New York

I remember my trip to New York in 2005. Over the winter months, I’d been emailing with a young writer from North Carolina (whom I shall call C), who’d recently lost his father. One evening, in a long email quoting Richard Siken, he invited me to meet him in New York and explore the city together. I didn’t need asking twice. I'd dreamed of New York since I was twelve, and in particular, The Chelsea Hotel, gorging myself on a teenage diet of The Velvets, Chelsea Girls, Dylan’s Sara and Cohen’s ode to Janis Joplin’s blowjob. Also, I was more than happy to flee my current love affair that I knew (my small heart temporarily crippled) was never going to work out.

     
Before I flew out, I emailed C to say I'd see him at five o' clock the next afternoon in the Museum of Modern Art, in front of a painting of St Anthony in the Wilderness. After arriving in the city I'd trudged, exhausted, up Fifth Avenue, my green fraying rucksack heavy on my shoulders. However when I reached the grand glass doors, security stopped me. No bags. So C and I met instead outside by the trashcans, a bird pendant swinging around his neck.

     
Other snap-shots remain fixed in my memory. I remember the morning I left Brighton - a taxi ride to Poole Valley bus station, my vision of early morning travellers and dark-glass windowed coaches blurred by sleep. I remember the feel of a warm hand on mine, a copy of James Joyce's Ulysses bluetoothed to my mobile. The goodbye was dream-like and beautiful, empty of substance. 

     
Then I remember swooping down towards Newark airport, the Statue of Liberty dirty and unimpressive below me. The city seemed like a grey polluted stain, and the Hudson, a stream of drizzle spinning down a gutter. I remember falling asleep on a single bed (in a house with four giant poodles, where I was fed cream cheese bagels at midnight and we watched The Sopranos). C, no longer a boy, but not yet entirely a man, read O' Brien's The Third Policeman to me, images of Macruiskeen and old Mathers cycling into my dreams.

     
I also remember swinging, orangutan style, from scaffolding with C whilst we waited for a poet to emerge from a subway.  C had talked much about him and held him in high esteem. We played footsie as a black curly shock of hair rose up into view from behind a metal railing. And then I remember driving through Boston at three in the morning, Lambchop on the car stereo, a house huge and ghostly, rearing up like a hallucination behind a white picket fence and neatly cut lawns.

     
I remember a kiss, like tango, or rather a desire for tango in an apartment near Central Park with huge white radiators. I recall the sound of the key in the lock and the clatter of a flatmate returning --  C and I, muted, still, frozen together, pressed together in the spare bedroom.

     
I remember turning a corner in the MOMO and facing Yves Klein's Blue canvas –  a sudden dizziness – sky coursing my veins, invisible currents knocking me backwards towards the wall. No other art in the building did that to me and none has done that to me since.

     
And I remember standing in a rainstorm on my last night with that same poet who'd met us from the subway - his hair frizzy and glistening with pearls, yellow taxi cabs speeding past us. In a single moment I fell in love with the blackness of the storm, the glare of headlights and this thirty-year-old woman-chasing poet standing by my side - disarmed, hopeless, desperately trying to hail me a cab, squinting at me through rain-spattered spectacles. 

The Daily Growl

Monday: train to Brighton

I'm on the train, having just left Birmingham Moor Street, heading for London Marlebone. After several days of balmy Indian summer, I pass through a rain soaked Birmingham, drizzle sketching out its streets, a familiar greyness suspended in the ether.

I can feel my mood shifting as I edge nearer to Brighton; a heavy feeling in my arms and legs, a sinking inside my stomach. I look in my rucksack for the armour I need to face my life back home. I find hoodies and a hard-backed book about a complicated love affair.

I left my sisters on the tiny village platform, and watched them shrinking as the train drew away, their plump arms raised, faces smiling and sad. My lungs surged with feeling as I sped past houses, yellow coloured fields, more houses. This is territory I have known so well. I have chartered this journey for the last twenty years.

I'm uneasy. As I made the journey back home to Wales last week, my speech was still blurry, my experience filtered through a tin can. The preceding weeks had taken their toll. But having seen Mum for myself, stable and much as she was before this latest emergency stay in hospital, and having been home with my family, a little bit of myself has returned. There is a little bit of Clare back in place.

Uneasiness lurches up through my throat, determined as I am to not go back to where I was when I left Brighton last week - sucked in, spat out.

So I sip my tea, plan my strategies; write here. I even have biscuits in my bag. Life isn't so bad. Mum is still alive, I have sisters who are loving and brave, who fight their demons and cut my hair, make me cheese sandwiches. Who always tell me the truth about myself.

They sit chatting in the fading evening light out on our back yard, staring at the apple tree and the flowerbeds, flicking ash from their cigarettes into the cooling autumn breeze. They never sit for very long. In a flash, one of them will be up, dragging something around the garden, pulling out a hose, raising some clippers, re-arranging the shed. They like to keep busy.
It’s then that I feel most like the baby of the family that I am, with my writing, my hula hoop, my desperate need for a new haircut. Watching and feeling and thinking and turning it over, all of it, again and again.

I got my haircut. I watched the dark pieces fall to the ground and with every snip felt a little bit of myself coming back to life. I am still arriving, in whatever this new place is. I watch dead wood fall, hear the doors closing.

So I want to get my head down, start my course, let those who really care, come to me, and the rest, I'll watch them take off like birds into a cloudy sunset. Throw a stick and see what comes back to me.
Despite the Twinings label, the tea is disgusting. No amount of sugar can mask it. Drizzle hits the windowpane and I'm returning to Brighton stronger, but more wary than ever, to a town cursed by too much sunlight, by too many options.

I might feel alone, but I'm not alone; I feel scared, but I'm not weak. I have lost, but then... life culls what it needs to; it does some of our dirty work for us.

I watch crows taking off over cow fields, and feel the love of my family, the ones still there. I feel the greenness of the passing fields, my hair against my neck, a brightness still behind my eyes, and for now, that's more than enough.

Friday

I went up to London last weekend. The trip left me simultaneously drained and exhilerated at the same time, as it usually does. There's something inherently exhausting about London; even whilst I am still on the train I can feel a certain kind of tiredness descend as soon as I see the rooftops peeping back at me, the Thames blinking into view.

I feel a wonderful adrenalin comedown just at the thought of all those bodies rushing about in their own personal bubbles, trying so hard not to knock against each other in case they might pop. This small act of vulnerability, this knee-jerk response to the giant mass of human life thudding in all directions, a million beings swarming in their own dreams and poverty, riches and frustrations, I find myself falling inline with almost as soon as I've stepped out of the station.

A slippery ambition coats London streets, and Brighton can feel like a lurching lost soul in comparison, steeped in an opium haze, watching the sea roll in, roll out, roll by. It holds a drink to its lips, lazy ardor running through its veins. Brighton sleeps for days.

On the other hand, London has speed and cocaine running like shuttles through it's blood, and it never sleeps. It naps between the noisy car horns and the fumes, the terrorist threats and the boats going up and down the river taking Japanese tourists to Greenwich. Between the housing estates and the delis with their £4 loaves of bread, indifferent shop assistants with concrete faces and eyes like treacle, Tower Bridge sits, luminous and ever watchful over the skyline.

In fact, I did very little whilst I was there, my reason for going, as usual, to see the people I most love, and to remember who I am again, remember the parts of me that come alive when I am with them on some busy dirty London street. A slightly different Clare. And I never leave without some pang of longing for the busy streets and the caffeinated conversations, the deep bonds with people, and the buildings that rear up, jagged, around the Thames, like a shock, like a broken jigsaw, pieces oddly fitting together, but somehow forming perfect symmetry. London is so beautiful I could weep. And it's a beauty that can't be owned. It is its own mistress; rude, loud, manipulative and slutty, but utterly honest in it's unquenchable, ravaged thirst.

If Brighton didn't have the seafront, I'm not sure I'd still be here. Maybe that's a hasty thing to say, but really, without wanting to sound arty and pretentious, (and no doubt sounding so anyway), of all Brighton & Hove's creative life, the seafront is my real Muse. Whereas London surrounds you like a loud, heaving crowd, this part of Brighton stretches out flat like elastic. It feels like it will go on forever, and you can fade into the blues and greys of the horizon, be swallowed up behind the piers and cast into a cloud of black wings, as the starlings swirl like a lava lamp, taking you with them up into the marbled sky above. It is whirling life, breathless poetry speaking in tongues, it is a windy squawking silence that makes me sigh over and over again until my lungs are entirely emptied.

I wonder where my place is. I think about Syliva Plath, buried up North in Heptonstall. I think about the Moors that surround Yorkshire and Lancashire, and allow myself to be swept up in Emily Bronte and the harsh murderous truths that shout across Saddleworth Moor. I think about Manchester (oh yes, still so much to answer for) and North Wales, my home, that took so much to get away from, that has such a pull, like a magnet that both draws and repels.

How long I'll be in Brighton I don't know, if I will stay South of the border or if I'll return to the place of roots and shadows, love and that pain of growing up somewhere I longed to escape from. The truth is, wherever we are, we always want, at some point, to escape the very things that drew us there in the first place. Like a long-term lover who shows you, because they know you so well, too much of who you are underneath the facade, and so you long to be someone else again, reinvent who you are and what you might become. To cast off the cloaks of habit, come hurtling through the tunnel into a new world, a new self, a baby in a fresh universe full of possibility.

I know enough now to know that whatever you run away from, comes back to you at some point, that we take all our selves with us, wherever we go. But change must happen if we are to be still alive, for the blood to not coagulate in our veins until we become stiff and unyielding, rigor mortis in our brains, hearts like vapour, ever drifting off over tree-tops to somewhere where the grass is greener, then returning with a bump of resentment when we find ourselves still here, in our stilted, safe reality. So I'm thinking of moving; whether or not that involves me packing a suitcase, I still can't say.