Old selves in other cities: a little diary magic.

New York, Grant Morrison and chronological vertigo.

Nine years ago today, on the A train to Brooklyn on a bitter night, a tired, wired young weirdo I used to be wrote a diary entry on their bashed-up phone.

Bite down and buckle up for some painful earnestness, a couple of creepy comics-related. coincidences, and New York City scattering serendipities like confetti and generally being its usual dramatic self, because the entry runs like this:

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It's the night after the day the world didn't end, and I find myself unexpectedly free on my last night in New York City for I don't know how long. Decide to spend it wandering bundled-up through bookshops that stay open implausibly late, drifting like a particle buffeted about by winds I can't see with my wooly hat pulled down hard around my ears, hungry for books and ideas, for signs and portents; I'm twenty-six years old and nomadic and this year I've had a bit too much coffee and not quite enough stability. Awful Christmas music is playing over every speaker in every store, except the comic shop; I let my fingers drift over the shiny tradebacks and open the last volume of the Invisibles, which I haven't read for years, at random.

"December 22, 2012," the page reads. "I'm there at the end of the world that was and the beginning of birth into full understanding - fusion with the supercontext."

I look at my phone. It's ten minutes to midnight on December 22, 2012. Grant Morrison has a way of sending a shiver right down the skin on your back and I definitely don't believe that a set of comics can be any sort of spellbook, although the writer can be found in several drugged-out Youtube videos claiming just that. 

Even so, it's a day when the world is turning. Solstice. The end of the Mayan calendar and the release of superstition. We have made it through the apocalypse that wasn't, made it halfway through the winter, and now we have to face the far more frightening possibility that the world will not end with a crunch but instead will continue with slow inevitability into entropy or collapse or transfiguration and what happens to it will be up to us, will depend on whether we're brave enough, clever enough, hardworking enough to make it better. Something new is beginning.

I walk home through Union Square. I love how small New York makes me feel; looking up at the buildings in the dark makes you think of those film-scenes where the camera suddenly zooms in from the tops of skyscrapers to streetlevel, macro to micro in one vertigo-inducing second: a scrap of lyrics in a song written by a friend of mine floats into my head, these aren't buildings they're batteries, charged up charged up with humanity. Something new is beginning and I will have to be brave.

Down in the subway, the stairwell echoes with a syrupy old song: an small woman with dyed red hair and a sparkly black cape has rolled a carpet out of a suitcase and set up a microphone in her temporary living-room, crooning old showtunes to the fashion kids drifting down to the L train, off on their last nights before heading home for the holidays. She tells me I've got a nice smile. She asks my name, and I tell her. "Lauren!" she cries, which isn't my name, but close enough for Christmas. "Lauren!" she says again. "That's my sister's daughter's name. My sister, I know she's up there watching me."

Then she sings me a song about how if you smile everything's going to be alright, or something like that. The lyrics are unremarkable enough that I only remember her voice, strong and pure and hard and loving in that weird New York way which can turn on and off like a lightswitch, and I wonder what her life has been before tonight. Then the song ends, and I give her five dollars and wish her Merry Christmas and she tells me she knows her  dead sister sent me and if it weren't New York I'd be far more creeped out.

Just as she's starting a new number, an enormous police officer comes down and tells her to pack up her music and get out of the subway. 

She tells the police officer that she is sixty-four years old and a senior citizen and she's trying to make a living. Has he seen the kids outside in the streets begging? Does he know how cold it is? Has he seen her permits? She has the permits, she says, and she just wants this to stop happening. The cop still makes her pack up her stuff.

At the interchange a middle-aged queer couple argue on the platform, drunk, the elder in makeup and earrings and straw-blonde hair everywhere and an oversized coat and battered, dusty man's loafers with no socks - he faux-runs towards the tracks and is hammered enough that the danger is absolutely real, and his partner, a younger African-American bloke, grabs him and hugs him tight, trying not to laugh or maybe not to cry or maybe both.

Somewhere nearby, another subway busker is thrashing the life out of an old guitar, love and cities and song, the day after the world didn't end. Tomorrow I'm flying home to see my baby sisters.

I get on the train.

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Diary entries are letters to the future. This one was lost in the ether for ages, and came back just when it was needed. Exactly nine years later. The night after the winter solstice, one year after the world ended and somehow didn’t stop.  I’m stretched out on an old rug, tearing up stories and setting them on fire.

Seven cities, thirty-six homes and five books later. One hundred and eight months of silly risks and inevitable bloody personal growth and everyday heartbreak and burnout and friendship and shocking good luck and irreparable grief gone by in a lash of time.

I tear strips off a newspaper, ripping through warnings of food shortages and predictions about the next wave of the pandemic and local interest stories about refugee families’ first English Christmas. I  crumple them all up and drop the stories one by one into the small stove fire.  We’re in the Sussex woods, where my mother lives, where I partly grew up. My baby sisters aren’t babies anymore, I no longer think it’s cool to skip sleep for no reason, and the world is vertigo-inducingly altered. Grant Morrison is out as non-binary, now, and so am I. I still love comics and I still can’t drive.

I feed the fire one more story about Conservative corruption; it laps it up hungrily and starts to spit hot little flecks of flame, so I scrape the grate into place. The radio is playing the sort of eerie Christmas carols we sang in school choir, songs that are only very tangentially about Jesus and largely advise us to stay indoors and huddle together for warmth, and wait for the Holly King and the return of the sun. (As my sister likes to say: Die Hard is in fact a pagan festival.)

My husband takes the sofa. I prefer to stretch out on the rug like an animal, trying to get as  much of my body in contact with comfort as I can. We’ve been married a year, the Aussie and I. When we met we recognised a restless kinship, the sort that flings itself as far as possible around the world booking it away from a notion of home we both longed for more than ever felt safe.

I remember the not-quite-girl coming at writing with her firsts up. Convinced she needed to keep moving like a shark, still in survival mode trying to break herself to fit the wold and wondering why it wasn’t working. Thank goodness I was apparently already getting ready to be brave. Thank betterness I had no idea how brave, or how much braver other people would have to be. I didn’t know how soon grief was coming and how dark the world was about to turn - but I didn’t know, either, that there was still plenty of time to learn things and build things and become kinder and better, that I didn’t have to clench my fists down on every good thing that happened stop it escaping. Although I never did manage to grow that thick skin, because some things don’t change.

Here we are in the future. Haven’t we grown up strange?

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