Where to start? How? A little under two months ago, I was back in London from New York with no job and less money in the bank than I’d like. It all came raining down on my head, then – the job offer, the illustrated books, the neighbourhood I’d been eyeing. I would’ve gone shopping to celebrate, but the gas bill came in.

I worked eleven-hour days for a month while Olive cooked dinner every night. Then, a little under two months after I stepped onto the Virgin plane out of JFK, I was back on a plane out West to definitively finish moving out of New York City. Remember when I left New York a year and a half ago? I thought I’d moved out of New York then. So wrong and deluded a girl can be! It’s just dawned on me that I’ve been living in New York in my mind the whole time, and trying to carve London into the shape of an apple. I mean, what’s not to love? I called a car service to Williamsburg the other night, for dinner outside at Schmio’s, with the rose bushes in bloom and the bird calling on the balcony. “London, England?!” the driver said. “There’s no place like New York!” He was a wiry black man who spoke in exclamation marks. “The city’s so great they named it twice!” The car intercom crackled with calls from the guy at the base, and the driver said, to no one, “Forty-two dollars to the Bronx! Shit! That’s gotta be mo’ than forty-two dollars! I mean, to the Bronx! Shiiit!”

I arrived in a New York summer Thursday at midnight. The brownstones on Ninth Street were silent. I slept with the windows open.

Friday the no-jokes activity started, and Dwayne the realtor man came ’round with his camera to take pictures. “I used to throw a lot of parties here,” I said, and he wrote “Gourmet kitchen” on his rental-description form.

Saturday Jason and I rented a van to drop off loved pieces of furniture with loved friends. He’d brought pecans and non-pareils. I’d brought lemon-fennel and rum-and-raison scones. It was like the traffic gods were smiling upon us as we pulled up willy-nilly and double-parked in bus lanes here, next to fire hydrants there, and down the street from the Yemen Café, right in the mid-afternoon mess of Atlantic Avenue. I had fat, ripe bruises on my leg the next day that made people jump back as if I were covered in bugs. This is what accomplishment feels like.

Sunday we had the moving sale, and Jeff brought Post-its and Sharpies to mark prices on everything. He brought his iPod and his iPod speakers for a Sunday shimmy. I wanted to hug him. I probably did. India came, too, with chocolate and strawberries. I know I hugged her. I kept misplacing the money envelope full of one-dollar bills, till India took charge and sat on it. I had a “Free” box that contained, among other things, video tapes, an HDTV antenna my cousin’d left behind, and a CD folder full of all the CDs I came to America with in 1995. I tell you – even for free, no one wants “Spice World”. Stewart came by with Benjamin, and Benjamin is six so he came by with the steps to the plankton dance. The neighbours kept stopping by to say hey and how-you-doing and good-luck, which just goes to show what Brooklyn is like and why it is so hard to leave it. The sunlight inside the house was dimming by five or six, and we were very tired and very quiet. I waved good-bye to India and Jeff, and then I was very tired and very quiet. I thought I was going to vomit, the apartment was so empty, and me even more so. I sat on the stoop and called Schmio. “I needed to talk to someone nice,” I said, and she said we would meet for dinner on Cornelia Street. A shower helped. The dinner helped more. It had started to rain by eleven or so, the kind of rain where girls shriek as they run for the cab down shiny streets, and we stood outside in the chill with a cigarette.

I don’t know what I had been expecting, exactly, but the truth is that this move has been much harder than I imagined it could or would be. There have been hot tears that well up unbidden, and more than once I have had to tell myself not to throw up. This is what grief is, I think, in a way, or maybe it’s just an intense desire to grasp and hold close to me for one last time everything that was electric and fantastical and true for so many years. Yesterday I wandered from room to empty room, and my hands were empty, and I wasn’t sure what I was looking for.

I went up to the roofdeck last night, where the wind was a blessing after a hot day of hot activity. Brooklyn stretched down all the way to the river, and the Statue of Liberty was waving hello. I had a bowl of sweet cherries. I sat cross-legged and watched the city lights till everything became blurry. Bit by bit I think I might finally be ready to leave.

The painters are here today, so good-bye pink wall, good-bye bathroom wallpapered with the Singapore Straits Times, good-bye brown wall, blue wall, red bedroom like living in the secret heart of a ripe cherry. Because the painters are painters – Johnny Mac, one is called, and the other is Ralphie – they brought a paint-speckled stereo and tuned it to the station that plays Rock Hits of Yesteryear. We’ve gone through “Knocking on Heaven’s Door”, “Light My Fire”, and the “Bohemian Rhapsody”. It’s only a matter of time before we do “Changes”, and then the deal will be sealed.

I’ve got five days left of summer in New York, which means blue skies and the park outside my door.