The Book of the City of Ghost Cats

Well, Easter is, by definition, a time of new beginnings. Maybe that’s what is bringing me to the page today. Obsessed as I am with the notion of a tabula rasa – a fresh start – I didn’t think it would take this long for me to get here. The intention was never to wait seven months or so to start this documentation process, but I suppose the migration process (both literal and metaphoric) has been ongoing. And I’ve been happy in a universe full of heartache and nonsense and my own particular strain of grief.

It’s been hard to find the way in…to describe and share the world from this new vantage point and not come across as a garishly naive American, overwhelmed by daily experiences that aren’t the way they are or were just a year ago. To not walk with ego or, alternatively, self-abnegation as though I don’t have preferences or things that are hard to let go of.

And then, like an overdue library book, I am carrying all the endless details, the sensory experiences, the snickelways, the daffodils dotting the hills under the wall, and it feels like so much to try and plate up. There’s been London, Whitby, Birmingham, Hull and impressions and stories in each of them. I’m a writer who hasn’t written in months, blocked up by this worry that I can’t get it right, and ultimately, the only curative is to do it wrong.

Today, for one, I went into town early in the morning, going to a massage in a hotel that has become one of my favorite places, walking along Bootham past W.H. Auden’s birthplace, past a little shop (unfortunately not open today) with the kind of trinkets, home goods and special cards I remember in Golden. Rain soaking into and darkening the already dark asphalt, affixing sheets of fallen leaves to its surface, but I have boots now and it doesn’t cause me much bother. Walking, not driving, feels almost entirely natural.

Later, the city’s a bit quieter because it is Easter Sunday. Even around the Minster, there’s a just a gentle flow of foot traffic. The Shambles is walkable today even as the Chocolate Festival (I’ve got a giant chocolate egg at home to dig into courtesy of the dearheart) opens up. Sun breaks through the sky and I don’t have to stress for a moment about parking or the overarching, nebulous threat of danger that comes with life in the States. I know routes and corners and landmarks, bridges where you can see the green of the river moving through. I walk over those cobblestones and tramp under those ancient gates and say cheers to shop clerks and this, too, feels like a method of trusting myself.

Friendliness and general ability of getting along does appear to cross all manner of boundaries.

It does feel very much like home, even if that word still is a bit wibbly-wobbly in my mind. I have routines and a local place to get my hair done and a favorite place to get coffee. Favorite place to see a movie. I know the football stadium where I can go to get my bloods done. Food is anchoring. I bought a crockpot and randomly made something akin to white chicken chili. Some nights, we have pie and watch terrible movies, some nights we have stir fry and watch terrible movies…some nights the plan is a terrible movie and we sort the rest out.

I happen to align with a bus home and it feels, as ever, a sort of kismet, to turn up to the queue and see it’s two minutes away. It’s quiet, it’s safe, it’s entirely without bother to sit with my headphones and watch the chilly air and grey clouds start to burst with sunlight through the bus window.

Walking through more fields of daffodils, next to the jokingly treacherous beck, I look for cats in the front garden of neighbors. There’s a fluffy ginger one that at least lets me watch it, but we haven’t taken the step of getting a brace of kittens. It’s coming, but we’ve been happily going about all of the UK and I know we need to be here and give them a place to settle into at least for a month. So…perhaps after October. We’re keeping busy. That’s the joy, or one amongst many, of having a partner about. We want to do things and then we make plans and do them. It’s novel in that way.

Even now, we’re packing for a week in London. In large part, we’ll be seeing friends and I count myself increasingly lucky that the world I can access is peopled with kind and goofy and learned folk. It is a deep breath of fresh air, considering.

Considering.

I call home and see my sisters and my niece and nephew and all that’s happening in my absence. Everyone’s growing, everyone has some version or dash of my parents that becomes strikingly visible to me. In the absence of the day to day, I see their character arcs bending and changing them. Would it be the same if I were there? Would I be able to recognize this development, this honorable, natural experience of people becoming who they are without the distance to clarify it? I don’t know that I would.

I don’t know that I’d be capable of climbing this same trellis and blooming without being here. I don’t know if the pitch broke left, or the rain fell east, or I didn’t have the thought stirred over coffee to just send a little hello to the English man I thought was darling and clever if I’d feel myself being myself in this same way.

I think about this now and make a post.