NEW YORK AND POETRY

Moments from a hot minute in my favourite city and something about returning to a place again and again

It’s Friday night, and Simon, Ellie and I are standing in the middle of a dancefloor in Flatiron, completely sopping wet. The queue outside the party got soaked in one of those biblical New York thunderstorms that drench you down to your knickers in minutes - the ones I think are magical and Simon thinks are horrific. It’s a ridiculous situation: our appearance, our location. The club is closed for the night for an influencer networking event - they made me send my instagram to them in order to get in. Ellie was the one who’d told us about it, and in the midst of our jet lag (and Simon’s black clothing deficit), it felt like a funnier, or at least slightly less painful excursion than Plan B: Goth Night in Brooklyn. We had planned to spend around ten minutes there before heading back to our hotel room. Obviously, we were there for hours. A girl goes ‘Ew!’ loudly as I brush past her, but the humiliation is worth it because it’s actually very funny to be in a room full of people incredibly aware of their public perception, and know that you will never see any of them again so have no reason for caring.

Saturday afternoon, and we’re still downtown (one of the things about living in New York is that you slowly start to realise that 99.9% of life worth living takes place below 14th Street), this time right at the end of Fulton Street - where it hits the Seaport. In the midst of my Barbie movie obsession (see: July Trend Forecasting), I saw they were doing pop-up poetry outside the pop-up Barbie cafe, so, shrugging off horrors of late-stage capitalism and a multi-million pound marketing campaign funded by Mattel, obviously we grab the subway from Greenwich Village. The poet asks me what I want the poem to be about - I say, ‘I don’t know…. New York? I’ve always been one of those people who have, like, a thing about New York.’ I tell her about when I lived here, and she smiles and nods and loads a piece of card into her typewriter. She hands me a card with the poem on it and I have a little moment with it:

And we return
in spirits--

to where our girlhood 
came to her close
two months under lights
and, too, scraping sky

I feel her here, now
that ghost of a girl,
leaving her goodness behind
in the cement to find.

I think about who I was last summer, and that year. I think about how it was the time in my life that I was the happiest and saddest all at once. I think about the person I was, walking around the city I’d dreamed about walking around since I was ten. I think about how I was absolutely, devastatingly heartbroken and in complete, all-consuming love all at once, in a single body. I think about the word girlhood and I have a lump in my throat. I tip the poet five dollars and get a drink at 5pm because, hello - it’s New York.

I remember versions of myself in such a visceral, ingrained way that I feel like I’ve jumped out of my skin six months or ten years into the past. A lot of my life is black-spotted out - which means that what I do remember is crystal-clear 2146K 4D complete sensory over-saturation. Certain moments are so close to me that when I come back to New York I’m ten and sixteen and eighteen at all once. I can see the different Ellianas all walking around the city, as I’m walking behind them, scrambling to catch up with myself speeding down the same roads. I stare at the same Lisa Yuksavage painting in the Met that I stared at last time, and the time before that. I love it here because I feel close to who I was when I was a baby and everything was new and magical, but also close to the summer when I learnt the most about who I was. New York is like the forest in a Shakespeare play - I’m allowed to interact with strange, supernatural versions of myself, and dress like a crazy person and lip-sync aggressively and scream loudly in public because no one notices or cares. Trust and believe, I do all of these things as brilliantly and frequently as I am able. And clearly, everytime I’m here, I have the itch to write scrawling, rambling pieces of navel-gazing prose about my past selves and assume other people will be interested.

Saturday’s farewell party is pre-maturely cancelled: as soon as Bella’s nearest and dearest start piling into their Greenwich Village apartment, we all realise the air-conditioning is nowhere near strong enough to accommodate any of us, and as the air gets muggy with smoke and sweat, the soirée is promptly moved to Berlin bar. We fly down East Houston Street with new friends - one is a boy who tells us about his one-free-stay perk working at the Chelsea Hotel spent on a man in his thirties, still financially reliant on his parents, and we shriek and shudder in equal parts. Simon is shrieked at by girl who used to study at Columbia, and seems to annoy me to absolutely no end. She DMs us later in the week and I do not respond. I feel guilty as soon as I leave the city. Sorry to that girl. The DJ-ing at the club is alternating between two brown-haired twinks who actually turn out to be that skinny alt brand of bisexual man who have their poor girlfriends hanging around the booth all night in hopes of a nod of acknowledgement. Very New York. They're both wearing appropriately edgy-yet-simultaneously-blasé Sacai t-shirts - sometimes the music is good (212) and sometimes it’s not (The Drake and Josh theme tune) - but the air-con is icy, and so, like yesterday, we stay for hours longer than we anticipate. We are asked if we are dance majors at both functions. No one in America seems to know how to dance.

Hungover breakfast at lunchtime (I wonder if there is a word for that) the next day in Brooklyn - ricotta, lemon, blueberry and parmesan pancakes the size of a small child I have been dreaming about since last summer, slathered in butter and syrup. Walking along the edge of the sidewalk, a black SUV completely drenches me in water on my right side speeding past on the way to the subway station. It’s such a rookie New Yorker mistake I almost roll my eyes at myself - I’ve shared knowing looks with fellow pedestrians watching it happen to someone else - but it’s such a coming-of-age indie movie moment that I just laugh. I only have a week back so there is physically no time to be put in a bad mood. A new ring is purchased (obviously) at the Brooklyn museum. An attempt is made to attend an exhibition, but the $17 dollar price tag, and the queue for the Jay-Z retrospective at the Public Library means that Noa & I end up sipping ice teas at an over-priced cafe near Prospect Park. We say goodbye the same way that you say greet to everyone you meet again from traveling - with a pinch of disbelief that you have actually even seen each other again. It felt like such a long shot to be together in New York that it doesn’t feel so bad to say goodbye - if we made the impossible happen once, who’s to say it won’t happen again? I walk away with the admiration and gratitude I have towards my female friends - how is she that cool? How come she even wants to hang out with me? I discourage Simon from asking the man walking in front of us if he can buy his Annual Twinks and Doll Olympics commemorative t-shirt off of him.

I feel less settled here than I used to because I am always moving. There is so much to do in such little time that I almost feel rude - I want to apologise to the city for being so flighty. There is no time to lounge at a usual haunt or to get distracted and take a tangent into a previously-undiscovered neighbourhood. But I will be back, I keep telling myself. One day, you will live here and there will be all the time in the world. I’m missing the city while I’m still actually here. It's too hot - I keep remembering with a shudder that it will be the coldest summer of my life - we keep having to duck into cafes, malls, wedding dress shops, for a blast of AC. Chinatown in an afternoon, as if Chinatown could be explored in an afternoon. Not nearly enough time in James Veloria, not nearly enough time for Central Park.

We walk past the queue of people waiting for the rooftop bar every time we get back to our hotel. We sleep deliciously in gorgeous sheets. We romp our way through Soho - Bottega, Loewe, McQueen, and we shriek derivative! I style Simon in a khaki jacket to go with my skirt, and the SA at Prada pulls out a white flower skirt from their last womenswear collection and I audibly gasp.

On my way to get breakfast with The Director a man waits for me to climb the steps up the Subway. I am wearing my new Simone Rocha tutu skirt that spills onto the seats next to me on the 2, and I look the exact brand of ridiculous that befits the city. I prepare for battle. He goes ‘After you, Princess,’ and sweeps a hand towards the exit. I laugh, and I curtsey to him, and I remember the woman last year who made me take out a headphone on the 6 to compliment my outfit. I have a rush of that naive love you feel for your fellow man you get sometimes standing in a crowd at a concert, and I skip my way over to the diner. The Director always orders some form of eggs and a bowl of strawberries on the side. It always fascinates me - it feels like the ultimate chaos order - but I always forget to ask him why, because now we are talking about the work he just did in London, and why there’s a focus on ensemble in the UK over star power in the US, and even though I ask a million questions, I’m back out the door with strings in my ears like I’m Judy Garland before I know it, and I never quite get to his breakfast order.

An open mic in the East Village where I hear poems that make me want to cry and poems that draw a hiss from the back of my throat and poems that have lines so good I have to grab Simon’s knee. A man who starts on the balcony behind and above us, who moves down through the space, who ends shouting into the microphone and anywhere else would be unbearably corny but, come on, it’s New York, and people are whooping when poets shout out the Bronx, and books of poetry are plugged to responses of ‘FIFTEEN DOLLARS???!! THAT’S BASICALLY FREE!!!’ yelled from the audience. A girl reads a poem about where she and her lover will be when the flood comes and I can’t remember a single line but I know it was the greatest poem that I had ever heard.

I get in the wrong line for Shakespeare in the Park like three separate times, so by the time I work out where I’m supposed to be I’m hot, sweaty and the line is two blocks long. People next to me tell me it’s not that bad actually, and I still have hope, even though my spot has no shade, and I’m slowly sweltering to death. I get caught in another torrent of rain so severe barely an hour later that my headphones break. A tiny old woman with a Trader Joe’s bag over her head for shelter catches me on the street and tells me she almost got hit by a car crossing the road to come find me and my lavender aura. I told her I didn’t have cash on me, and she said that the universe always finds the way and that there was an ATM on the corner. I smile, thank her, and walk away. A guy holds the door open for me as I walk past Electric Lady Studios, like he’s expecting me to go in, and I feel just a little bit invincible.

My year of Hamlet culminates again - it’s this year’s production and we agree it was a little mediocre - a little too American for the both of us. I shed a tear regardless. ‘I am dead.’ Hamlet says twice. ‘Goodnight, sweet prince,’ Horatio says, and god damnit you know I’m gonna eat that shit up. I get to hear every single line of poetry I’ve read over and over, in person, and I feel crazy, like they’ve picked the words out of my head because I know them so well. Simon gets a drink so strong the bar only allows you to order one per visit, because of course he does, and we have tacos for dinner at like, quarter to midnight

I fall in love with a pair of boots for Miu Miu that cost $2,000. I put them back on their shelf and think of them often. We have dinner on the Upper West, in the East Village, in Flatiron, in Brooklyn. I stomp around Manhattan in my docs, because one day wearing my cowboy boots for one day gave me blisters like I’d never had before. I listen to Jackie Onassis on repeat. Over and over and over again. I cave to jet lag and buy an $8 iced latte that comes in a plastic bag which I proceed to squeeze and spill coffee all over myself. I have my nails painted at a bar by a woman who hates everything I like. We have maybe the funniest conversation of the week, where I bring up a subject and she immediately rolls her eyes. She is not a fan of: Greta Gerwig, British people (which, fairs to be honest), any movie that is not Heathers, Glasgow, college, the list - I can assure you - goes on. She is maybe the most mean-spirited person I have ever come across and all I can do is laugh and laugh and laugh

My last night and I’m finally meeting with The Writer. She’s breezing out of her hair appointment and dragging me into The Odeon, brushing past the House Manager at the door. Immediately it’s the most New York bar I’ve ever been to - impossibly crowded, ridiculously noisy, effortlessly chic. We perch behind the bar on window benches and I’m nervous because I flew eight hours just to buy her a drink. She starts speaking and I have to stop her and ask if I can record the conversation. She’s the funniest person I’ve ever met and I decide that want to be her when I grow up. She tells me about the first play she ever wrote about three housewives killing their husbands, and how she wrote it as a drama, and how it turned out a comedy that debuted on Broadway. She tells me how the male critics eviscerated it, and how the women in the audience loved it. She asks me ‘What does the audience want?’ and ‘Have you noticed every girl in here is wearing the same outfit? No one in New York dresses crazy anymore!’ We talk about my play, and the fringe, and she sends me an email the next day and it’s maybe the nicest thing the most talented person I know has ever said about me. That’s the magic of New York - that when I’m here, it actually feels possible. Not necessarily within my grasp, but if it’s going to happen anywhere, it will happen here.

I walk to Greenwich village from Tribeca - it’s my last night and I want to savour the city. The sun is going down, so it’s not as devastatingly disgusting to walk places anymore. I meet Simon at The Duplex, and fulfil my last duty as a wannabe New Yorker - sob loudly and furiously in public. We have one of those conversations, where I say, over and over again ‘I can’t talk about it,’ and then obviously do. We dance all the way to Union Square lighter and heavier than before because I’m sharing the audio on our phones and playing Charli XCX.

I feel like poetry. Like all the things about me that make me mundane are hyper-romanticised. Like unbelievable things will happen to me. Like my life is a story that is interesting and meaningful and something people will want to read about on a Substack. New York is basically the holiday I take from the real world and the belief I am a fundamentally unlovable person. New York isn’t an old friend, because New York doesn’t actually give a shit about you - it just lets you do your thing. That freedom in anonymity that allows for true self-expression. New York kind of is poetry - well, duh, because basically everyone ever has written or sang or painted about it, but it’s a new poetry to me, and a new poetry to you, and I’m not entirely sure what I’m trying to say apart from that I will be back as soon as I can.

Sending love from New York XXX