New York for London

I was young, and was holding a postcard in my hand with the statue of Liberty in it whilst crossing the Houston in the Staten Island Ferry. I lived in a leafy community house in Staten Island, twenty minutes away from Manhattan by boat.
In Manhattan I met people who have never been in Staten Island, and in Staten Island I met people who have never step foot in Manhattan. Still, the ferry was free and the crossing of this amazing large river would only take you twenty minutes and would allow you to contemplate very closely Miss Liberty’s solid serious face. She was empowering. The statue, that is.
The postcard had large red attractive letters printed on it: the home of the brave, the land of the free. That’s how I felt: brave and free. And lonely, as I looked at the waters and at the distance from one side to the other. I remember there used to be a country singer in the boat. She was black and used to wear the best smile and a big cowboy hat. She used to sing “take me home” and I believed she was from Alabama.
I used to cry when she sang that. I was young and I felt away from home. It was hard.

I need to learn how to forgive myself for what I’ve done.
I blame myself, blame her and blame my destiny.
Only rarely I can accept positively that my choice was then the right one, even though consciously I know that was the only thing to do.

It started to snow early that year in New York. The days were short and cold. The Houston was covered with massive white platforms that looked like little stages for unknown actors and made up for a huge and incomplete puzzle. The boat consequently took much longer to cross the heavy waters and the heaters were poor, so I remained quite and thoughtful staring through the window, my head cupped with a hat, my hands submersed on gloves, my scarf all around me.
Only my eyes were attentive and my mind was thinking of her.

I longed for warmth. I longed for a companion, and I missed my cats.
The postcard was to be written, and the words in it were as important as my actions.
When you have someone you love in the other side of the ocean words become missions. Every single one must bring the exact amount of care, warmth and irony that you want to build up in a relationship. Words can be poetic, they can be fun or they can be short and simple. My postcards always seemed too small. I wanted to write more in them, to give more of myself to it, to loose myself entirely.

Her postcards were the only ones to arrive. I didn’t receive any letters from my family or friends back home because people don’t write letters anymore. They are either too busy or too condescending. Or they use the Internet and write stupidly simple emails.
It’s becoming harder and harder to be real through writing. But she was real. Too real!

I never liked her letters very much. They were written quickly and not very carefully, they weren’t very long, and they were run freely. But I have learnt how to love every single word in them and so I would read them everyday and appreciate every single word in it like a kiss, even if it didn’t make sense.
With time, I started really enjoying her careless free style writing, her non-sense badly grammar long sentences, her lack of punctuation. And her letters became my only possessions, my hobby, inspiration and source of hope.

It was in a very cold evening that I made the final decision. It was snowing and I’ve missed the ferry back home. I was coming from my rehearsals, and had been working in a restaurant in The Village getting one dollar per hour. I was tired, lonely and fragile. I had to wait for another hour for the next boat and I looked for a coin in my pocket. In the ferry waiting room all the homeless were getting their beds ready. It looked dodgy, and I didn’t want to be there. I had to seat for an hour and I was too scare to sleep.
I decided to call her and told her I was coming to meet her in England.

And I made the choice I still blame myself for: I left New York and came to live in London.
With time, I've learnt how to love London. Day by day, like every single word in her letters.
Right now I love where I am. I love who I am. And still, I love her.