ten years ago i moved to new york

dispatches from depression #8

Hello hello okay listen do I need to tell you when to do. Oh my God I have to say. Right I just I just want you to know intuitively when the sentence needs to end I don't want to have to say. hi everyone I'm in the Familia kind of pickle of it's the end of the month and I wanna write something for you all but like do I? I'm not well but not quite totally depressed though my bedsheets would probably disagree I'm living life you know and it's hard and what's even harder is that someone is playing really like loud but inny techno, tinny tinny not inny they're playing really loud but tinny techno from their boat and it's travelling across the water and entering every single one of my orifices at the same time. Anyway, here I am and finally old enough to say alive when people ask me how I am. I wanted to write this month because it's an anniversary and I wanted to commemorate it. I'm also very sad and tired and afraid of myself so I'm trying something new which is not writing but actually doing speech to text which I've never done before in all my 20 years of writing I've never thought listen how about we give the thingies a break thingies I'm trying to say fingers but I'm saying it cute like fingies and use the voice I mean I've always maintained that I like writing because it's not talking and I've always kind of found talking difficult one way or another or at least not energising. I find it so much easier to think without pressured air leaving my mouth but at the same time I can yap. Like on the way home from my studio just now I responded to 4 separate voice notes and I know my voice notes are gold and so while I'm stressing about having to get home after a day of work and think and write and tap tap tap I have the thought that maybe life could be easy. Maybe I could go home to the boat eat the sentimental chocolate that I bought for a friend and just like yep yep yep yep yep okay speech to text doesn't like to know what yapping is when it's shortened. So this is what I'm giving this month

Hello

Hello new paragraph

Romie

Took a second but we got there. So the anniversary that I was talking about, is essentially my 10 years of not living in New York anniversary. I moved to New York in August 2014. I had just turned 25 and I had decided I wanted to move to New York a couple years earlier when I was there with the rock band I used to be in recording an album and quite simply definitely fell in love with the place. I remember in particular walking past a guy unloading a van full of flowers early in the morning in Manhattan and catching eye contact with him and him looking down at me from the truck, a halo of the crispest blue surrounding him and feeling like it was all for me in that way that the cinematography the drama the hyper-individualism of New York can make it feel like it's all for you. I also snogged a random Italian man in the photo booth of a pickle back bar? Is a pickle back a thing? I might have made that up, but it was some kind of Irish pickle juice intoxicant and I never used to drink or kiss strangers well I still don't, but I really felt the spirit of letting loose on that trip and I wanted more Carrie mama, Kara Lili, boo-boo, Doodoo Shashi Reba Reba. Sorry I was curious to know what would happen if I made bird noises

Hello.

Okay, I need to stop being lazy and just do the new paragraph thing manually.

So yeah in 2014 I acquired three separate scholarships just so I could move to New York City knowing nobody and nothing and I realised that in the ten years that have since passed I have spent five in NYC and five in London where I was born and raisin and that’s a cute equal split isn’t it. I have bounced between them, working hard to maintain friendship, work, health, romance, visas, responsibilities and group chats in both places, really stretching the limits of doublelifeism, but without the secrets because as you know I am an oversharer. But this isn’t going to be a reflective piece that’s like look how far i’ve come in a decade because that would leave me with no choice but to kill myself so this is more… what is this? I don't know.

I'm tempted of course to do a New York London comparison moment as that is definitely a conversation that has haunted me for the decade that I've lived between the two places and it is quite a pleasing thought to never have to have that conversation again, but what will I do instead - tell people to check out the Substack piece I exorcized from myself using speech to text and then didn’t edit before sending when I was too depressed to type? Maybe. Maybe this is my incantation my spell my plea that I may never have that conversation again. Because it’s boring but also unending in its complexity. And it feels weird to do a casual compare contrast of the two cities when they are both deeply genocidal forces, built and maintained upon the suffering and eradication of others. I don’t know I’m tired. And still, I have moved to New York twice in that time, and I’d do it again, which is probably all you need to know. About my mental health, if nothing else.

Coming from London, it's pretty easy to fall in love with a place with light. It cannot be overstated that six months out of the year London skies are white. Not even grey, which might be interesting, but white, like a piece of printer paper placed atop a fishbowl. That dusk begins at 3 pm. I hear the God voice at 2:30 say that's quite enough of that. Time for bed! But it's not just the light, is it? It's the landscape, the land. As evil as North American land has become it's not hard I think for spirited folk to commune with the time before it. Indigenous keepers of the land speak through it and it is beautiful. Holy, in a way I don’t think the land of the British Isles could ever be, to me. Let there be light let there be passion let there be music let there be gay. My God let there be gay. The city of New York feels kind of inherently Queer 000 we are we in Queer now no don't capitalise it. And that isn’t to say that queers are not being assaulted and murdered there at all times, as they are everywhere, but none of this is to say anything in particular.

It feels Queer I suppose in the way that self expression, being true to yourself, finding freedom against all odds, looking fabulous, saying no is queer. Not perhaps a utopian queerness, but the one we’ve got. The bit on the 4 train when there are no white peeps left on it because gentrification hasn’t reached quite that far yet and people start looking up from their phones, and of course all United Postal Service workers keeping the streets gay af. Friends who have visited me in NYC, particularly trans-femmes, have said they have never felt so seen so beautiful. I got off that plane in 2014 never having had a queer relationship and truly, did not look back. There’s something in the air. In NYC’s desperate freedom there is a deep sexiness that cannot be conjured amongst the damp repression of the English, even in its capital city. Unless you find being accidentally sat on by drunk people in smoking areas sexy, which unfortunately I do not.

London is the imperial core of the world, and the unbearable whiteness of being is felt, like an iron rod, everywhere you go. It is completely inescapable on that land, no matter how we try to massage it into a shape that fits us. I have been saying this for years, but it seems now is the time for widespread acknowledgement that British terror did not in fact end in the 19th century. England is just as racist!!! It is just more covert and less guns about it. Repressed in every way. Very psychological warfare. Very demure!!!! Before I left for NYC 10 years ago, I went to a lecture by Kimberlé Crenshaw in which she told us that there were currently 19 professors of colour TOTAL across universities in the whole of the UK. I don’t know what that number is looking like now but I bet it aint that much higher. Conversations about ‘black/brown only spaces’ were still taboo among ‘radical’/activist community - reverse racism was still accepted as baseline etc etc. In 2014 I lived in a dilapidated house in a Brooklyn neighbourhood where I swear I could go a week without seeing a white person and… I liked it. QTBPOC creativity, legacy and resistance was rich and reflected in the things I did and the conversations I had and the Guyanese woman next door cooked food that smelled exactly like my grandma’s. Aside from the helicopters circling the neighbourhood every night, it felt so cozy, so safe.

And the truth is of course that both places are hell and full of zionists and white radicals who would let you perish in front of them a million times over and queer brown capitalists, and people who earn 100k and still think they’re poor, and no spare rooms for anyone, and technicolour hedonism and I obviously don’t know what it feels like to be Black in either place but definitely in many ways not great. Both are less sustainable as long-term living options with each day that passes - healthcare, policing, rising water levels, housing crisis, cost of living, and New York is the least sustainable of all in that while it does intoxicating, delirious joy so so well the counterbalance of horror is mighty. Like, I can’t even get into it. I left NY the first time in 2018 because I needed to go to a psych ward for a while, and couldn’t afford it without the evil that is health insurance. Still, I find it impossible to fall out of love with being fucked by it repeatedly, my longest relationship. I feel at home in its madness, I appreciate the honesty.

But how much of this is about the place and how much is about being away from home? Some of us are the type who just need to be away from home. Some of us are the type for whom home is a kind of malleable effervescent haunting thing, everywhere and nowhere. Some of us are the type who need to keep it moving. A couple weeks ago I had lunch at a Turkish chain restaurant on Walthamstow Market with Andriniki, a friend from those 2014 Crown Heights dilapidated house days. They were born in Brooklyn a couple years after I was born in North London and they have now made home here. We are both equally baffled by the others commitment to loving our hometowns. I tell them I miss New York so bad, they say why? I tell them people keep asking me when I'm gonna settle down and they say as in… Settler? And I slap the table and scream yes yes exactly, feeling vindicated in my inability to, my disinterest in committing to a home. My confusion every time a peer asks me but WHERE do you live? Wanting me to choose, lay claim, be traceable, trappable, still. I’m here now aren’t I? Isn’t that enough? Perhaps though, if anyone should be settling, it should be us? Grabbing as much land as possible. But where the fuck? Is my desire to keep moving, to play within the meaning of home a move towards freedom? A mindless exercise in privilege? An ancestral doctrine? A promise to keep myself small, or as big as possible? Aren’t we all running away from something?

People say they dream of marriage of some kind of domesticity and I can't say I ever have. I remember as a child, balking at the thought of living in my own house, feeling it to be a certain type of death, though perhaps because I thought I’d have to do so with a man. I've only really dreamed of love without containers. The idea of choosing a spot and sticking with it, when there’s a whole world, never made sense but sticking with love, in its many shapes, did. Perhaps I keep myself unmoored to follow easily the scent of love. I have imagined this as the love of another. That by their side I may eventually find a resting place that doesn’t constrict. Though I am coming to terms with the idea of learning, somehow, to settle for myself. I guess that’s what the nomads were doing all along.

I am not a settler in any sense of the word. I am grateful to be guided, for a strong and ceaseless sense of what I am willing to dream. I do not settle for the state of things. My body tells on me when I cross its wisdom. I do not settle for the ways some would like to treat me. I do not settle for love tinged with homophobia or whorephobia or whatever. Love in the shadows of myself. I do not settle for sorrow in the eyes of a lover. Despite the alternative being inconceivable pain and loneliness, I do not settle.

While it does not exactly spark joy, London gives me boat life, a somewhat chance at life not completely outside but on the edge of capitalism, and through the constant movement of the river I am able to make peace with the unending heartbreak of everyday, of home as a mirage. When living aboard a vessel is made illegal here, as it has been in New York over the last 20 years, that will be my sign to leave, if leaving is even possible. Last week I put an offer in on the most beautiful boat you’ve ever seen and I didn't get it cause I don’t have enough money and I don’t have enough confidence and theres no QTBPOC discount in the real world and that hip young white couple definitely don’t give a fuck about you lol and part of me was devastated and part of me was relieved that I can keep living my small life, adjacent to struggle, in a boat no-one wants to steal from, that I can abandon without too much thought.

Recently when people ask me where I’ve been or where I’m going next I’ve said I don’t know I’m a wandering hag and everyone said don’t call yourself that but @everyone I didn’t mean it as an insult!!! My wandering hag friend Morgan (and it’s a crucial part of the wandering hag lifestyle to have wandering hag friends) left London this week for a year in Japan. Her parting gift, a hag stone from Beachy Head on the English coast.

I’m actually feeling nauseous with heartache to the point where I don’t think I can speak or type anymore so I’m going to take advantage of this speech to text situation and play you a voice note I received recently. One of many sent by friends, the love from which have become my homes for now.

I want to acknowledge your heart, to say I hear you and I love you and if you were in New York I would take you on a date and I would make you feel like a fucking queen and yeah I don't know I just really love you and I want you to feel how wonderful you are and not forget it. You’re okay sometimes life is just fucking hard and messy and confusing and scary and vulnerable and just like not very fun, but if you can just hang tight with it and like be in the intimacy of it then it does kind of end up mutating itself until it becomes a really beautiful abundance like a bloom. Transformation just takes time and its painful but you know we just gotta roll with it so your life will bloom anew in ways you cannot even imagine, and you will have intimacies and experiences of place and community and people and yourself and it’s okay that your brain can't even process that because it's just beyond whatever the constraints are of this moment of understanding your world, so hang tight, my friend and trust that, and in the meantime, I’m here.