cosmic

Alright, I’ll tell you about the trip to NY because it is midnight and I have jetlag insomnia despite being exhausted. Life has been too mad to even grant me the time to sort my photos so I have hundreds yet to go though, albeit the same boring ones of buildings and food as usual.

Seriously, life’s dealt me a rough hand this week despite transatlantic posho jaunts. I have a problem sheet due in all four of my classes next week, whereas I usually average two a week and that is stressful enough. On top of that, I found out on the day that we flew out that Surprise! I had a project outline due today. That was all v. interesting given that I only had a title for my project and my supervisor is the head of the dept and therefore impossible to get a meeting with. I emailed him for clues all week while in NY to no avail, so finally ended up camping out in his assistant’s office with my luggage and everything straight off the plane. I hijacked his office for five minutes. Yes, my outline was a complete and elaborate fiction regarding dark energy and modified gravity and I’ll sort that puzzle out, simples.

Yeah and then I got home last night to discover that the gale force winds knocked over my Vespa and now congratulations it won’t fucking start and has a dent in the fender. Glamourous. Words fail.

But this is about NY so I will start with the weather and tell you that it followed Pareto’s principle exactly in that it was 80% shit and 20% fabulous. They get such blue skies there, such bitter winds, such grim and horrible sleet and tearing winds. We inherited this storm from them so I got to experience it twice, double my pleasure double my pain. Fortunately, it was sunny and not bitter on the marathon day, which is what counts, really. 

Thursday, when I woke up disoriented in the hotel, the heavens shat down rain and sleet on an epic scale, like a rating of 2.5 Londons. It was so shit I only managed to trek 5 blocks to J.Crew and back, and my paper shopping bag was soaked through and fell to bits. I gave up and went to the hotel to engage in some filthy general relativity homework. Then my mom got there and it stopped raining and the rest if a bit of a blur, to be honest, because I was being yanked back and forth between mom and jetlag and homework and banker gatherings and marathon duty.

Supporting someone running a marathon is damn near as hard as running the bloody thing, I swear. It’s rewarding but it does my head in. We missed her at mile sixteen, but saw her at 23 and then retrieved her from the finish. We have the thing wired now, in case she does it again. She did it in 5:30 and was less tired at the end than I was, not least because she took a painkiller with street value and my jetlag is a heavy burden to bear.

My mother is like a small child. I think the reason I don’t fancy kids is because while I love her massively it’s damn hard work hauling her around cities. She gets sidetracked and talks the face off everyone and has no sense of geography. We got in a fight on the subway because she tried to chat to someone and I have told her for years now not to do this in any major city and damnit she won’t listen. I’m hard work and she’s hard work but we’re hard work in precisely orthogonal ways. 

But this is about NY, not about my crazy awesome mom.

NY has become sort of a strange halfway place in my life, like the closest I can get to home without actually getting there. I never wanted to like the place and my feelings are conflicted about it. It is incredibly gauche and American and lacks the class of London (and, come on, the subway is so shite). But it has a charm of its own once you look past the overinflated sense of self-importance.

I measure holidays by how much I want to move to a place when it is time to leave. The idea of NY is growing on me. It makes me homesick for America, the trashy real America, land of cheetos and s’mores pop tarts and froot loops. I ate fried oysters for the first time in years, and lo, they were good.

So the thing that NY has in spades is potentiality. It is true that one gets the feeling of being able to do anything there. It is compelling, like a blank sheet of paper. It gives me that itch, to up sticks and try again, try harder, get it right this time. The skies are blue there like nowhere else, like looking through a polarising filter, a perfect Klein blue outlined by perfectly rectangular buildings and perfect ginkgo trees and perfect glittering pavements.

I am starting to meet time echoes of myself there, which is dangerous, it violates causality. I now have a habitual loo that I use at Tiffany. They always have one blue diamond that is a perfect Platonic form, and I try it on just to feel a half a million on my hand. It’s remarkable how heavy a 1.5 carat stone can be when it would require a 30 year tracker jumbo mortgage to buy it. It has become a perverse habit, like trying all the red velvet cupcakes when ironically the current global champs are here at Bea’s of Bloomsbury.  I go and walk and find myself in familiar places, I see myself reflected in the same mirrors.

It is like that, I guess, a big city where you can go and meet yourself coming and going. Time is heavy in London, either too slow or too quick, a bit blurry, but in NY it is ephemeral, leaves falling in Central Park, water through one’s fingers. Because of that I don’t really feel like I have a handle on the place. But it beckons me to come and try, to find out more.

I like its food, I like its jazz, I like the brusque charm of the natives. I like that it feels like home and yet it doesn’t. I like autumn in Central Park and hot dogs. I like Strand books, I always come away with a true gem from there. I like how Americans are always crazy and slightly hysterical because it puts me in perspective, bloody hell, I feel positively rational in comparison. I love the New York Times, in paper, over breakfast at dawn. Only New York could make me feel happy to have jetlag. I have seen more sunrises from there than anywhere else.

I have not ventured outside Manhattan. Well, I have been through some of the boroughs in a car to and from the airports, of which I have been to all three. The provinces do not look salubrious, so I stay on the island. I like islands. They are small and manageable but complicated and yet interestingly insulated from reality. I guess that’s my life, though. I try to stay central. In the middle I find the 24 hour chess shops and buy tiny carved chess sets from them. I plan to go back and play on their tables. I plan to keep going back, maybe for weekly lessons. Someday.

And so I am a transnational. I have two passports. I can come and go as I please…so maybe one day I will do just that.