who only by moving can balance

Alas, part of the reason I am so wrung out, so strung out, so tired and sad at the moment - is precisely that I have been living a life without a wheelchair in it, that I've been avoiding not been able to face the mechanics of getting it up stairs and dealing with buses and on and on and on. I just... can't. And in turn that means I get tireder, and it's all a bit grim.

Democracy is the worst form of government ever tried, and all that. I resent that I am ill enough to need a chair. I resent that it forces interactions in public space. I resent so much.

None of it is about resenting the chair. The chair means I can sit up without things hurting; the chair means travelling 500m doesn't exhaust me (I don't even know how to deal with the idea of gradually building up stamina when walking 500m on one or even two or three consecutive days isn't a problem, but beyond that I don't recover, I don't get better or stronger or faster, I just get ground down).

And yet: it is so difficult not to resent myself, not to resent the tools I need, because of the ways in which interaction with the world work. And it's further complicated by the fact that resenting my body ends up resenting the chair by implication, not because my body necessitates it but because it is part of my body. I'm not quite sure how to explain this to people without the relevant experience, but -- it's an insensate part of my body; thus the intimacy of people-who-are-permitted-to-touch-it-without-asking and thus the revulsion and horror and discomfort when people not in that set do.

Perhaps that is some of why I'm finding this hard to talk about: fundamentally I think I think about life-with-a-wheelchair in approximately the same way as I think about life-with-my-brain or life-with-my-hips: essential, unreliable, often inconvenient, doesn't play nicely with others, and of necessity something to nonetheless be kind and compassionate to. Over and over I learn patience, and I do what I can with what I have, and I keep my head down and get on and try not to break my heart dreaming about the impossible. Or, to circle back around: it's a lot like living with my brain.

First and always: Cambridge. Cambridge, which I've seen through enough different eyes -- town and gown, resident and caretaker, political and utterly independent of any given inhabitants -- Cambridge, which had me for two decades and change, and has me still. My parental home is a 1960s newbuild semi in Arbury; my college contains an archway that predates its foundation in 1350, that's had chunks carved out of the limestone by bicycle pedals over the last hundred-odd years. I've laughed, fondly and otherwise, at the new undergraduates with their shiny new college scarves and no idea how to cycle; I've dodged punt touts and helped my baby brother pass his hiring test to be a punt chauffeur; I've rummaged through the stacks in the University Library and put up and repainted street-signs. I know where the permanent graffiti is and I remember some that's been and gone; I've delivered leaflets at 6am on election morning and I've observed the counting of votes and I've walked across town at four in the morning from the Guildhall (where the outcome was known) to a common room (where people were glued to the news); I've walked across town at two in the morning (Homerton to Trinity Hall) very solemn and slightly wobbly with a viola; I've leaned my forehead against stone and felt where it's come from and been reassured by its solid indifferent presence; I've punted to Grantchester and back and eaten strawberries in the meadows in the sunshine. I've lost and found and found and lost religion and confidence and friends and trust and love. Cambridge is mine, or I am Cambridge's, and so it shall be forever, amen.

Zürich was next. I spent a summer soaking up sunshine, glancing up from my commuter paper to see the Alps crowned with glaciers as we crossed the river, looking out the window on my way to tearing down the stairs from the eighth floor to see the turtles and the fish in the pond way below. There are fields opposite the Spital Limattal -- apple orchards up the hill, but immediately opposite - by the bus stop - pick-your-own flowers and an honesty box. I found cafes and restaurants and friends and I learned a whole new language and I lived by myself absent a support network for the first time, and I explored and I fell in love with museums and was baffled by art and I swam in the lake and learned to like blue cheese on a Roman customs point in the rain overlooking a river with P. I miss pear bread most of all.

I didn't learn how to love LA. Mostly I got as far as baffled affection: for the sky that only ever got as dark as a glowing orange-purple, that turned opaque blanket of smog when you drove high enough into the mountains to see the stars, that left my lungs a wreck for six months; the fantastic street art and terrible public transport; the storm drains and dry river; the jacarandas and the humming birds. My experience of LA is less that, more a haze of heat & food & Caltech campus, with a dream-sequence weekend-long road trip up to the Bay Area somewhere in the middle.

And, of course, London. London, and its river-that-is-a-dragon. I would (as I thought) have hated moving here when I was 18; now I find myself delighting in how joyfully small it makes me, in exactly the same way I am small when I look at the stars or (closer to home) the Moon. I don't belong here but the river-dragon will let me stay a while, and so for now I will fling myself into proms and parks and concerts and gigs and museums and the poetry library; I will stand breathless with delight on the bridge at Embankment or at St Paul's; I will be a mirror for this city and the city shall be a mirror for me, and I will learn more about how people work and more about how I work and I will adore its trees and mysterious statuary and, most of all, I will learn.

(Honourable mentions go to Oxford and to Edinburgh, neither of which I understand, in part because of how intensely my experiences of them are bound up with how I relate to the people I love who relate to these cities; to my patchwork understanding of Heidelberg, all castle and computational linguistics and music and cheap beer by the river; to Rome; and to Paris, and in particular the sunrise walk between Gare de l'Est and Gare du Nord, and a toast to fifth-floor balconies and wine, and croissants by the Seine at dawn.)