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.

❧

1.

On Highway 1 the radio cuts out and we have a fight about the Beatles. I say I’m sick of bad country songs anyway, can we have the Beatles? He puts the Beatles on and says he doesn’t really feel like listening to the Beatles just now.
“Take the CD out,” I say.
“Why?” he says.
“I don’t want to listen to it anymore.”
“Why not?”
“Because you don’t like them.”
“That’s idiotic,” he says. The first song starts to play.
“Take it out!” I shout.
“No!” he shouts.

Then we do not speak and we listen to several renditions of “Yesterday” and I sip a cold coffee with vanilla creamer which is almost too sweet but also just sweet enough. After awhile he says it’s interesting to hear different versions of “Yesterday” and I say I really like the bad country songs and when the CD is over can we try the radio again?

Later, as the road is starting to widen and straighten again, we stop and get out to look at the elephant seals. They are braying and slapping the sand with their flippers. There are hundreds of them stretched out across the beach, and dozens of accidental tourists in the car park, people who thought they were just on a drive and found themselves suddenly on the side of the road, watching these creatures shuffle and snuggle on the edge of the water.

A volunteer docent offers to answer any questions we might have. We have no questions, but he stands beside us for some time anyway.

2.

The last time I did this drive – the only other time I’ve done this drive – I was 14 and it was summer and I was a passenger. A friend’s father had built, or half-built, a cabin in Big Sur and we went for the weekend. On the way up I kept listening to the same Weezer song on my portable CD player. It wasn’t even the song I liked so much as one particular part: “They don’t make stationary like this where I’m from – so fragile, so refined/So I sniff/and I lick/your envelope and fall to little pieces every time/I wonder what clothes you wear to school/I wonder how you decorate your room.” And I would listen to the whole song just for that moment, and then, when it was over, I would press repeat, and listen to it again. I guess I didn’t really think about what it meant. Just the way it felt to hear it.

When we got to the cabin in Big Sur there was a drunk man sitting in the living room pouring himself another glass of vodka. Later, at night, when we came inside to brush our teeth, he lay sleeping on the couch, moaning and twitching, and from the bathroom – me on the toilet, her at the sink, spitting out toothpaste – we could hear him crying out: “The rats! The rats!” Like Colonel Kurtz whispering the horror, the horror.

As we snuck past on our way back out, the drunk man shifted in his sleep and we thought for a moment that he had awoken, that he had somehow, in his confused state, perceived us to be the rats, that he was going to squish us, or at least shout at us. But he was only moving a limb and then, in the blackness that happens when all artificial light has been snuffed out, things were calm; so we followed a thin beam of moonlight back to the deck outside and climbed into our sleeping bags and giggled about it when we were sure that the snuffles and haunted cries from inside the cabin were merely a symptom of troubled sleep.

What I remember about that trip mostly is the fog; how, on the drive up, it swallowed us whole, and yet how as we ascended the mountain we reached a ceiling and kept going until we were above the clouds. We stood on the edge of a grassy hill and couldn’t even see the sea, the famous sweeping coastline. Just a layer of white haze. We were actually floating.

3.

Today it wants to be clear, and sometimes it is. Even the grey of the half-clouds is bright and I wear my sunglasses the whole way down the coast, until sunset at Morro Bay. Occasionally, on the 1, cutting through the trees, back to the coast, crossing the bridges, we see a lackadaisical hitchhiker – messy-haired, perched on a rock, looking at the view, inhaling smoke. At the last minute, before we pass, a hand will move but not entirely commit to the request for a ride.

Later we put the radio back on. We have this thing about country stations, we listen to them so we can feel like we’re on a road trip, or something. There’s one song in particular; all of the stations have been playing it. “My oh my you’re so good looking. But who are you when I’m not looking?” is how it ends.
“Is it still a rhyme if you just use the same word twice?” I say. But it’s the third time today we’ve heard it and I guess it’s sort of growing on me.

❧

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.

❧

I.

Listening to music on the subway is one of the most certain ways to feel you belong somewhere. Visitors don’t listen to music (we’d like to think) – they’re too worried they’ll miss their stop, or some crucial announcement (“Courtesy is contagious. And it starts with you!“).

I don’t know why I feel this way, exactly. I know the first time I felt it. During my second year of university, I volunteered (briefly) for the campaign of a Lt. Governor candidate in Boston. I had to volunteer for one of my classes, so I deliberately picked one of the least-known candidates in the hopes that I would have something more interesting to do than stuff envelopes, but what I didn’t know is that everyone stuffs envelopes on a campaign. And the office was in Quincy, so I would take the Red Line for an hour to get there and stuff envelopes. (My first day I got a paper cut and bled all over a whole stack of envelopes before I noticed; I hope this is not why my candidate lost the election.) And one day, on the way home, one of those icy late-winter evenings, a rush of cold just before things would start to get warm again, I fell asleep listening to my music, head against the window of the train. And when I woke up – just in time, at Park Street, seconds before the doors were about to shut – I thought, I’ve made it. I belong.

Up until then I had thought – irrationally, unfairly, I hadn’t even been there two years – that I belonged, that I had some ownership over this place (or it over me). But now I knew it to be true, because I had been lulled to sleep on a train with my headphones in.

And I don’t belong in New York, particularly. But here I am with my music on anyway.

II.

Step off the train at Coney Island and you feel immediately dislocated in time and space. A place that once was, I always think; all that imagined laughter and cotton candy, but no sign of it now on the empty avenues and windy winter beachfront.

I first had this feeling when I was 12. After a red eye flight from California, followed by a long day traipsing around Manhattan (or was it Brooklyn?), we took the F train to Coney Island. I only knew Coney Island as part of the geography of my mother’s childhood, so it’s possible I had absorbed some of her nostalgia (or not-nostalgia) without realizing, without knowing the place at all. On the subway, tired of being made to do things by adults who, I reasoned, should be even tireder than me, I fell fast asleep. When I awoke we were at Coney Island. It was April and freezing and totally desolate. We had hot dogs at Nathan’s and then walked to the boardwalk and looked out at the sea.

III.

Now it is December. A pair of newlyweds are posing for photos outside of Nathan’s. She is wearing a long white dress, her arms bare. A sleek black car from the 1950s waits for them (maybe they are all from the 1950s, maybe they will disappear to a happier, warmer time for Coney Island when they get in that car). The photographers’ hands are white with cold.

Later, eating our hot dogs, we see the bride and groom casually cross Stillwell Avenue, holding hands.

❧

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.

❧