New York City Says Hi

You may notice over the course of the next month or so that my blog entries will become a little more infrequent. This is because I will be dedicating a lot of writing time to my novel project, something I started off as a bit of a laugh but has now grown into this big monster which I must conquer as proof to myself that I can start a task as mammoth as writing 50,000 words in the space of 6 weeks and bloody well finish it.

A question I’d like to pose to people is this: if I were to write a novel, what genre do you think it would be? I’d always thought that I’d be more of a realist/fantasy type, but what’s happened is I’ve gone full sci-fi. The story takes place between the settings of Earth, the Moon and Outer Space, spanning over a timeline of 150 years. It features the stories of five different characters as their lives are changed and influenced by humanity’s project to mine the moon for resources (which, by the way, is a plausible thing). There is a bunch of other exciting threads to the project — time-travel, Beverly Hills parties, Hindu architecture and lesbian power-couples — but I’ll leave you to guess about it for now.

The big story from this past week is my trip to New York. One of my best-best-best friends, Christina, was passing through the Big Apple on her way from Switzerland to Sydney, and so I hopped over on a wee plane to say hi for a long weekend. Christina is one of these friends that you can go months and months without seeing (we figured it was about a year and a half since we’d seen each other last) and snap right back to normalcy the moment you reunite. After catch-ups over sushi and midtown and drinks during a thunderstorm, we were back in the apartment of her dear friend, Grace, laughing ourselves to near-hysteria over nothing particularly funny at all on the sofa bed.

I had come to New York with a trembling bank balance, but the weekend turned out to be surprisingly cheap. Perhaps I have dollar pizza to thank for that (which we consumed 3 times within the space of 32 hours), but we also didn’t have to do any of the touristy things, which are big money-sucks. Thanks to the weather, Christina and I spent one rainy afternoon introducing Grace to an episode of Sun, Sex and Suspicious Parents (her facial expression during the whole thing was priceless), and on the other day we wandered around Central Park after brunch. I must admit for most of the time we were traversing the city streets, I was thinking what most like-minded people in New York probably think: “at what point am I going to turn a corner and get approached by HONY?” Alas, I wasn’t picked out. This didn’t stop me from rehearsing my HONY-worthy quotes in my head, though.

The best moment of the whole trip by far was spending 4th of July on a rooftop in Williamsburg. We were at a flat party in Brooklyn, with grilled burgers and beer. At about half past eight, we all took to the stairwell and stepped out on to the roof to the most breathtaking view of the Manhattan skyline. The sky was a dusky mix of coral and blue, the lights of the city were beginning to sparkle through the evening haze.

It was just like a movie — you know, perhaps the part before the credits roll, where all the friends are reunited and there’s this sense of completion but also an “ooh, what lies ahead in the future?” vibe going on. We drank and laughed and chatted and I felt very, very lucky. The fireworks started on the bay, massive blooms of glitter and fire that almost became double as they reflected in the windows of the skyscrapers behind them. It was the best 4th of July ever.

Later that night I found myself having an incredibly ‘New York Moment’ as I talked to a guy I’d just met in a gay bar in Hell’s Kitchen, sipping on a vodka tonic and telling him that I’m writing a novel, don’tyouknow. We had gone back to Grace’s part of town as her friend was DJing that night. That venue and experience was particularly excellent as I ordered drinks between the rainbow-clad leggings of a gyrating dancer on the bar, had a heart-to-heart with the loveliest drag queen and found someone who now gives me only two degrees of separation to the contestants of RuPaul’s Drag Race (and Ru herself).

I’ve been to New York three times now, and I’ve noticed that each time I visit, I’m at a really transitional period in my life. It’s almost as if the city acts as a punctuation mark. The first time I went was with my family, and we immersed ourselves in all the tourist traps: getting blinded by Times Square on our first evening, taking the Staten Island Ferry, my knuckles turning white as we ascended the Rockefeller Center, crossing the Brooklyn Bridge at nightfall to gaze upon the glimmering skyline. It was the summer after I’d graduated high school, and I was only a couple of months away from beginning my time at Edinburgh University. It was to be one of my most exciting years yet.

The second time I went was after a five-day trip in Boston with my boyfriend at the time, Patrick. The New York we saw then was a combination of Harlem, Coney Island, Greenwich and an afternoon of complete confusion in the Hasidic Jewish neighbourhood of Williamsburg. We spent an extortionate amount of money, mostly on books (I was mega into a teen fantasy series at that point, as relief from the amount of Dickens and such that I had to read for my English Lit course at uni) and ate like kings (I was a king who got really bad stomachache after over-indulgence on a couple of occasions). By the end of that summer, maybe two or three months later, I would break up with Patrick and go on to join the student radio at Edinburgh (these things weren’t really related — “it’s me or the radio show”). For various reasons, that became my best year at university: I really started to pull out great marks, I made a ton of new friends and I felt like I had really come in to my own as a person.

This third time in the city marks my first summer living on my own, away from Scotland, in the country of my dreams. I’m doing pretty well.

One of the things that I didn’t expect from the trip was this sense of home that I began to associate with Toronto. I started to look forward to returning to my street, my bed, my own city that had excitement and thrills but none of the craziness that New York served. I had my favourite restaurants and bars, my favourite cafes and my local fruit market, my grocery stores and my favourite walks around the block. On the small plane back, just as we were minutes from landing on the island, we passed the skyscrapers of the financial district, and the CN Tower nestled in between. I welcomed the warmth and familiarity of the sight, and — surprisingly — I felt like I had people I was returning to: Nora, Angele, Robert and even Mr Swipey who I’d seen earlier that week.

When I got off the plane I took the streetcar as far as Bathurst and College, walking the rest of the way back to my apartment, just because I wanted to. I passed through Little Italy and Little Portugal to my own street, breathing in the night air. I felt like I had come home.