New York
Friday, July 23
I have spent the last few days suspended over Brooklyn in a glass-walled room. I have been looking out the windows constantly—watching the approaching weather, watching the traffic on Flatbush, watching the sunrise, jetlagged, and the sunset, sleepy. I don’t know what cardinal direction I’m facing; that’s the kind of thing I could google, or ask Graham, because it’s the kind of thing he always knows, and also this is his apartment. He is gone and I am staying here, as I usually have when I’ve come to New York in recent years. Graham is extremely generous with his space, so much that many of our friends joke about our stays in “Café Graham.” It is like being in a luxury hotel, sort of: one continuous room, minimalist décor, white walls and sleek appliances. In the lobby, there is an advertisement for on-site dental care. Before I started staying here I never understood why anyone would live in a high-rise; now I think I understand. Mostly the way the light comes in, and this feeling of suspension, so that you feel in the world without actually being part of it. I wouldn’t like it permanently, but it is somehow perfect for this moment, when I am here but not really here yet.
In the mornings I wake up and go to the Dunkin on Atlantic that is also a Baskin Robbins. It opens at 6 am. I get a large iced latte with a big dose of liquid sugar. In London, where I lived before this week, there are not really iced lattes, or if there were they were really small and not very milky. Once I tried to order one on a rainy day and the barista looked at me like I was crazy. “We didn’t make ice today,” she said, and paused dramatically. “Because of the weather.” Americans are always complaining about the lack of ice abroad, which is annoying, but then, I was an American abroad and it’s true, there wasn’t enough ice; I am a girl from Massachusetts and I like to order iced lattes when it’s snowing, so I am glad to be back for this luxury. I suppose I am particularly attuned to these small differences right now, in this moment just after moving. I imagine I’ll forget them later. In London, I lived in a kind of an apartment that was really more like half of a house, with two floors and a climbing rose that grew on the façade. Will I regret walking out of this house and this life? Probably yes. I am obsessed with the past.
Days are long this week. I am spending a lot of time alone in this glass-walled room. I am thinking about real estate. Chelsea and I are texting, trading apartment-hunting woes. I email with former professors of mine; one asks if I’m interested in housesitting, which is a supreme generosity. I once halfway-lived in her beautiful brownstone, the summer after I graduated, in the middle of the dissolution of a relationship; I can’t go back. Another professor tells me a good story about a rich art collector accidentally destroying an expensive statue, the kind of story I like. I spend a lot of time looking at Airbnbs for February, wondering if I could afford to spend a month in Big Sky, Montana, skiing and writing. (No.) I idly scroll through houses for sale in Providence, Rhode Island. I am always talking about moving to Providence. I am always talking about all kinds of things. I am trying to do that a little less.
I have come here, back to Brooklyn, with all kinds of intentions, but mostly I am trying to stay put. I have lived, I think, in eleven apartments and houses in four years, often for short periods. I am tired of moving. But in this moment of suspension I feel like it would be very easy to walk out of this life into all the other possible ones I covet, and this is tantalising.
Later I will put on a tiny macrame shirt embroidered with roses. I will take the elevator down and out into the oppressive heat, which has a certain comfort because it means I am reentering the world, rather than experiencing it from above. I will meet Michael, an American friend who I know from England and drink beers outdoors as a light rain starts and stops; I will go to dinner with Mack and Josh and talk about collections and objects, talking quickly, talking always; I will walk with them to meet Chelsea and Angelo and Claire and Max at a little outdoor bar hut decorated with beautiful lights and drink more beers, becoming sweaty and a little drunk and spilling something on my shirt, feeling weightless and enamoured by the brink of this life, almost lit from within.
Sophie Haigney is a critic and journalist.