It's a few hours before dawn and I float, somewhat inexplicably, over FDR Drive, watching the ferries and barges puzzling their way down the East River. New York still steams with a heat that rests its weight on you — mindlessly, like rush hour A train strangers.

When I'm in New York I move without a body. I don't need one here; I don't talk too much, I coast through crowds up the avenues, I slip silently onto the side streets. And most of all I watch:

I watch men with perfectly-parted hair pull up security grates, and emerge from their storefronts to sweep the sidewalk. They're meticulous, they make carefully-arranged and -indexed libraries of produce in their stands, soon to be thoughtlessly ravaged by the morning's onslaught of grocery shoppers.

I watch the sky get dressed for the day in the gaps between blocks. Capricious, it trades dusty lavender gowns for pink, for a shade of orange that feels swollen with soul. Those colors creep up the brick walls of the imbricate LaGuardia Houses, and deep shadows are roused from their deep blue bedspreads to go sprinting down Hester Street with the rest of the morning runners.

I watch armies of old women fighting slow motion battles in Seward Park. Overhead the dawn sunlight fills each green-gold leaf of each honey locust before overflowing, spilling down into the lower leaves, and lower, finally gathering on the tile mandala in the center of the park, where it sparkles in pools beneath slippers that move gently through endless Tai Chi forms.

I got a letter from Robb a ways back, he was out in Tokyo for a chapter. In his letter, he said something that surprised me: When we say we love a city, he wrote, what we are often really saying is that we love the people who made us feel a part of it. I sat with that for a long time, trying it on, sizing it up against my experience with New York, city I love most of all.

And what I found was that, for New York City, at least, he's sort of right, but he's sort of wrong — I've adored many friends and lovers in New York, in as many shapes as human adoration might take, but I'll adore those people no matter where we find each other. It's something else that weaves my veins into the fabric of the city: it is not the people who make me feel a part of it, but those that make me feel apart from it.

It's the shifting slang in languages I haven't learned, and the daily rituals and religions I'll never understand, and the experiences informed by experiences informed by experiences that I won't know, coursing through arterial streets and insisting upon themselves day after day, mit besonderen Fremden verstrickt! It is this awareness of and the fleeting overlap with these other strange uncountable beings that make me feel like, perhaps, my being matters some. My fellow ghosts, floating bodiless with me over the FDR, and the Village, and Astoria. Those millions and millions and millions of strangers, made and unmade by this infinite city, whose tapestry lives will never intertwine with mine...

Except, perhaps, in these shared glances; in this dawn watching.

I have a recurring dream that we are sharing a cigarette in an embassy doorway in Belgravia. When I glance through the glass to the clock in the foyer, it is 5.47am, and the steady light of the lantern on the dramatic arch above us wraps and catches between the folds of our clothes, before it fades out towards the stairs. There is a light rain. So fine that it is soundless as it lands on the stairwell.

We are smoking a very mild tobacco, and as you pass me the cigarette in the dark, I can make out the soft print of your lipstick on its beige filter. When I purse it between my own lips, drawing it deep to my lungs, it starts the cherry back to life, and I feel the warmth of your whole body overwhelming me in mine. There is a whisper of your perfume woven through the aroma of the smoke and I am reminded that the memory of love is a miracle.

You might already know, but it is quiet at dawn in Belgravia. There is an infrequent, sibilant sigh of dark cars, Japanese, Italian and German, passing one another, like black strokes of a fountain pen leaving signatures on the night. Over the wet asphalt, their tyres spray a mist that settles immediately into the watery reflections of a wake that then quickly vanishes. There is an unknowable mystery behind every tinted window. Some ambassador, or special advisor, or diplomat, moving secrets between an infinite time-series of locked doors around the great cities of the world. Men and women in the business of trust, and representation. As I suppose we all are, in one way or another.

In the dream, when I turn to look out from the doorway towards the street, all of the rows of immaculate, stucco-fronted Georgian columns look like they've been heavily draped in hundred-foot planes of soft, ivory linen. Just hundreds upon hundreds of feet of Corradini's extraordinary La Vestale Tuccia, if you're familiar. But it isn't one beautiful, singular masterwork. It's every single building, in an ocean of fabric, in a street so long that neither of us can see to the end of it. A kind of endless sweep of stone curvature. When I walk out into the road and reach to touch it, it immediately loses its form, like warm air that diffuses and then immediately re-gathers around my hand. There is an amber glow that emanates from the sash windows beneath the sheets. It is the most unbelievable thing I have ever seen and it doesn't bother me much that I don't understand it's deeper nature.

After I walk back up the stairs, I pass you the cigarette and you press your chest to my shoulder and gently kiss my neck once and it makes me feel certain that we will both live forever. But there is something between us that neither one of us will reach for because sometimes to name a thing is to disappear it. I think about the curve of your legs as they stretch and roll lazily across your bed like a mile-long vineyard. And I know your car will arrive soon, and I don't want it to, and so I think about where you'll go next, and if I'll see you here again, back where the precious geometries of reality matter so little.

When I wake from the dream I pine for you, even though you're always just asleep next to me. And it feels clear to me that my mind and my body love you so deeply in this world and in every other, that it doesn't bother me much that I don't understand it's deeper nature.

It is January in western Tokyo. Plastic fir trees still linger in the porches of the gated homes in Denenchōfu and I have been renting a tumbledown room close to the steep curve of Dorikono-zaka.

I write to you haunted. Or, perhaps, I am doing the haunting. These days I'm scarcely able to tell the difference. You see, I have been wandering these empty streets at night, retracing the paths of my youth.

When we say we love a city, what we are often really saying is that we love the people who made us feel a part of it. So, when I think of this place I do not dwell on Tokyo Tower or the glare of the Yamanote. No, I am taken first to nights sharing chūhai and convenience-store bento under the Maruko bridge. To the fogged windows of our neighbourhood yakiniku joint; hushed words and cigarettes passed between sauce-greased lips. How we'd stumble from the train to walk home en masse, our hands warmed by vending-machine coffee and voices hoarse from just-one-more-hour of karaoke. It's curious how, in those liminal moments as a season of your life draws to a close, you feel as if you might live forever. It's only in parting ways that I think some distant version of yourself succeeds.

And so tonight I have installed myself on the paved bank of the Tama river, where we used to meet. The last train is readying to leave, hurtling passengers from Shibuya, towards Kawasaki and on to Yokohama. As the carriages clatter overhead, I feel their resonance in the hollows of my chest and think on how Tokyo pulled itself up from nothing but the black waters of the bay marshes. How, when the city outgrew the land, they covered over the life-giving rivers and reinvented the streets atop vast caverns of concrete and steel. But the old heart still beats. Out here on the banks of the Tamagawa, close to midnight, there's a gentle clarity to be found amongst the mud and reed grass.

Across the water, the floodlights of the Todoroki stadium have begun to flicker and fade. Soon I will be on a flight home to the people I love and who love me back. I am so eager to greet all that this new year brings. For now though, I will sit here a short while longer. Quietly tending to the ghosts of my twenties.

Under the Tōyoko-sen, sleet falling.

The new year lazily wears in, and I am missing everybody I've ever loved and all of their details.

I think that if you've ever truly loved the bones of somebody that some part of the glow of that love lives trapped inside both of you forever. And that stays true even if you desperately hate one other by the time it comes to part. It's like some unkillable essential chemistry just rattles around in both bodies. The same first promise, just out of time. And that it stays quietly searching for the best version of the other, endlessly. Trying to return to the shared history before it all became impossible.

Over time, I think that the body just becomes a kind of dusty, draughty old house that collects all of these hauntings. They don't know about one another. But you know about all of them. And sometimes you can feel the soft collision of their brushing past one another as they move in you. When I say I am missing everybody I've ever loved, I mean that today I can feel all of my precious hauntings brushing gently past one another at once.

I don't know where these flourishes go when we die. I can tell you that it isn't nowhere, though. If you still think that love dies with the body, I think you need to live longer. You'll see.

Every day I am forcing myself into feeling bright and optimistic about the new year to spite the kind of dismal January weather that makes everything feel like the darkest version of itself. The city of London is covered in a sort of treacherous black and white petrochemical-snow-sediment that freezes and refreezes for days. It lies waiting to take anyone to ground who commits the mortal sin of paying attention to something other than their footing for even a split second. Yesterday I saw a young commuter sprawled across the freezing, sleet-soaked concrete outside of Liverpool Street station covered in his exotic coffee while a thrumming mass of industrious bodies immediately adapted and swiftly navigated around him. It reminded me of ants. Although ants actually help one another. And I flicked up one of the black vanilla smokes that Remi bought home from Tokyo and thought man, yeah. It's like that sometimes. It can be like that sometimes for sure.

But of course, "No winter lasts forever; and no spring skips its turn". A new season will be here to blast away winter's monochrome din soon, and everything will be bright, and open, and different. And on that, I'm reminded that I must write to Henry. There's much to do this year, and not much time in which to do it. I'll need his vision, and care and expert point of view.

I reckon there’s a lot of writing to be done. I've seen some gaudy Sorrentino joint at the Curzon Theater down the street, and it was very beautiful to look at, very wonderful in its Italian melodrama, and tremendously awful as a piece of art. I can always feel a film that was good to watch moving underneath my skin for a while after. I feel it bursting from veins: I find myself moved to find strange ways to speak about the world, or new Achillean parables to tell about the beauty of a stranger's back or a dear friend's hands.

Red I write to you from the thrumming waters of your wake. I met Soho first when we chased you through it, from bar to Vietnamese restaurant to jazz club and back again, and I've never managed to completely unstreak the blurred landscape of clamorous red paper lanterns and laserbeam blue stage lights and insistent flashbulb marquees in my head. I remember feeling like demigods as we paraded up Dean St and back down Greek, and I remember envy, deep in my muscles, at the infinite life that flowed out of you and your glamorous lover. I remember your laughter and ours echoing like gunfire percussion through the city.

I admired your furrowed-brow intellect and wide-open heart, your patience and curiosity about people. London isn't the same when it's not first a setting for your life.

We’re staying at Mimi's hotel, far nicer than it ought to be for the price, and the hotel bar staff is a close-knit group of rambunctious and infuriatingly beautiful Italians with light eyes; they smirked at me like I was a little kid when I thanked them with an unpracticed, teetering grazie for letting me stay past closing time to write. My room is incredibly small and windowless — the perfect cavern to retreat to after electrocuting oneself with the neon and brass of Soho.

It's almost one in the morning — the neighborhood churns outside the bar, young and garish and queer, and men rev their motorcycles at each other like catcalls. Once I've finished writing this, I'll turn myself out to the pavement, to walk for hours through the slipshod knotwork of London streets in search for a foggy December dawn.

Bar Italia is both a cafe and a portal. What I mean by that is that it is open for 21 hours a day and anywhere that is open for 21 hours a day eventually, but inevitably, becomes a portal to something else. It has to. I'm not saying it's easy to explain. I'm saying you should come to Soho some time with me and I'll show you what I mean.

On Frith St. at about 1.30 in the morning there's a secret door in spacetime where the cafe racers and stupefied barflies and the post-show jazz players and the just-off barbacks meet the night workers and the money guys and the writers and exciters and it all collapses into a frantic kaleidoscope of chaos and desire. As with all good dens of debauchery, it is an obnoxious and almost completely incomprehensible cacophony of impulse and worship. It wails. The tear of 4-stroke engines, tentative piano keys, the hushed clink of crystal martini coupes, doormen tackling, a dropped pint and a smashed glass, a cackling drunk, an 'I fucked somebody I shouldn't', a perfect double bass walk, the exotic percussion of five-hundred pairs of black stilettos click-clacking under the leaking neon of Chinatown. It's the same thing as church bells, in its way. It rings.

I can tell you that I dream about Soho all the time. It's the underneath of something. You know, someone once said "No past, just an infinite present" to me, talking about hotel rooms. But it's the same thing. The big risk is that you're free, here. Which of course means you're also in perilous danger. And of course, danger is a sharpener for the dull edge of the soul. If you are in sight of Bar Italia in these manic hours you are trying to escape something, and I only know that because I am trying to escape something too. We are trying to escape something together. Which is incidentally also the best way I can describe being madly, desperately in love.

Across the street, I've been watching a young band loading into one of the most iconic jazz venues in history, which I think coincidentally is a portal of its own kind, too. I've been thinking about the reverence and the promise of standing on the same stage as Ella, Nina, Miles and Bill. Chet. Later, Amy, from Camden Town. And what that must mean for a 21-year-old in Soho for the first time, dragged here by their instruments, the most important of which are their hearts and their hands.

And what it means to weave your own notes on a stage graced by peers with such a profound sense of musical intuition that the way they expressed their own humanity changed the shape of popular culture forever, and that how the same sensitivity that made that vision possible killed many of them outright. I think about Chet spending years relearning his life's work when they broke all his front teeth and he still did it. Because the trumpet was life or death for him. And he still came back to Ronnie Scott's at Frith Street across from Bar Italia and did the precious and sacred thing that only he could ever do, that melted so many people's misery away, even though jazz was dying.

Music like that is confession, I think. Forgiveness in the air between you and God, and I.

I’ve just settled into the room in Luzern, and the air is dry and crystalline cold. The frost wakes me up, and warps the old wood floors of my ribs. It’s a far cry from my sweltering week in Mexico, and my bones are melodramatic in reminding me of that.

My grandmother’s memory is slipping. She asked me about thirty times, last time I saw her, whether or not I liked the cold weather, and she shivered with fresh theatric disapproval each time of thirty I responded that I did. When she asked the second time, I started to think about why it was so easy to answer ‘yes’ before.

I welcome the cold because it puts you inside your body. Winter brings with the snow a period of peace for reflectance, for closure. Winter makes the world tragic and fearsome, it dismantles the things nature builds in sunnier seasons, and it lets one turn to themselves with the same sense of indiscriminate, irreverent rememberance. What will I make of the project of my self in this time of maintenance and revision?

On long, snowy walks along Lake Lucerne (the Vierwaldstättersee, of course), it is easy for one to reflect light into the rafters of one’s character, inquire about unhealed wounds, maybe decide this will be the year one properly learns Italian. I take pauses from the project to nod at other walkers, who are too preoccupied with projects of their own to return the gesture. The sun makes a rare appearance through incomplete cloud cover, shining warmthless and white over the water. Soon the Christmas lights will reilluminate the old town, holiday markets shaking loose the snow and bringing the flagstoned streets back to life.

I am stuck in Tallinn. This winter is brutal. Two weeks of new snow has made everything impossible. It is insufferable, and so am I. I cringe at how I was so desperate to be unreachable. I have been living in a large, mostly empty first-floor apartment. By the time the sea's bitter wind reaches the old town, it rips a wicked frozen draft beneath these doors like some furious midwinter spirit. Left alone, I ruminate on all of the miserable things that have ever happened to me. It is typically self-indulgent and pathetically sad.

There is a small, long-abandoned bakery downstairs and I glance through its boarded windows every time I drag myself through the baltic treachery to find the cigarettes that I love and that you tell me will eventually kill me. It feels that there is little sadder to me than this abandoned thing. The ovens look worn and tired and heavy and like they're only good for salvage, now. I wonder about the fire that they once bellowed into the world to bring warm, soft, sweet poppy-seed kringle into the hands of excited children. I wonder about the last breath of the fans, and how one day they never kicked back into life again. I have to imagine their final breath in triumph, not defeat.

I have been thinking about you constantly, and it's all that can help me to beat back the cold. I have been dreaming about the rhythm of the curve of your back, and your honey-coloured skin, and the olive of your eyes, and your heart-shaped face. I fantasise about your hands holding my hands, holding your hands. I have been thinking about us dancing in your favourite dive on the Reeperbahn. I have been thinking about the white wine at the edge of your mouth. Your mystery.

Everything reminds me of you. I'd do anything for you. I swear to God, I'll stop smoking to live longer with you. I ache for and with you and I am a wretched fool for thinking otherwise. I wait for the phone to ring, for the music in your voice. You never miss your promised calls. You never let me down.

I will not allow you to be another story of a gift I leave in the past. It was an astonishing and delusional act of self-grandeur that I ever tried to resist. I am coming to find you the moment that the storm is through with me. It would be the privilege of an entire life to spend it returning to you, one way or another.

It’s so easy to be so comfortable these days. With all the apps and all the logistics networks, it’s just so simple to sit inside one’s home, in its landlord-white-walled, hospital-grey-vinyl-flooring, pestilent rectangular glory, and let the world be brought to you in drop-shipped disposable packaging — catered, of course, by the gourmet Sysco stylings of the build-your-own-bowl chain two kilometers down the street.

It’s the scariest thing I can imagine, to be comfortable. Decide I've seen enough of the world, or that I want to see only the marketable parts, to see it only through lenses so tidily branded in pastels and geometric sans, so conveniently delivered right to my door. It is an existential terror to me, and almost certainly to my own detriment. The greatest stories of my life have all come from moments of strangeness and stress in far-flung locations: in blizzards in the wild Rocky Mountains, in disasters incurred in the wake of missed trains in Italy.

And now here in Mexico City, where in the historic center, I detour down and up side streets, listening to the excitable noises of markets and trucks on the main road fading and returning with proximity. Here are tumbling, overlapping voices drifting down the Calle de Santo Tomás, and the sound of leaves turning over in the air, and the skittering scrabbling of three dogs wrestling in the road. And I do not know the language very well, but I am trying my best to learn, and my lo siento’s and my gracias por ayudarme’s are trying their best as well. I am learning about the shapes that people are, and I am reaching my branches out to find new shapes for myself.

Like a houseplant, like the inumerable shamel ash trees that line the streets from here to Roma Norte, I do the most growing when there is more soil to be enjoyed.

I write to you with solemn news. I am in Paris, writing my life’s only masterwork. I spend my days drinking good espresso and smoking inexpensive cigarettes, writing clearly about what hurts. As such, I cannot ‘Log On’ - and friend - I will not attend your ‘laser-focused mesh network webinar’.

Nobody knows what ‘kubernetes’ is here, chap. There is no ‘container runtime’. But ‘resource isolation’ is surely real. You see, I have taken a lover, and we lie, legs entwined, waiting for winter to pass, in a dusty apartment where cinnamon and brandy sit lovingly in the air, knowing we’ll be strangers again by spring.

As such, I shall not ‘hop on a call’, nor will I ‘push my latest branch’. I cannot see past what I must create now, chum. The snow is early. It falls soft on these balcony rails, like some wild flower, a dream of a Paris meant to be. I will never ask ‘can everybody see my screen’ again. You understand. Be well.

I don't want to alarm you, but I have decided that I won't be coming home. I know I haven't been Online. I know you've been racked with worry. I know I should be racked with guilt. I know, that you know, that sometimes, I am.

What I can tell you is that I'm safe here, and that I have been here for 47 days. The journey was complicated in a way that will not be helpful to share. I do not think about the Internet any more but in an occasional involuntary panic. It arrives and disappears in a flash. The frenzied technicolour of a fevered dream. The sheer, primed tips of the claws of an anxious animal.

But, its colours become more muted each time it pins me. Its teeth shorter. A softer grip. I can tell that it is losing interest in my body. The prey drive wanes at the unkillable. I think it knows that the hunt by itself, the blood alone - is worthless. I suspect it will forget about me entirely soon. I imagine I will, too. I dream of the time where I am released from the cocktail of horrors that the Internet quickly became in front of us. I am abandoning the haunted monument I gave the days of my youth to build.

You see, I am in Tangiers and there is something ancient here that makes the kind of demand of me that I would not turn away from even if I could. It is the gentle roar of a distant voice that is two thousand years old. I can feel her precious gift wound around my ribs like a mile of cactus silk. It is a tribute to the hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of African nights where the ocean collides with this desert's pining coast. What is a place, that still stands - hundreds of years after the beauty and brutality of its warring kingdoms now only live in books, or in the mind? Do you think that that is a place at all?

Most nights, I slip beneath the cloak of the soft canopies of the maze of the bazaars here. Seeking. A foreigner to its rites and rituals. But I am certain I was born here too. I do not understand it yet but I am listening intently to the language of the soft command that it puts patiently before me, until it breaks through to me. And it will.

The air is thick with the scent of cardamom and incense, and the rich, dark sugars of northern African date syrup, here. The clatter and the din of the city is a chaotic symphony of daily miracles. I cannot describe it. It is the molasses of time. I cannot escape it. I suspect that a god might be here in the soil. And I suppose you will think I have lost my mind. But please, try to find some comfort in this inevitability. It would have ripped everything from me anyway, had I not already given it willingly.

I want to be honest with you when I say that it is not likely that we will see one another again. I mean that with an endless, profound adoration for you that I could not have understood before I came here. I wish you everything you've deserved. I wish you an eternity of a light like this.

I know that it aches. I still feel it like you do. I think I will, forever. But there is something I need to do, and it is here. And it is beyond me, now.