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.

❧

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.

❧

I’ve been traveling. Or at least this is what I tell people. The truth is that when we arrive at LA neither of us feels different or amazed in the way you feel different and amazed to discover yourself someplace entirely new. The air is warmer and heavier than it was in the place we left; in England there was a summer wind, blowing big clouds across a narrow sky, whipping my freshly-washed hair around my face. But we have a history here – if not here specifically then here generally, in this part of the world – and the pleasantness of familiarity borders on mundanity. We take a shuttle to the Hilton and check in. Everyone is cheerful, and the mirrored elevator whisks us up a dozen floors. Our room looks out over a parking lot. Anonymous lights flicker and blink in the distance. We’re in a no-man’s-land. Hard to believe this place ever had any other purpose, though it must have, once. We fall asleep with the TV on – a film with Russell Crowe, I think, or someone like him, playing a cop in 1970s America. He’s yelling at a junkie in an ambulance when I nod off.

We wake very early; no spectacular sunrise, just a dark grey that lightens as the invisible sun moves behind a curtain of June clouds. I ride the elevator to the pool. There are two men splashily attempting laps as I swipe my card and enter the gates, but they soon leave and I have the place to myself. The pool is shallow, and so small that within six strokes I can cross it lengthways. But the water is warm, and the air outside is cool and the overall sensation is soothing.

***

Orange County is a source of perpetual amazement. In Garden Grove, Anaheim, Santa Ana, I think: people made it this way. But how would you ever know that it was people and not robots, that it was meant for human inhabitants, that it was deliberate at all? Do you see any humans? Do you see anything that’s human-sized? No. You see the drive-thru ATM, the drive-thru coffee shop, the strip malls, the six-lane streets, the parking lots. Even the Crystal Cathedral, with its garish screen announcing services and its spires pricking a white sky, is too big, meant I suppose to contain multitudes but destined, I fear, to look comically (or tragically) like a cartoon version of itself. Where they exist, the sidewalks are hot and narrow, stained by chewing gum and spilled McFlurries, interrupted every few feet by curb cuts. We pass hamburger joints, hospitals, hotels. Nothing seems particularly busy, but there are always cars pulling in and out and people must be inside the cars, compelled to keep moving by some obscure motive or other – errands, lunch breaks, breakdowns. There are people behind counters and cash registers, taking money, making money. We repeatedly seek respite in the old part of Orange, where antique shops and cafés and wide shady spaces make us feel welcome, even a little nostalgic. I fall briefly and irrationally in love with a vintage 1940s swimsuit, made of thick navy blue wool with red straps, “a really rare piece,” the girl in the shop tells me, smiling encouragingly but understandingly; it belongs in a film, or a frame. So I pretend that if I had lots of money, or even any money, this is the sort of thing I would impulsively spend $250 on.

***

I watch episodes of Friday Night Lights and feel nostalgic for small town Texas, even though I’ve never set foot in Texas, even though I’ve never been to a high school football game. My high school mascot was the earwig, which inspired very little spirit in anyone, and all the boys played lacrosse, although certainly not well enough to be state champions. People weren’t really from there, anyway: it was mostly a boarding school, and everyone scattered at the end of each year to go home or to college. I flip through old yearbooks; I note that in my senior year, I was voted ‘most likely to succeed’, alongside a male counterpart. As I was never sure, and still am not sure, what it is I’m supposed to succeed at, I doubt I’ve lived up to the challenge yet. (My primary achievement so far, apart from moving far away and finding somebody who continues to love me even though I never put the bread back in the bread bin, seems to be writing a book centered largely around the idea of changing definitions of success). The boy voted most likely to succeed now, I believe, works in finance, which sounds much more like something approaching success, particularly if success involves being able to pay your rent on time.

I revisit the valley where I went to school. The uncertainty of my relationship with the place now is based on the understanding that I know almost no one here anymore: there’s little chance of a chance encounter, one of those movie scenes where you’re standing at the counter picking up your mother’s prescription and someone taps you on the shoulder and says ‘oh my god, I can’t believe it’s you!’. I keep thinking about how different everything is – none of the places that used to be here are here anymore – but at the same time nothing’s really different. It’s not the same salon, but it’s the same old story, or a version of it – this time it’s the hairdresser’s husband, not the hairdresser herself, who was born and raised here.

I drive home, listening to a mix CD I must have made in high school – Jimi Hendrix juxtaposed with Dashboard Confessional. I always did like to be contrary. The sights are familiar and so are the sounds. I turn the volume up, blaring Weezer like I’m 17 and pissed off at nothing in particular but nevertheless enjoying the freedom and the speed and the inherent understanding that all the big decisions are still somewhere on the horizon, not yet made.

As it happens I’m not pissed off at anything and am feeling pretty mellow, driving slower than I used to, pulling over to take bad photos with a borrowed cell phone, momentarily at peace with the big decisions that have already been made. But I still remember the time I hit the squirrel on this stretch of road and the time we discovered that the cows had escaped their pasture on that stretch of road. I’ve been thinking a lot about memory lately and I wonder why these are things I remember particularly.

❧

In New York, it was hot. I forgot to be amazed that we’d just crossed the Atlantic ocean in seven hours. I wore shorts and sandals a lot. We went to Coney Island, enjoying the air conditioning in the F train all the way to Stillwell Avenue. The last time we were there we saw a pair of newlyweds having their photo taken outside of Nathan’s. It was December and almost unbearably cold; the bride wore a long sleeveless gown and stood motionless, her shoulders bare and her face frozen into a smile, while the photographer, in a heavy coat and fingerless gloves, darted around the wedding party. Then the place was photogenic; now it was sort of eerie, all set up for Halloween but inhabited by sun-seekers, shirtless men on bicycles and girls in bikinis lying on towels or splashing at the shoreline. I stood in front of a zombie-like figure, blood on his plastic shirt, trying to get some shade. This place was becoming a haunt of ours, I thought.

***

We were staying in a Brooklyn Heights apartment, up six flights of stairs. A few doors down was a café with a bench shaped like the Brooklyn Bridge; at the end of the street was a playground, at the other end, an Italian restaurant. At breakfast I re-read Hemingway because I’d just seen the latest Woody Allen film. There was a good desk in the corner of the room from where you could look out at the Manhattan skyline, but the chair had wheels and the floor sloped, so you couldn’t sit there for too long without sliding away. There was a roofdeck, and on the hottest nights we went up and watched the sun set over the buildings and had a Sam Adams. I’d had an apartment like this in Boston, a tiny, well-lit 2 bedroom apartment with access to an empty roofdeck. I couldn’t tell if I was nostalgic about it – even some of the smells reminded me of that place – or grateful to be somewhere else now, metaphysically I mean. I remember once coming back late after serving drinks at some swanky function (I was a temp for a catering company; I owned a polyester tuxedo, complete with clip-on bow tie and trousers with an adjustable waist) and wanting a beer – it was spring, quite hot out. My roommate had left some Harvest Moon pumpkin ales in the fridge, so I opened one and took it up to the roof where, not very long ago, we had made snowmen during a St. Patrick’s day blizzard.

***

Later in the week, when the weather had turned (not cold and Autumnal, but wet, humid, the skyline shrouded in a queasy mist), we went to the Brooklyn Museum. Somehow I found myself in the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, although I had no particular interest in the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art. I stood in a dark room. On one wall was a gilded mirror; on the other, a large screen, onto which was being projected the image of a room. In the center of the actual room was a chandelier, lit up, upside down. And into the projected room a woman in period dress walked. She entered, looked around, exited. A few moments later she reappeared, standing on the ceiling, upside down. She began to recite a speech, or perhaps a series of speeches. I was alone in the room with her. Then I was joined by a woman in a leather jacket. She looked around, took a flash photograph of the exhibit, left. She was not part of the exhibit. I was not part of the exhibit. On the wall outside the room I read: “In The Spirit and the Letter, the viewer enters as space where sculptural elements, including a softly glowing crystal chandelier balanced upright on the floor and a framed mirror hanging upside down on the opposite wall, invert physical assumptions to produce an uncanny sense of dislocation.” I did not know what this had to do with feminism, exactly, though I had to admit that later, looking at my photographs of the exhibit, the image of the woman standing on the ceiling made me feel a little disoriented.

❧

About a month ago I went to London for an errand, and after it was done I had a few hours to kill so I figured I might as well walk around a bit. And as I walked around I tried to understand why I never go to London and feel like it’s a place I could live.

In fact I go there and I feel like it’s not a place anyone could live, let alone me, even though I know lots of people live in London and lots of people love it. I just don’t see anything there that suggests living on a human scale. The architecture is all mixed up – beautiful things, monstrosities that should never have been allowed to be built, but nothing really stands out, so your impression is never one of either beauty or ugliness or even of contrast, just of some big grey slab that’s muddy and muddled and doesn’t make any sense. The buildings are big but of course nothing is big inside, so you get the impression it was built for giants to look at but dwarves to live in (the opposite of the Tardis, I suppose). And it’s just so disparate, so desperate, so empty even when it’s crowded. In my two mile walk from Pimlico to Chelsea I saw nothing charming except at one point a broad tree-lined avenue which turned out only to be leafy and green because it bordered a hospital, and the lovely garden I could see through the fence was not for public consumption at all. Leafy London. Except most of it seems sterile and shoppy to me. Everyone is shopping, in a way.

***

So I tried shopping, too. I went into a shop, I bought nothing, I went back out again. It’s not that there weren’t plenty of pretty things; it’s that nothing suited me in that moment. I was a traveller; I wore stained jeans and an old flannel shirt and carried a heavy, sweaty rucksack.

It’s funny that even though I have a home I’m still window-shopping for places to live all the time. Every place I visit, even London, is a possibility. I only think of this now because I came across this piece by John McIntyre on André Aciman’s Alibis: Essays on Elsewhere, which I haven’t read but would like to read. “Aciman,” writes McIntyre, “views the places he visits not with the wondering, landmark-seeking eye of a tourist, but with the speculative, assessing eye of a potential resident…He examines this habit at length in “The Contrafactual Traveler,” and concludes that, “I ‘connect’ not by saying, ‘Isn’t this lovely, picturesque hill town beautiful?’ but ‘Do I see myself living here?’”

***

The tube was crowded and on the way from Sloane Square to Paddington, an Irish group played live music in my carriage. They were good. They made me smile and think I could get used to that sort of thing. I guess in a way it’s why people live in places like London, it’s why people live in cities, because that sort of thing might happen and make you smile, whatever sort of thing “that” is, whatever makes you smile.

But anyhow I didn’t have any change to give them because I’d spent the last of my change on an artichoke and egg sandwich on artisan olive bread on the King’s Road. So I couldn’t show my appreciation and then they were gone, on the platform, and we were left alone, sweating and close. I did not really want to listen to my music anymore, although my headphones were still in and as it turned out my music had been playing the whole time, but very quietly, so I hadn’t noticed.

***

On the train back to Oxford I fell asleep accidentally, slumped against the window with my hand on my almost-full cup of coffee, my second weak, pointless latté of the day. I had tried to read Hemingway, well, I had read Hemingway, for a bit, but something about the way he described Gertrude Stein as having “immigrant hair” had started to grate on me, even though I had read the book before, and that particular story, in fact, many times, and knew I liked it. But it grated on me and grated on me, and I just sat there and read it over and over and over again – immigrant hair immigrant hair immigrant hair – wondering what does it mean, why does it bother me so much? Until I fell asleep slumped against the window, train crowded at midday, people everywhere, my weak latté still clutched in my hand.

I woke up and it was a muggy day in Oxford. The train station was ugly and for a moment, as I stumbled through the turnstile and stood remembering the way Paddington always makes you feel like you’re on the edge of something, that something new or big is just around the corner, it felt provincial. But I see myself living here anyway.

❧