In this edition: The last(?) fragments of the trip to New York City in November 2021, patchworked together over the course of an evening sitting in my bedroom in Berlin in July 2023. Also, perilous vehicles, a thunderstorm, and a parade.
I buy a box of small figs on First Avenue from a man who is talking into an earpiece. I keep thinking he’s talking to me, but he isn’t. I get embarrassed, he doesn’t notice. I walk south along First, block by block. For the rest of the day, every now and then I will pull the box of figs out of my backpack and eat one – sweet, creamy, and increasingly jostled about and bruised by my wanderings. It feels thematically appropriate. I imagine myself writing about it.
I took quite a lot of notes, in one way or another, while I was in New York. Documenting little interactions, little observations, soaking things in and waiting for their significance to become apparent in the fullness of time.
The first culture shock happens before I even leave Berlin, queued at the gate at the airport. A woman headed for Dallas leans forwards to ask me about the ukulele strapped to my backpack. “I used to play bass in the orchestra!” she says. “A long time ago.” People chat more often where I’m headed, I think. More than here. I’m going to talk to more people, I think.
I try to take notes in my everyday life as well, sometimes, but it’s hard to know when to direct your attention to things. Not every life-changing event seems that way from the outside. A few weeks ago I wrapped my mint leaves in damp paper towel and put them on a plate in the refrigerator, and now I feel like I’ve unlocked the fountain of youth. Somehow they became fresher than when I bought them, and this is life-changing in the sense that my life seems, in an infinitesimally small but crucial way, more put together, more clicked in and secure than it did before I learned this forbidden herbal knowledge.
My anxiety loves to tell me that everything could be a life-changing event, for better or worse. Its particular angle will change from “look what you missed out on” to “look what you’ve irreparably done,” depending on which end of the better-worse spectrum it’s aiming for.
A subway passes underneath the grates and lifts all the fallen leaves into the air. As I walk past the south east corner of Central Park, one car crashes into the side of another. People converge, and start exchanging accounts of what happened. Nobody seems hurt.
Lately I can’t tear my mind away from the intense awareness of the way that one person’s life affects another’s, affects countless others’, all the time. That often all we’re doing is walking around pushing over the starting dominoes on an ever-branching line of falling tiles that are often totally invisible to us. It’s sort of interesting having this newsletter as a record of other times when I felt something so intensely that I had to write about it1 – the subheading for this issue back in May 2021 was “There are ripples that will land on shores we’ll never see” and I’m like damn, past me. Yeah. Yeah, you’re right.
There are ripples that wash up against my life, names of people I’ll probably never meet. How many lives are splashed by the wake left by my own path through the world?
I wonder constantly about the strange confluence of decisions that brings very precise people into our lives at very precise moments. I think all the time about how our paths tentatively overlap before we know the significance of their intersections. Funnily enough, there are particular literal streets that will bring this thought to mind. Perhaps I was in Berlin at the same time as this other person, even though we wouldn’t meet for years to come. We might have walked past each other in the street, over and over, and never know what we’d eventually mean to one another. What does it mean, that we eventually crossed paths as the selves we were in that moment, and not our earlier selves? As years pass and more and more people leave my life, as well as enter it, I am coming to see time as being at least as crucial a dimension as geography in determining who we become attached to, who we feel connected to.
“I’m passing through a very cool, colourful street [in Hell’s Kitchen]. Something that I’ve been thinking about this afternoon is, like, I wonder how many of these outdoor dining spaces are only since last year [2020]. I have to think that like, all of them are only since last year, since the parking spaces were co-opted for the purposes of being able to have… oh my goodness I’m so overwhelmed by all the colour and light going on. Again, like, I didn’t plan to walk through this particular – oh! I just walked into the middle of a really happening block, it’s so beautiful. I’ll have to walk down it again when I’m not recording a voice note. Oh god, it’s so exciting. But I guess what I’m seeing is a significantly different version of the city than what it looked like two years ago, which is very strange to think about, because the streets are very much defined by the fact that every establishment has a corresponding outdoor bit on the road in front of it. The roads are reduced, there are not many parked cars, and the streets look very different than they would without those there. And I was thinking about how you see a city, you can only ever see it from the point when you first go there, onwards. Maybe that’s a silly thing to say, but it’s just like, oh, I will never have been here before this time, you know? It’s just got a weird kind of feeling, you know, to think that. Wow, I love exploring, it’s the best. Gonna try not to get hit by a taxi.”
Here I am in my room, writing this whole issue all in one evening. A sudden drop in barometric pressure makes itself known as the sensation of fingers closing softly around my brain. A thunderstorm has been building outside my windows for the last forty minutes, the sky gone dark two hours too early, and undoubtedly the poor wildflowers I’ve coaxed into life on the balcony of my flat will suffer the ravages of it once again. Tomorrow I will go outside and clip the broken stems and tattered leaves and wonder if I’m doing the right thing in doing so, whether it will help or hurt them, whether I should have planted them all the way up here where they’re exposed to the wind.
A delivery van drives past me through Hell’s Kitchen, along West 50th Street. A woman cycles alongside the driver, who has his window open, and they are chatting as they whiz down the road.
Sometimes I think if I imagine bad things too vividly and too often, I’ll make them come true. As the lightning starts flashing overhead, I think of how the last thunderstorm brought down a tree on the banks of the canal not far from my house, at the same spot where Carrington and John and I saw a grey heron on my birthday just a week or two before. I pull the charger out of my laptop as I write this, remembering that some adult figure in my childhood would go around unplugging electronics during thunderstorms. It could happen, I think. It could happen because I imagined it pretty hard. What could happen? I don’t exactly know – being electrocuted through the keys of my computer, a bolt travelling down wires and into my body because I invited it there through the mystical power of anxiety.
Sometimes I think if I imagine things I want too vividly and too often, they won’t happen, because in some way they’ve already happened in a parallel reality I made up inside my head, and so their potential is used up. Or else they’ll be ruined by the envisioning – destined to disappoint, unable to live up to the daydream. I should instead allow the universe to always surprise me with good turns of fortune, I should look up in coquettish astonishment and say “Oh! For me?” as it graciously doles out gifts, one hand still folded smugly behind its back.
I stumble upon it unexpectedly. Maybe I should have known it was in the MoMA, but I didn’t. There is a small crowd. Beside them, a woman on her phone, cropped grey hair and a pink flannel face mask, is pacing back and forth next to Van Gogh’s Starry Night.
“You get all wrapped up… no, I know you do… and I think that’s probably the thing you need to work on most.” Her partner touches her arm and guides her into the next room.
“Do you think it looks different in person?” I ask the guy next to me.
“Yes… the brown in the tree… I never noticed that before. It really throws you off.” He has a British accent. He’s wearing a beanie with red stripe over short locs, and a hoodie under his coat.
“Like a totally different painting. I used to think it was a tower, when I was a kid.”
“Ah yeah, I can see that. It could be.” Is he humouring me?
I think about how much this painting is an object, not just an image. How I’ve known the image forever, but the object is new to me. How it stood in front of a window, as a person who was going through something unbearable applied these careful layers of paint.
“I mean, I know it’s not, I realised it was a tree before now. But still, I always have that image in my mind. But not now. It’s definitely a tree now.”
We stand in silence for minutes.
“Thank you for confirming that, I needed to talk to someone about it,” I say.
We pass each other in the next room, and nod and smile in acknowledgement. I think about going up to talk to him again. I think we’ll likely pass each other again later on in the museum. But we don’t.
The thunderstorm passes, and I have about eight hundred words written. As the light lifts, returning to the normal course of evening, I hear sounds approaching through the open window. The flowers are fine, if anything they just got some extra water – the wind barely rustled them throughout the storm. A parade is coming down my street despite the rain still trailing behind the storm, a giant banner reading “Dyke* March Berlin” (I check a queer WhatsApp group I’m part of, and sure enough there are a flurry of messages tracking the parade’s location through the city). It’s the day before Berlin’s giant Christopher Street Day pride parade, which goes through a different part of the city entirely, so I’m surprised but not very surprised. Some combination of the low air pressure and the thumping bass makes my head vibrate unsettlingly as I climb through my window to watch, but I wave to the marchers and dancers. One girl and I share a dance, she in the middle of the street and I on my balcony, and we blow each other kisses as she moves on. It’s hard to focus, my head is so weird today, I am too aware of how many people can see me up here. My phone buzzes, and my friend Momo has just posted a BeReal directly in front of my house from the midst of the parade, though they presumably didn’t see me since they were facing the other direction.
Liz and I wander through a thrift store in Greenpoint, being gently dazzled by the array of objects under our fingertips. Two older women are giggling together, trying on a jacket covered in feathers and a pair of sparkly beaded glasses. We tell them they should buy them, they look amazing. They tell us they’ve been friends for forty years.
The hard thing, of course, is understanding that we have all this impact on other people’s lives, but ultimately very little control over how large or small or wonderful or detrimental that impact will be. We can try, we can do our best to be the kind of presence we wish to provide to others, we can employ all kinds of tactics and strategies, we can shout and wave our hands and we can vanish suddenly, but we can’t really decide what it means for someone else. No matter how we move through the world, we’re pushing against it in a hundred thousand ways, we are always happening to it, even in our absences. It’s so easy to feel small and insignificant and unremarkable, but you couldn’t stop happening to the world if you tried.
I am sitting at the table in this Williamsburg diner alone, and it is mostly empty because it’s Thanksgiving, but across the aisle is a woman named Debra, who catches my eye and asks me a relentless string of questions, the next one held ready on her lips as soon as I answer the one before. “You’re from Germany? What is it - Merkel? She the Prime Minister? Is it a democracy? Can you vote? What do you study? Sociology? You gonna be a social worker? Do they really have kangaroos in Australia? Is it 24 hours to fly from the States to Australia?” I ask her for a bit of a break from the conversation, so that I can eat, and she agrees amiably. A few minutes later she is on the phone, asking someone else questions. “Will you tell them? Will you talk to my sister and brother-in-law and ask them to reconcile with me, as Jesus demands?”
I’ve left the window open too long, and moths are starting to converge around the lamp next to me. I’d turn it off, but then I assume they’d start investigating my illuminated laptop screen. I imagine them obscuring the words I’m typing, distracting me, creating new shapes on the bright white background. I think the air pressure is going back to normal at last. It’s nearly midnight and I’ve sort of forgotten to eat anything since I had brunch with Paula, which was about twelve hours ago. I’m not hungry, I’m not thirsty, I’ve been on my couch for so many hours now.
Before that I was walking around the area north of my apartment, letting John decide which way we were going to walk, based on where a good breeze was coming from, providing relief from his jet-lagged haze.
“That way,” he said, swinging towards the park. “Or – wait, is that, where does that go…? Yeah, okay, that way.”
“Hey, I mean, all roads lead… to other roads,” I replied. “Unless they’re… circles?”
“Or the first piece in a game of Catan.”
“True.”
So I do still have a few more bits and pieces from my NYC notes, one idea that still hasn’t quite figured out where it fits yet. But I think that’s probably it for this particular series for now. Three issues in less than a month! That hasn’t happened since literally the first month I started writing Figs! Don’t get used to it! But also thank you so much for continuing to read and to tell me how you feel about it, thank you for passing along this weird little project to your pals and other loved ones. It’s terrifying in a good way, as being perceived often is. As always, you can say things to me by replying to this email or by leaving a comment in the way our ancestors have been doing it for decades:
I might be giving your inboxes (or subscription feeds) a bit of a rest for a while, but hopefully I’ll be back before too long. If you’d like me to infrequently bother your inbox in future, you can take steps towards that reality right here:
If only someone could invent the concept of journalling, then I might be able to see such patterns all the time! Ah, alas.