7.xi.13

The story so far: I have been in New York a month -- this time living on the Lower East Side-- and walking home tonight from the Upper East Side, and the New York Society Library, I stopped here, at Cafe Pick Me Up on Tompkins Square Park, for a glass of wine and thought about York. The traffic between the two cities where I have spent so much time in the past few years, the ocean between them, the spaces I inhabit as I pass across the lives I live there and here. This is the third time I have been in New York for a month, or two, or three in the past two years, and it feels as if this may be the last for a while, and so here it is, the prompt for 2York: overheard fragments, things I notice, the grime and the crush, the unexpected beauty, the connections, the music, the deaths, the friends, the books, the food, the Russian and Turkish baths, the retreat I am going to on the north of Long Island on Saturday. I have spent so much of my life in the USA in the past fifteen years, much less in York, where I have lived for eight. The passage between York and New York has not gone unmarked -- I curated York New York with my friend Claire Hind, commissioning writing and sound artists to make  short sound pieces, more than five years ago now. So this has been a long time coming. Listen, the table next to me has three young guys making a project on lap tops, in front of me two women converse, heads close, over wine. Beside me two guys chat about work. Out there the last leaves are yellow in the street lamplight. It's fall, and winter is almost here. Around the corner in the Russian and Turkish baths they are getting ready for the show I saw there last night, sitting in the hot rooms in my bathing suit. My husband Bill is on the road from DC. A siren passes by. The streets are quiet and dark. I think of my garden in York. I imagine it full of leaves, extremely dark under the sycamore and the lime tree, stretching away from the house, full of leaves. Here we are. I have six more weeks here.