggs and champagne and shaving foam, gone away, got jobs. Countless barmen and women have become comfortingly familiar and then vanished. The things that haven’t changed start to seem like the only things out of place: the café with the red sign, the summer-evening sound of church bells and ice cream trucks, the arrangement of furniture in your bedroom. The cherry trees and the ground elder have taken over the garden; the ivy has wrapped itself around the old Dutch bicycle that you used to ride everywhere; the landscape, the view from the study window, is simultaneously unrecognizable and unchanged.

Which isn’t a problem: it’s just time, doing its thing.

❧

There are, Andrew Cohen writes, “millions of men and women wandering around America today who spent some of the best years of their lives in and around Boston…Even if we can’t say we are ‘from’ Boston we surely confirm when asked that we are ‘of’ Boston. It remains in our blood”.

And now all these little love letters to the city are cropping up (and not just from men and women wandering around America; “I loved that city,” writes one Australian) – blog posts, articles, tweets. I too have been thinking about Boston, all week, obviously, but especially today. I know it’s basically meaningless to express affinity in a time of crisis or distress, but as someone certainly not from Boston and equally certainly of it, I’m glad nevertheless to see people expressing a kind of indiscriminate and generic affection for a place, for this place particularly. I like the shared ownership it implies, even when everything is still happening and confused. Even if, like me, you left, and the city’s just a network of distant memories now (not all good, but all essential), they’re our memories.

I have nothing new to add. I lived there between September 2004 and December 2007, my tenure framed by two big Red Sox wins. Sport was casually central to my life there; I spent countless hours in the gym or at my boyfriend’s tennis matches or studying against the backdrop of televised baseball games. I used to hang around on marathon Monday, watching the post-race runners all wrapped up in silver blankets. I watched them eat, drink, laugh, cry, vomit, hug: messy, noisy, leaky enactments of humanness. I used to think they were pretty stupid, actually: who would want to do that to their body, to train it and test it like that? But I admired them, too, more than I care to admit.

I used to run in the city myself. One hot summer I lived alone in a cramped apartment near Fenway, across from the Fens and Clemente Field, where there always seemed to be people playing cricket (I’d never seen anyone play cricket before that summer). When it wasn’t so oppressively humid that I couldn’t stand to be outside I’d run around the track, or else through the shaded park – often at dusk, when everything was blushing pink. Once, running stupidly at midday, when the heat was at its worst, I was struck in the side of the head by a passing bird, which left a smattering of down feathers smeared across my cheek; I was revolted and cut the run short to return home and shower. Another time, I was wearing a grey Harvard t-shirt that someone had bought for me and a man shouted as I ran past, “you don’t go to Harvard!”, and he was right, I didn’t, and I hated that he could tell, or that he’d made a lucky guess. When I played volleyball we used to have dawn workouts, running circuits around the Boston Common, falling to our backs on the damp grass and doing sit-ups, followed by squats, followed by this or that, admiring the serene old men doing Tai Chi while we sweated and struggled for breath. When I lived in Kenmore Square I used to run down Beacon Street or Comm Ave, up Beacon Hill, just seeing where things took me, finding convoluted ways to lengthen the route. I liked this run because I could do it in the dark, and it was heaven on a cold late-October night, with the smell of decaying leaves and smoke heavy in the air, and a warm glow coming from the kinds of Back Bay townhouses I dreamed of someday inhabiting but knew, deep down, I never would.

Mainly, though, I used to run along the river. I usually just did a nice easy three or four mile loop; I could do it in the mornings before class, or on the weekends, even if I was wickedly hungover and dehydrated, because I was still so young that my body hadn’t yet learned to protect itself from its own abuse. There was something pleasurable about doing that run when I was hungover, actually: it made me feel unreasonably defiant and able.

It was only a few months ago that I first encountered this passage, from Murakami’s What I Talk About When I Talk About Running:

As I’m leisurely jogging along the Charles River, girls who look to be new Harvard freshmen keep on passing me. Most of these girls are small, slim, have on maroon Harvard-logo outfits, blond hair in a ponytail, and brand-new iPods, and they run like the wind. You can definitely feel a sort of aggressive challenge emanating from them. They seem to be used to passing people, and probably not used to being passed. They all look so bright, so healthy, attractive, and serious, brimming with self-confidence. With their long strides and strong, sharp kicks, it’s easy to see that they’re typical mid-distance runners, unsuited for long-distance running. They’re more mentally cut out for brief runs at at high speed.

He’s describing a run he took in October 2005 – so I could have been one of those girls, maybe. Except that I’m not blond, I was not a Harvard freshman, I was not particularly used to passing people, and was fairly used to being passed. Still, I was there then, running then. I tried to run all through the year, but couldn’t manage it in the depths of winter, when it was simply too cold to derive any pleasure at all from being outside, and anyhow I liked it best in early Autumn, when the leaves would start to fall and the wind came off the river and made you feel like this really was the prime of your life, anything was possible, anything might happen.

Boston always made me feel like that; it’s why I moved there. I didn’t care much about what university I attended, or what I studied, for that matter – I just wanted to be there, in that city.

I haven’t been back since the winter I graduated. I left in a rush, in the frigid aftermath of a blizzard; my English boyfriend helped me pack up my studio apartment in the North End and ship all of my things to England over the course of a weekend, and I took an uneventful final exam, and handed in my senior thesis, and that was it, I was done. To celebrate our early graduation, some friends and I took a cheap bottle of bubbly down to the Boston Common and drank it waiting in line to go ice skating; a few days later we all left the city for good, or for now. But we are of it; it remains.

*Haruki Murakami

❧

There’s an episode of Doctor Who in which the eponymous time-traveling Doctor finds himself in an alternate timeline, where it’s always 2:02pm on the 22nd of April, 2011. Other things are amiss too: pterodactyls are chasing children through the park, the War of the Roses has just entered its second year, and on TV, Charles Dickens is explaining the plot of his upcoming Christmas special: “All I can say now is it involves ghosts and the past and the present and the future all at the same time.”

Holy Roman Emperor Winston Churchill, evidently feeling disquieted, summons the Doctor.

“Something has happened to time,” he says. “That’s what you say, what you never stop saying. All of history is happening at once. But what does that mean? What happened? Explain to me in terms that I can understand: what happened to time?”

***

In the 21st century that you and I live in, pterodactyls are extinct, the Wars of the Roses happened in the 1400s, and Charles Dickens never got the chance to appear on television. But Emperor Churchill’s question feels no less relevant: what happened to time? Or, rather, what’s happening to time? And, since ideas about time and place are so integrally linked, what’s happening to time and place – time in places, places in time?

It’s not necessarily that time and place have changed their (slippery, shadowy) shape. It’s that our view of them is shifting – or, more specifically, our tools for viewing them are shifting. Take Facebook, which, as Nathan Jurgenson writes, “fixates the present as always a future past.” Or take the Fitbit, a device that tracks every step you take, feeding back data on how far you’ve walked, how many calories you’ve burned. It’s just a fitness tool – ostensibly an intensely personal thing, a thing about you and your relationship to your body, your bodily relationship to the world. But, as Malcolm McCullough writes, “[p]lace begins with embodiment. Body is a place, and it shapes our perceptions” – and the Fitbit is part of a larger context, too, a proliferation and assimilation of devices and applications which fix us always in time and space, which force questions about what it means to be able to freeze time, excavate the layers of a place, make memories as they’re happening.

Craig Mod writes about this in a piece on “the Data Mind”:

Walking is different than biking or driving down a street. Heads stuck in smartphones, we miss the humanity of the scenes we pass. Yet using that same technology we can call up with atomic granularity the time and place of a meeting with a dear friend years back. Sometimes those two spaces collide – technology creating an almost psychic, projected awareness of the here and now.

The language we use to describe the uses and implications of this kind of technology is heavily couched in temporal and geographical language. The here is affected by the now, as the now is affected by the here. And place, as the cultural geographer Doreen Massey writes, is “here and now. It won’t be the same ‘here’ when it is no longer ‘now’.” It’s crowded by ghosts and memories, complicated by what James Donald describes as a “simultaneity of past, present, and future”, a “temporal tangle that defines the ‘now’ that we inhabit.”

So what exactly is technology creating an awareness of if “the here and now” is so slippery? What’s here? What’s now?

***

It’s a good time to be thinking about this, maybe, given all the recent interest in the app Snapchat, which allows users to share pictures and videos which disappear from the recipient’s device, irrevocably, after a period of time. I still don’t understand what the point of Snapchat is, exactly, or why I would want to actually use it, but perhaps that doesn’t matter: perhaps its point, if it has to have one, is to act as metaphor, or as catalyst for conversation. Certainly there’s been a spate of good writing about it recently, so I think it’s probably earned its keep in the lexicon of essayists and theorists (and, in the case of this post, amateur bloggers). “A photograph is made of time as much as it is of light,” writes Nathan Jurgenson:

- a frozen shutter-speed-size gap of the present captured within a photo border. There’s always the possibility that the next photo you take will one day be lovingly removed from a box by some unborn great-grandchild; the Polaroid developing in your hands might come to be pinned to someone’s bedpost in posterity. To update that to more contemporary terms, your selfie on Instagram might be a signpost for the future you of what it was like to be this young.

On Snapchat, images have no such future. Fittingly, its logo is a ghost.

The symbolism of the ghost is loaded; I’m reminded of Steven Conner, writing that “[a] haunted place has become stuck in time, or time has been scored into it”, or, for that matter, of Edward Thomas, writing about Oxford in 1903: “The past and the dead have here, as it were, a corporate life. They are an influence, an authority; they create and legislate to-day…as I walk, I seem to be in the living past.” It’s a reminder that although something may disappear (and everything disappears eventually) it isn’t necessarily erased: that’s what memory’s for. The temporary photograph may lose its form, become disembodied (or re-embodied), but it may still leave an imprint. The temporary photograph was made to be shared, and sharing has the potential to be a form of remembering, or at least a form of noticing, a way of heightening “awareness of the here and now”.

Jurgenson writes:

The photograph, for all its promised immortality, always hinted at death…Documenting the present as a future past, as conventional photographs do, asserts the facts of change, impermanence, and mortality. The temporary photograph does the opposite: It interrupts the traditional photographic fixation of the present as impending history by posting a present moment that’s not concerned with the past or the future. As such, the temporary photograph is necessarily less sentimental and nostalgic. By being quick, the temporary photograph is a tiny protest against time.

Is it fair to extrapolate all this from an app which, according to its creators, is primarily about “the beauty of friendship – […] the lightness of being”? Maybe not fair, but certainly possible. Of course, the temporary photograph is concerned with the future: it’s concerned with evading it, concerned with being gone before the future arrives. What’s happened to time, maybe, is that we’ve dared to think we can somehow manipulate our perception of it. But we’re still left with this uncomfortable fact, this understanding of the temporary photograph as a moment in time and therefore – tiny protest though it may be – very much of time. “The past is a projection as well as a determinant of the present,” writes James Donald – and every future will be a present and a past.

***

Place is the convergence of not just past, present, and future, but also of “past as projection and determinant of present”, “present as future past”, and so on: it’s the form that the temporal tangle takes. That is to say, as Malcolm McCullough writes: “Life takes place”. Life takes place: it occurs, and it occurs somewhere specifically – the kitchen, the city, the hillside, the library, the field. Place is also, as the geographer Patricia Price writes, “a processual, polyvocal, always-becoming entity”. It’s subject to shifts of mood, memory, and other equally unstable processes. It’s subject to the same pressures of time that human life is. Places age; they show cracks in the ground or erosion of cliff-faces instead of wrinkles under the eyes, in gleaming new buildings where once lay the buried dead or a fallow field – not erasing history but building on it, literally – but they do age. The temporary photo doesn’t age: the temporary photo attempts to train our attention on an isolated present, if such a thing exists – the here and the now, coexisting, on the verge of disappearing (it’s possible, too, that we ascribe more meaning to what’s fleeting than less). The Fitbit turns our understanding of mortality on its head: all that data collected, all those healthy miles logged, and for what? For the hope, maybe, that we can be briefly free in the city, briefly and powerfully in place – never mind the future, the weight gained and lost, the breath quickening and slowing. We’re doing it to improve ourselves, but also to be ourselves.

The question, then, isn’t so much, “what is technology doing to our sense of time? – it’s, “what is technology allowing us to say about our sense of time?” If technology has the power to create a “projected awareness of the here and now,” or to fixate “the present as always a future past”, what does a future-past-present actually look like, geographically? How much of the here and now is actually neither here nor now?

I don’t know – “All I can say now is it involves ghosts and the past and the present and the future all at the same time.”

❧

I.

Here’s the thing: I’m a serial re-visitor. I like to chase my own tail.

I’ve made this list of all the places I want to see. I add to it all the time. But then instead of booking a flight to Cairo or wherever I suggest we go back to Fez, say, where we’d been three years earlier, on our first holiday together. We had a nice time then; we drank a lot of black coffee and walked round and round the medina until we’d earned the beginning of a sense of direction. At night, after a too-big meal and a final coffee, we’d climb to the rooftop of our cheap backpacker’s hotel and watch the lights glinting. We’d flick through the photos we’d taken on our digital cameras, reliving the frozen moments, assimilating them.

It was a good time to go on holiday: we had no shared past and no particular compulsion, yet, to speculate about the future. I remember that at the end of the trip, on the bus back from Luton, I made a list in a little leather notebook of all the things I needed to buy when I got back to Boston, things I needed to furnish the new studio apartment I was moving into. I had this excitement-tinged-with-sadness feeling, but I made the list anyway, and then fell asleep on his shoulder like we had been together for years and would always be together, like we weren’t from opposite ends of the world. I think this is maybe what people mean when they talk about being present, about inhabiting the present. We were there and that was it: we were there, and still unbothered by the logistics of living, or living together, or making a living, or making a decision about our future. I had a semester left of college to complete, so life was full of invisible possibilities – I trusted implicitly that they were there, even if I couldn’t identify what they were.

You can’t return to that time; you can’t return to any time. But you can return to a place. So I return to places. So we go back to Fez, or New York, or the same village in Wales, over and over again. A poor sort of time-travelling, but there it is: it’s the best we’ve got.

In most cases I trick myself into believing that it’s because these are places that need revisiting – they’re complicated, demanding, worthy of a relationship. They’re marriage material, not one night stands. I say there’s too much to Fez to be found in a single visit; we need to go back, give it the time it deserves. Upon second visit I find that I am comfortable enough here, walking in my own footsteps; I am someplace familiar, deliberately seeking out familiar landmarks – squares, cafés, that restaurant we really liked. But this sense of familiarity is more disquieting than calming. At one point I find myself fighting a panic attack. I pretend it’s the heat, the travel, the heady smells, the crowded dusty streets, the donkeys pushing past, the chickens waiting patiently to be slain. We climb up out of the fray and sit on a low wall at the edge of the medina and I identify at last the strange feeling, the disquieting feeling: the feeling that I am haunting myself, following my own ghost, inhabiting the space she inhabited three years previous in an attempt to somehow be her again. It’s the feeling that I am jealous of myself as I was then: that I am both with myself and outside myself. I’m not unhappy now, in this present – far from it; I’m in love and it’s summer and things have turned out okay. But I know more about the me in that previous present: I know what happens to her, I know how she gets from there to here. Whereas I don’t know how I get from here, now, to there: I don’t even know where ‘there’ is.

So we sit on a wall and I feel simultaneously right and wrong. That evening we have a beer with a friend and watch the nightly migration of birds cloud the sky. Later in the week we take a taxi out of town and hike to a waterfall, where the air is clear and cool. And then we go home again. Three more years elapse. I consider another trip.

***

Notice that to write about this, I use the language of the supernatural. Familiar, as in the familiar spirit, assisting witches. Ghosts. Haunts. I do this instinctively but also knowingly. A few years ago, a friend sent me a link to a paper by Steven Connor. “As a term, ‘haunting’ has an almost disappointingly innocuous past,” Connor writes:

Well into the eighteenth century, a ‘haunt’ could be simply a place to which one had frequent recourse…As a noun, a ‘haunt’ signifies not exactly a home, but rather a sort of second home, a place to which one has periodic recourse from one’s regular home…Over the last couple of centuries, it seems to have become more common for places to be haunted than persons…A haunted place has become stuck in time, or time has been scored into it.

***

Oxford always seemed to me a haunt of long-dead phantoms, living off its past and alien to anyone with energy and a mind on the future; now I walk among its ghosts and see them as my own.

- Pico Iyer

We are always sharing space with ghosts. “All landscapes are haunted by ghosts,” the geographer Patricia Price writes. Sometimes the ghosts are versions of ourselves; sometimes the ghosts are people we never knew, people who never even existed except in the minds of others or the pages of books. When I moved to Oxford I finally read Jude the Obscure for the first time. I’d tried before and always abandoned it about two pages in, but now there was a shared geography, and certain passages and sentiments stayed with me, particularly as Autumn took the city in its wicked fist, shook the trees and turned the stone grey with worry. The city became Christminster, Hardy’s University town – and I, I suddenly came to understand, had moved here, like Jude, to be close to something that I wasn’t quite a part of.

I took long walks after dark; I felt very Hardy indeed, walking in the cold abandoned nights: “There were poets abroad, of early date and of late, from the friend and eulogist of Shakespeare down to him who has recently passed into silence, and that musical one of the tribe who is still among us…” One night, on St. Giles, wide and empty, a woman with a black eye came lilting towards me, as if she was walking on a ship in stormy waters. We stood under a streetlamp while she asked for change and I refused to give her any. I don’t know why I refused: I was broke too, but broke in a different way; I could have reached into my bag and discovered a few coins. But I walked on, I guess because sometimes the things we imagine we see somewhere seem more real than the things we actually see. I’m not proud of this, but it’s how I spent a lot of time feeling when I first moved here, I think: like if I tried hard enough I could make every ghost manifest itself, like I could literally build my own version of the city.

I stopped in a café for a glass of wine. It was warm and smelled of salt and onions inside. Jude Fawley had lived in Jericho, I remembered. I had read a lot – too much – about this city. I knew what fate awaited Fawley, as I knew what becomes of the sorry lovesick undergraduates in Zuleika Dobson’s Oxford. Through the fogged café windows I could just make out all the doomed heroes, phantom figures slouching home on twisted roads. I loved this place, but I never knew if I belonged to it or if it belonged to me; never knew if I haunted it or if it haunted me.

“We are adept, if occasionally embarrassed, at saying what we make of places,” writes Robert Macfarlane, “– but we are far less good at saying what places make of us.”

***

So I revisit places. At least once a month, maybe less in the winter, and often by accident, I find myself in Christ Church meadow, sitting on a particular bench near the bridge to the boathouses. I sat here the week I first arrived, nearly six years ago now. It was a hot, clear day, the start of summer, the VIIIs in full swing, the banks crowded by spectators. I wore a sleeveless dress and sucked on a zinc lozenge, trying to ward off a cold that was threatening to ruin my plans to meet my new almost-boyfriend for drinks later. And now, whenever I find myself nearby, I like to mark the spot, acknowledge the memory, so I pause midway through a run, or on a chilly January walk. I have no idea if the view has changed, if the trees nearby have grown, if the shape of the river has changed at all, if the path ringing the meadow is more worn than it once was. I don’t notice the surroundings at all: I only notice myself being there, again and again, year after year.

II.

We go to New York again and again, too. I didn’t like New York at first; it took me maybe a dozen visits to warm to it. This is another argument for revisiting: sometimes you have to give a place another chance, or another dozen chances. Sometimes the relationship needs to be nurtured, requires great patience.

We go back to the same Brooklyn bars, claim some kind of ownership. We feel the half-memories we made here (too much whiskey, popcorn strewn across the floor, frantic, heavy conversation with friends we only get to see once a year) bind us to the physical location in which they were made, even though the physical location, if it had the capacity to remember, would have long forgotten us by now. Do you know how many people come here every night? And you show up two times in as many years and think, “this is our place”! So fine: our place and everybody else’s. It belongs to us, and to the girls communing with the toilets, and to the dudes sliding off barstools, stumbling away, holding up the doorframe, dissolving into the shout-infused night. It’s ours, to share.

We go to Coney Island. I know: us and every other hip young thing with an SLR and a pair of Converse. The first time I visited it was April, and I was 12 years old. My mother and I had come from California via a hazy layover in Las Vegas. I think I must have slept, but when we arrived, I didn’t feel like I had slept; I wasn’t yet accustomed to the sensation of trans-continental travel, hadn’t learned how to overcome the particular weariness that follows a red eye flight. So when, in the early evening, after a day of aimless wandering, we took an F train to Coney Island, I fell asleep and woke up disconcerted, wondering if this was a thing you were allowed to do on subways. Did grown-ups fall asleep on the subway? Later, living in Boston, juggling schoolwork with jobs and internships and long nights of drinking, I would learn the art of sleeping gently between stops, slipping fully awake at just the right moment, disembarking like an automaton. But then it was a new sensation, and the time spent asleep gave Coney Island a kind of magical property: I couldn’t identify exactly how we’d gotten here, I didn’t know how long the journey had taken, I didn’t know, geographically, where we were in relation to where we had been. All I knew is that it was a place my mother had visited in her youth; she’d spoken often of it, of New York in general, and now here it was.

There are a few photographs of us on that evening, taken by a friend. We’re silhouettes against the backdrop of the sea. I’m wearing a leather jacket and a pair of ugly khaki cargo pants. I have a pimple on my cheek. What I remember is being cold and windswept and reluctantly having a ketchup-slathered hot dog from Nathan’s, hunger overriding my erroneous and newly developed adolescent desire to preserve the child’s waiflike figure I’d previously taken for granted.

***

Years later I came in December. We’d been out too late the night before and we sat mutely on the train, shifting through stations. The journey seemed to take forever, it seemed to take longer than the journey from England had taken. I observed a man across the aisle from me reading a book, the title of which was obscured by his gloved fingers. I looked out over the frosty rooftops. The air grew cold as the doors hissed open, then hot again as they steamed shut. And then we were there, at Stillwell Avenue, crossing the street. My partner had never been here before and, like I said, my memory of it was mostly not my own at all: the photographs, the stories my mother had told me, about being here as a teenager and being compelled to ride the Cyclone even though she hated it, telling her boyfriend after that he could ride it again, if he wanted, but it would have to be alone. Not my memories at all. My memory was of the limp hot dog, the wind and the cold, and here again was the cold, only ten, a hundred times more ferocious. My face went pink and hot and then numb. My fingers in their thick gloves were burning, then numb. Outside Nathan’s a wedding party posed for photos. The bride wore a long strapless white gown but stood stoically while the photographer, encased in a heavy duffel coat, attacked the scene from a dozen different angles.

We went along the boardwalk, taking our own photos. As I could no longer feel my fingers or my toes or my nose, it didn’t seem to matter if we stayed the whole afternoon. We passed one or two other people, drifting along, but they looked unconnected to the rest of the world, like maybe they were imagined figures. I took a photo of a plastic palm tree, planted in the sand near the ice-grey Atlantic. When the cold became unbearable we sought refuge in Nathan’s. We ate hot dogs with onions. Outside it grew dark and when we left, pulling our scarves up over our mouths to try to take some of the bitterness from the wind as it shot down our throats, the neon signs lit up and we took blurry photographs of the way they glowed.

***

We were back the following year. This time it was hot, 84 degrees at midday. I wore shorts and sandals and tried to take photos as we had before, but found that everything looked washed out, dull. Even though the weather was good and it was a weekend, the place was sparsely populated, mostly by shiny sun-bronzed old men on bicycles who had left their shirts at home. We watched some friends ride the Cyclone; I got a photograph as they came down one of the lesser slopes, hands in the hair, faces aghast or delighted or perhaps both. I stood at the frothing line of the Atlantic, watching two swimmers gliding up and down, completely parallel the shore, admiring their strokes.

Although it felt and looked like midsummer, it was nearly mid-October, and everything had been decorated with ghouls and goblins and giant spiders and bloodied zombies in anticipation of Halloween, of cold nights and warm scarves and the smell of rotting leaves and sickly sweet smoke machines. I posed for a photo in front of a zombie-like figure with blood down his shirt and at the corners of his mouth and his bloodshot, perfectly round eyes. My own eyes were shrouded by the Ray-Ban aviators I’d bought off eBay a year or two ago, when I had been working full time in an office and felt like I could finally afford to be frivolous (now: a full-time freelance writer with no clients and no projects; this trip felt like something I’d stolen, but it was the best we could do: meet my parents in the middle, spend a week in someone else’s Brooklyn Heights apartment, have beers on the rooftop looking out at the skyline, imagining that things would soon be different, easier, clearer). If you looked up you could see the shredded witch-figures hanging from lampposts. Everywhere was the eerie, the haunted, the haunting. A place to which one has periodic recourse from one’s regular home.

For lunch we went to Nathan’s and had lemonade and hot dogs outside in the sun.

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Stadtbad Mitte, Gartenstraße. Built in 1930. Survived the bomb raids of the second world war. Renovated in the 1990s. The roof and the walls are covered in squares of glass, and even on this grey day the light comes pouring in and the big room is warm and inviting.

This is the first time I’ve been in a 50-metre pool since I was a kid, when we used to spend long summer afternoons at the Coral Casino in Santa Barbara, practicing our dives and our cannonballs, making up games, peering through the sauna steam at the naked old ladies, their skin folding and drooping, fascinated and horrified by this glimpse of what we would, if we were lucky, someday ourselves become.

I enter at the deep end, standing on the ledge that runs around the perimeter of the pool. I press my goggles against my face. The seal is weak and soon I’ll need to replace them. I push off from the wall. For most of the length, it seems as if I’m not moving at all: then, suddenly, I’m approaching the other wall. The pool is shallow here, so shallow that my knuckles are practically grazing the floor, and I am moving, and I have no sense of time; it might have taken me seconds or years to go from there to here.

I think about the particular and universal language of the pool. It’s a relatively recently acquired language, for me, but I feel fluent here, even though the only German word I know is the one for thank you. Thank you, I keep saying to everyone, even when what I really want to say is, “sorry” or “excuse me” or “yes” or “no” – as if hoping to somehow convey a kind of gratitude for being allowed to bumble along.

Anyhow, once I am dried and clothed again and out on the street I am back to being a foreigner. We walk towards the S-Bahn station. The day had started out cold and wet but now, in the early evening, it has brightened, and the shadows are long on the grass.

“Located right next to the border, the Nordbahnhof building formed a spatial link between the eastern and western parts of the city,” I read on a sign outside the station.

***

One day we walk for hours with no particular agenda. That evening is soft and light, like September. We walk through Charlottenburg, which feels village-still, calm and mild. We eat early, after a stroll near the glistening lake, like pensioners on a package holiday.

***

Because I don’t want to pay for data, I spend a lot of time in the mornings, on trains, in between doing things, studying maps: the fragmented for-tourists map in the back of my guidebook; the U-Bahn map, the map on my laptop where I’ve marked all the places I want to visit (swimming pools, streets, cafés). Usually I would consult my phone on the fly: now, because I can’t, I’m confined to the limits of my own imagination, my own ability to interpret and navigate.

“Augmented space is the physical space overlaid with dynamically changing information. This information is likely to be in multimedia form and is often localized for each user,” I read.

***

Laid into the sidewalks all over the city are brass bricks, rubbed smooth by footsteps, commemorating victims of the Holocaust.

***

I begin to feel immune to physical geography. We are staying in the apartment of an old family friend, whose youngest daughter was my best friend growing up, and there is something profoundly familiar about the rooms and the furnishings. In the bathroom I have pleasant flashbacks to the farmhouse bathroom, the exotic European soaps and creams, the bright towels. In the bedroom I remember visiting my friend after she’d had an operation on her knee; it was a hot California-summer day, the sky woozy and blue, but we stayed indoors, on the bed, watching bad films.

The night before we fly home, we have dinner in Kreuzberg with another of the daughters. We reminisce a little, and we might as well be anywhere, residing, as we do for an hour or so, almost wholly in a shared past. The wall to my right is painted bright red and has a texture like corrugated iron, but it seems to dissolve for the duration of the meal, the background neutral, the beautiful girl with the long blonde hair at the next table a phantom or a placeholder, not an inhabitant of this very real city.

***

At Stadtbad Neukölln, the water is very cold. In the shower room, middle-aged ladies stand under hot water, all lobster flesh and happy sighs. I stand wilting under a heavy stream of cool water, enviously watching the steam rise from their corner of the white tiled room. When they leave I step over and enjoy the remnants of their hot water.

But the pool itself is cold, too. I go down the steps and crouch, water up to my waist, then my armpits. The room is grand – pillars, marble, spitting statues flanking the staircase, but the water is darker and murkier than I’m used to. And after so many laps in rigid lanes with other stressed, serious adults, all of us eager not to transgress, eager to ignore each other even when we stand inches apart, breathing hard, barely clad, spitting and sucking in the same water, the lack of order here alarms and delights me. I watch a woman – in cap and goggles, like me, though no one else wears either – plow up and down the pool amidst the frivolous bathers, the slow, relaxed men with their paunches and the chatty girls in bikinis. She makes a space for herself in the calm, the chaos, and no one collides, no one seems bothered; it’s like watching ducks flitting across a pond, their paths erratic but deliberate.

I begin a gentle breaststroke, occasionally lapsing into a subdued crawl. There is no room here for the private competition I regularly engage in back home (can I beat her, in the next lane over, the faster lane, even if I give her a head start?). I don’t count how many times I swim up and down the pool. I don’t look at the clock. I don’t feel out of breath.

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