I had spent two Decembers in the United Kingdom prior this past one, the first in London, the second in Edinburgh, and they were both marked by an extreme sense of expectation. I’ve always loved Christmas with a sort of unabashed sentimentality, but the weeks leading up to the holiday took on a new dimension when I was living abroad—every day closer to Christmas marked another day closer to my return to the US, to something I didn’t even realize I missed until I started thinking about it for more than three minutes. Christmas offered up my childhood home and my home country, a way to re-right something that felt like it’d been knocked off-balance living so many miles away. I found it easy to get wrapped up in festive cheer if I kept a steady eye on the date, a sort of advent calendar counting down to my plane ticket.

(It was likely this momentum that made it so hard to return here afterwards: studying in London, I was only back for a month before deciding to finish my junior year in Massachusetts. Working in Edinburgh, well—those t-shirts could certainly fold themselves. I got word that the shop had gone out of business two months later; I’m not ashamed to say the news made me smile.)

I suppose the more time I spend in the UK this time around, the less I feel the need to linger over thoughts about rounds one and two. The circumstances are all different, and my past experiences here are only marginally instructive—and I find much easier comparisons between the life I’d been living in New York City and the life I’m living now than with anything that happened here close to a decade ago. So then going back to New York, in the weeks before Christmas, promised to make everything feel a little bit more complicated.

It did, but then, it didn’t. Because the undercurrent, the bookends, the continuing pulse that dominated December and January—on both sides of the Atlantic—was my obsession with a particular television show. The day before I flew out of Heathrow, in mid-December, I attended the premiere of the new series. In the final days of January, I published what I described somewhere as “the literary critic equivalent of an overshare” on my devotion to said show—basically the truest expression of my feelings ever printed in a place that wasn’t one of my own blogs. All of this inevitably casts a shadow over the past few months, a low, often anxious hum in the background (and then, when both pieces were well-received, when women of all ages wrote in and said that they had felt isolated and strange and I had expressed exactly what they were feeling and they were incredibly relieved to read it, I felt sheer, unadulterated joy—and an incredible sense of relief myself).

But I am more than the sum of my obsessions (not a whole lot more, but still). I am currently straddling the Atlantic, working to navigate the trajectory of my life as I approach the next decade of it. Going back to New York was hard, in some ways. In others, it was the easiest thing in the world.

I wind up at the back of a crowd boarding the Manhattan-bound J train at Jamaica, because I’ve got a heavy suitcase that I’m perpetually worried will be caught in a subway door as I awkwardly lug it onboard. (This same fear will lead me to wait for three separate Piccadilly line trains upon my return to London, when I need to find a car empty enough that I can take my sweet time boarding.) All the seats are snapped up immediately, save one—that’s taken by a woman’s things, a bunch of crappy reusable plastic bags. I gesture politely: ‘Will you move your stuff, please?’ She ignores me. I say out loud: “Really? You’re doing this?” She quite deliberately ignores me. A few stops later I manage to take the seat across from her and pull out my phone to take her picture. Does she see me doing this? I can’t tell. She’s covering her face in one shot, like she’s just been caught by the paparazzi. I seriously enjoy taking these pics. All bets are off on the J train. In some small way, I am home.

It’s cold as fuck in New York City. This is December, pre-Polar Vortex, just your standard Northeastern frigidness—in my home town, about four hours north, it will hover below 15° F on Christmas day, and my mother and I will wrap up our faces and grumble and shuffle around a four-block perimeter approximately once before declaring our brisk winter walk finished. England’s got this damp chill that often leaves me shivering, but it’s nothing like the dry iciness of New York in the winter, the sheer bitterness of the air. “New York feels like a very small place when it’s this cold,” Paul will tell me a few days later, after I’ve moaned about braving the gale-force Arctic winds along Coney Island Avenue to visit his office. It’s tucked amongst shabby auto-body shops and industrial supply warehouses; I buy him a Diet Coke at a neighboring gas station, the kind of dingy Brooklyn convenience store in which I always feel like no woman before me has ever entered. New York does feel small, but it feels so familiar. This isn’t unexpected, necessarily, but it makes me sad.

It’s a week-long whirlwind of meetings—not business, though there’s a little bit of that, but more like reunions, with friends and former coworkers, with little spots that made up my New York life, with the inconveniences of the city I wasn’t very sorry to leave behind. By chance, a number of friends who’ve also moved away are back in town on their way to their holiday destinations, and they join me at a bar in the East Village on my 29th birthday. We trip each other up by asking about the big themes of our new lives: “How is it, out wherever you are?” As though it is simple to summarize this sort of thing, leaving a career for school, or vice versa, a transcontinental move, an upcoming wedding—there’s a total lack of context, beyond the one that we all used to share, and the comparisons grow tiresome, after a while.

I’m a bit down after this big reunion, and I recognize it as a feeling colored by nostalgia, but it’s not nostalgia for New York the city, but for my early New York, a few years back, when most of my friends could be easily collected in one place, before our ambitions or frustrations took us elsewhere, before we moved on to different stages of our lives—because even many of my friends (the majority of my friends) who haven’t left the five boroughs have moved on with their lives, in some way or another. The birthday party is held in the ground level of a bar where my friend is hosting a reading series, and she surprises me with a birthday pumpkin pie. I’d missed it, on Thanksgiving.

There seems to be a prevailing assumption that I will promptly return to New York after finishing my dissertation. It’s hard for me to insist that I’ll stay in London—it’s so miserably expensive, the chip-and-pin machine pecks away at you every day. I’ve been spooked by stories of impossible-to-acquire visa sponsorship, and David Cameron’s determination to keep me far away from his workforce. I feel like I’m too old to take any old job for the right to stay in this country. It’s hard to think, though, that the return to New York is inevitable. “I’ll go where the right job is,” I say, many times. “What’s the right job?” I am asked. I shrug, sort of helplessly. The snag in the grand life plan.

I spend a few hours in the office amongst the auto-body shops and Paul talks to/at me about my life choices in a way that I have missed a great deal. I guess it’s unfair to characterize it that way, because he keeps trying to change the subject and I keep trying to get him to talk to/at me about myself. The future is impossible to map, and I’m not the type of person to find this particularly scary (in fact, it’s slightly invigorating), but the geography thing is hard; I’ve got a cat waiting for me back in upstate New York, and I don’t love feeling physically unmoored for long. Later that evening I attend a warm, intimate dinner party a few bus stops north, in Windsor Terrace. Upon my arrival, the host informs me that she’s just taken “the wrong kind of drugs,” though, after a night of observing her, it’s not clear what these pills would be right for, exactly. Early in the evening a friend asks me which city I prefer, New York or London, and I tell her I like them both equally, in different ways. She narrows her eyes. “I knew you’d say that,” she says, accusingly. It’s unhelpful but true.

My time upstate, over the holiday itself, is a bit of a blur: I catch a brutal upper-respiratory thing promptly upon arrival and remain couch-bound with a fever for the bulk of my visit. But my cat is there, and it’s so, so miserable to leave her. I return to New York after Christmas and attempt to tie up loose ends. I’ll be back soon enough, because a pair of friends, the kind of friends you’d fly across the ocean for, are getting married Memorial Day weekend in Vermont. My last day in America it rains, and it’s the worst sort of Manhattan rain, just pitiful buckets and sprinting soaked down wide avenues and getting pummeled with dirty water by passing cabs. I am very wet, and very vocal in my annoyance. Lord knows why I’m excited to head back to the land of rain.