sewage and chlorine
Written: Tuesday 29th March, 2022
New York City was like a waking dream—it was loud, overwhelming, it smelt like exhaust fumes and sewage and chlorine, it was unfathomably tall and magnificent, it was fast, packed more and more densely with people the further uptown you walked, it was litter-strewn and full of bird song and pockets of tranquillity in the form of Union Square Park and Washing Square Park and the High Line, it was expensive and (almost) all the service staff were phenomenal, it was concrete and passion and art and beauty and obsession and exhaustion and sirens.
Written: Friday 18th March, 2022
One time I flew to Paris and assumed that because the flight was only an hour long I would feel totally fine—I’d sit in my seat next to an unnamed stranger for 60 minutes and not have a panic attack. Instead—the opposite. An hour-long panic attack. Every time the anxiety would dull for a second a new wave of sickly dread would overwhelm me. I shook and sweated and truly wanted to die. I’m not scared of flying because I’m afraid the plane is going to crash. In fact, when in the middle of a panic attack I suspect that would be a better option. No—I’m scared of something more nebulous. A claustrophobia in the closeness of strangers I can’t escape from. The lack of control one has when belted to a seat thousands of metres in the air. That is the stuff of 3am nightmares: bolt upright, pyjamas soaked in sweat.
At the beginning of the year, I made a promise to myself in my little William Morris notebook—I would make life bigger. I would feel the anxiety and do it anyway. After two years of staying put, enjoying the ebb and flow of a small, quiet life—working and reading a lot, taking long baths steamy with lavender oil, walking on the beach and in the hills and doing video calls in the evenings with my friends and family, I’m feeling something alien. A pull. Having suffered painful homesickness even while on family holidays in France, our neighbour, I’ve often felt more excited on the journey home than the journey away. Now, though, something new. Perhaps a result of possibility taken from us by communities locked down and seeing near-death so close—I want to see this vibrant, varied world. Suddenly, I want to be hit by a wall of dry Mediterranean heat when I step off the plane. I want to eat Kanelbullar in Sweden and drink French wine outside Parisian cafes that give you bread to snack on even when you’re not having a meal. I want to walk the streets that I know so well from films and television—Greenwich Village, Williamsburg, Tribeca, the Upper East Side—and squeal (and trust me I will squeal) at the Friends apartment. So close I can touch the red brick with my fingers. How will my brain –my soul – believe that my physical body is there.
Seeing, smelling, hearing and feeling a place ourselves—truly experiencing—is transcendental. It is when we feel most alive. When all our senses are heightened. Jose Saramango said that in ‘each of our fingers, located somewhere between the first phalange, the mesophalange and the metasphalange, there is a tiny brain.’ It stands to reason then, that consciousness is not only located in the mind—the fingers are aware. The whole of us is aware. To betray my body by only expanding and exercising the mind would be a great waste.
Written: Thursday 31st March, 2022
T and I landed at Heathrow on Sunday night (11pm, UK time). We picked up our car from the heinously expensive but efficient car park and then drove half an hour to pick up Jeremy (our cat, if you’re new) from my grandparents’ house. Then, the three of us—Jeremy unhappy to have been tearfully reunited with his parents and then immediately jailed in his carry cage—drove three hours to my parents’ holiday place in Norfolk where we planned to isolate for the week: working at their old dining room table and staying away from people in case we’d picked up COVID on our travels. The contrast is stark. Instead of horns and sirens blaring in the middle of the night I can occasionally hear the donkey in the field next door, honking contentedly. Gold finches, blue tits, moorhens, robins and even a hare have been spotted from the window. I am taking time to digest the past week – how proud I feel for stepping so far out of my comfort zone I could no longer see the zone (as Joey from Friends famously says: ‘the [zone] was a dot to me). How relieved I feel that it went well, that it was a positive experience and one that has left me lying awake humming with excitement about what else I could do and see and experience. There’s sadness too—just normal post-holiday-blues that make the prospect of work and washing up seem irrational. Is it strange… or, worse, a horrible cliché to feel forever changed by just setting foot in New York City? I can’t answer. I feel I am. I went to New York hoping that some of its history, culture, thrill, inspiration would leave a mark on my skin long after the blisters have healed and I think it has. It has opened me up. Though I don’t think I could live within its concrete walls just the fact of its existence, which has created, birthed, shaped some of the most important minds, pens and works of art the world has seen brings me great joy. Makes me feel real, pumping gratitude.