Continent: North America
North America first arrived as television light: wider streets, colder air, a scale I could not quite believe. These are the North American cities I have watched from very far away and never walked.
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New Orleans
New Orleans is a city built below the water it lives beside, holding a party over its own graveyards, in a heat I would recognise anywhere.
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Montreal
Montreal is the city I think of as a clerical error — a piece of Europe entered, somehow, in the wrong column of the atlas.
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Toronto
Toronto is a flat, orderly city on the shore of an inland sea — the whole world resettled politely along a frozen lake, the New-World city so many like me went to.
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Mexico City
A vast modern city sinking slowly into the drowned lake-capital of a vanished empire — the dead kept close to the living, two volcanoes on the edge of sight.
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Vancouver
A young city where the mountains come straight down to the sea — glass towers under snow peaks, rainforest and ocean pressing in at the green edge of the New World.
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New York
Of all the cities I have never seen, New York is the one I have seen most — pre-dreamed on my behalf, in advance, by everybody.
