London smells of wet metal and old decisions.

I noticed this the moment I stepped out of the Tube for the first time, dragging a suitcase with a broken wheel that scraped against the pavement in a rhythm so consistent and so mournful it sounded like it was trying to tell me something. The air hit my face and it was the air of a city that had been breathing itself in and out for two thousand years and had long since stopped being interested in the impression it made on new arrivals. It did not smell of welcome. It did not smell of hostility. It smelled of wet metal and old decisions and the specific, horizontal rain that I would come to understand was not weather in London but simply the city's default emotional state rendered atmospheric.

I stood outside the station for forty seconds. I counted them. This is a thing I have always done in moments of significant transition — counted the seconds while the transition is still happening, before the new reality closes over the old one and you can no longer feel the seam. Forty seconds, standing on a pavement in a city I did not know, with a suitcase that mourned beneath me and a phone with a new SIM card that had not yet learned to belong to me, and above me a sky the colour of a decision already made and not yet regretted.

Then I moved. Because that is what you do. You move, or the forty seconds become fifty, become a hundred, become a man standing outside a Tube station in the rain with his whole life in a suitcase, which is a category of person this city has seen before and will see again and feels, correctly, no particular obligation to assist.

I want to tell you about the bar first, because the bar is where this year lives. The bar is the spine of it. Without the bar, the year is just a collection of grey days and greyish nights and the specific kind of loneliness that has no adequate name in English, though Arabic gets closer — ghurba, the ache of being away from where you belong, which is not homesickness exactly because homesickness is a nostalgia and ghurba is something more present-tense than that. Ghurba is not missing somewhere. It is the continuous, low-frequency awareness that you are currently somewhere that is not yours. It follows you like your shadow follows you. It is longest at noon.

The bar is called The Anchor, which is either poetic or ironic and I have spent nearly an entire year deciding which. It is in a part of East London that used to be something else and is in the process of becoming something else again, the way all parts of London are always in the process of becoming something else, shedding one identity and growing another with the patient, relentless metabolism of a city that has survived enough history to have stopped being sentimental about any particular version of itself. There are coffee shops now next to chicken shops next to a gallery with no name on the door next to a Bangladeshi grocery where the mangoes in the window are the most saturated colour on the entire street and stop me every time I pass because they are almost but not quite the colour of Lebanese mangoes and that almost is its own kind of ghurba.

The Anchor has been a bar since 1987, which in London makes it practically ancient. The walls carry the specific tobacco-coloured patina of decades of conversations, the accumulated exhalation of ten thousand evenings in which people said things they meant and things they didn't mean and things they would wake up at 4am regretting for years. The bar itself is dark wood, worn smooth at the front lip where hands have rested — a geological record of elbows, of the unconscious geometry of human leaning, of the particular way people position themselves when they want a drink and want also to be seen wanting it. There are photographs on the wall behind the bottles. I have memorized them all. This is another thing I do: memorize rooms. My mother used to say I had the memory of a building, which she meant as a criticism and which I have come to understand as the most accurate description of myself I have ever heard. Buildings remember everything that happened inside them. They hold it in their walls, their floors, the specific creak of the third stair. I am like that. I hold things.

My manager's name is Dennis. He is fifty-four years old, built like a man who was once very strong and has redistributed that strength into a kind of dense, unhurried solidity that communicates, without aggression, that he has seen everything and is not easily moved by any of it. He interviewed me in fifteen minutes, asked me where I was from, said Lebanon, right, rough few years, and when I said yes he nodded in the way people nod when they are acknowledging a fact rather than offering sympathy. I respected him immediately for that. Sympathy in the abstract is a transaction I have never known what to do with. The nod was different. The nod said: I have registered the reality of your situation and I am now going to assess whether you can pour a pint without spilling it, which is actually what we are here for.

I could pour a pint. I had never poured a pint in my life but I understood, watching Dennis demonstrate once with the particular efficiency of a man who has done something ten thousand times and therefore can no longer see why it would be difficult, that it was fundamentally a question of patience and angle. Everything is, I have found. Patience and angle. I poured it cleanly on my second attempt. He said, good, you start Thursday, and handed me a black shirt with the bar's name on the chest, and that was the negotiation completed.

This is Night One. Thursday. My first shift.

I want to tell you what it felt like to stand behind that bar for the first time, but telling you requires me to go backward for a moment, because the feeling only makes full sense against its contrast, and the contrast is Beirut, and Beirut is always the contrast, that is the deal I made with myself when I bought the one-way ticket — that I would carry Beirut with me as the measuring instrument against which everything else would be calculated.

In Beirut I worked in my uncle's restaurant on the street I grew up on, a street whose stones I knew individually the way you know the faces of people you have eaten dinner with every night for twenty-five years. I knew which step in front of the jeweler's shop collected water after rain. I knew which corner caught the smell of the sea in the afternoons when the wind came from the right direction. I knew the sound of the neighbourhood in the morning — the specific argument of the two men at the coffee stand who had been having the same argument about politics since before I was born, the volume of which functioned as a kind of emotional weather report for the day. I knew the late-night sounds: the particular pattern of traffic that meant it was after midnight, the call to prayer that arrived at 4am like a voice in a dream you recognize without being able to explain why. I knew the weight of the air, which in summer is the weight of a warm hand pressing gently but continuously against your face, and which I have not felt once in eleven months of London air, which presses nothing and weighs nothing and is simply there, grey and indifferent and technically adequate for breathing.

Behind the bar at The Anchor, on Night One, I felt the distance between those two rooms with a physical specificity I had not expected. It was in my hands, the distance. My hands knew what to do in my uncle's restaurant — they knew the rhythm of the kitchen, the weight of the particular plates, the way to carry three glasses in one hand with the fourth hooked in the crook of two fingers, a skill acquired over years and stored in the muscle memory of my palms. Here, behind the bar, my hands were new again. They moved with the careful deliberateness of hands learning a new language. They did not yet know this room. They did not yet know the tap placement, the glass sizes, the specific reach required for the top shelf. They would learn. They do learn. Hands are practical things, ultimately, and practical things adapt. But on Night One they were honest in a way hands rarely get to be — they could not pretend to belong somewhere they had only just arrived.

The first customer I served alone was a woman of about forty who ordered a gin and tonic without looking at me, her eyes on her phone, her coat still on, her whole posture communicating the particular exhaustion of someone who has survived another day of something difficult and has earned this drink and would like it produced without the complication of human interaction. I made it. She took it, still looking at her phone, and said thanks in a way that was not unfriendly but was entirely impersonal, the thanks you give a vending machine, the acknowledgment of a mechanism rather than a person.

I want to tell you — and this is the part that embarrasses me slightly, even now, even with everything that has come since — that it bothered me. Not her specifically. Not even the impersonality of it, which I understood and did not take personally in the way it was not intended personally. What bothered me was the sudden, enormous distance between who she was not seeing and who I actually was. Which is a ridiculous thing to feel behind a bar on your first shift in a foreign city. You are not there to be seen. You are there to pour the drinks and take the money and say cheers with the correct inflection and wipe the bar with the cloth that smells of the specific cleaning product Dennis buys in bulk from a supplier in Walthamstow. You are there to be a function. And I know this. I knew it before I walked in. But there is a difference between knowing something intellectually and standing inside the fact of it at eleven minutes past nine on a Thursday evening in October in East London, making a gin and tonic for a woman who cannot see you, while outside the window the rain continues its grey, horizontal, entirely indifferent project.

What she could not see: that I had, two weeks earlier, sat at my mother's kitchen table in Beirut for the last time before the flight, and my mother had made kibbeh nayyeh with her hands the way she has made it since before I can remember, and we had eaten it in the specific silence of people who have things to say and have collectively agreed, by some unspoken negotiation, not to say them yet, and maybe not ever, because some things are better held than released. She had packed a jar of zaatar in my suitcase. My entire suitcase smelled of it when I unpacked in the room in Stratford, that small, persistent, unbearable smell of every kitchen I have ever known, and I sat on the floor of the room with the jar in my hands for a long time before I put it in the cabinet above the sink.

What the woman with the gin and tonic could not see: the jar of zaatar. The broken suitcase wheel. The forty seconds outside the station. The whole elaborate and entirely ordinary human history standing behind the mechanism that had just placed her drink on the bar.

This is not a complaint. I want to be precise about that. I am not telling you this to generate sympathy, which, as I have established, is a currency I find difficult to spend. I am telling you because this is the central experience of the year that follows, and I want you to understand it from the inside, from Night One, before it accumulates weight. Before it becomes, as everything does with sufficient time and exposure, familiar.

The invisibility of the bar is the most honest social mechanism I have ever operated within. The man behind the bar is not invisible in the sense of being unseen — every eye at the bar finds you consistently and efficiently when the glass is empty. He is invisible in the sense of being looked through. You are the transparent surface through which the drink is accessed. You are the medium. You are the city itself in miniature: present, surrounded by people, and fundamentally, structurally alone.

By midnight the bar had filled and thinned and filled again in the rhythm I would come to know as well as my own heartbeat. I had poured approximately forty pints, made eleven gin and tonics, broken a glass in the sink, been shown by Dennis with patient wordlessness how to operate the till when the contactless reader stalled, and had approximately nine brief conversations of the functional variety — what can I get you, that's eight fifty, cheers — and one slightly longer one with a man called Patrick who had been drinking Guinness since seven and wanted to tell me about a woman who had left him six months ago and whom he was, he said, completely over. He was not completely over her. I could tell because of the specific way he said her name — Clare — with the slight pause before it of someone who has been trying not to say a name all day and has finally, in the warm, unpressured dark of a Thursday night bar, surrendered to the relief of saying it. I poured him another pint and said nothing, which was the correct response, and he looked at me with the brief, grateful expressiveness of someone who has been heard without being advised, and then looked back at his drink, and that was our entire relationship, complete and sufficient in itself.

I want to remember Patrick. I want to remember the forty seconds outside the station and the jar of zaatar and the woman who didn't look up and the gin and tonic that was the first thing I made alone in this city. I want to remember Night One with the completeness of a building, holding it in my walls.

At closing, Dennis told me I had done well. The specific phrasing was not bad, which I have since learned is the English superlative for excellent, deployed only in contexts of genuine approval and not to be confused with its literal meaning. I took it as it was intended. I put on my coat. I walked out into the street, where the rain had stopped and the pavement reflected the orange of the streetlights in long, liquid columns, and the city was quiet in the way that cities are quiet after midnight — not silent, never silent, but quieter, the hum of it lowered to a register that felt almost like thinking.

I walked to the Tube.

I did not count the seconds this time. The seam had closed. The new reality was already closing over the old one, the way skin closes, the way water closes, the way a city closes over another person who has arrived into it carrying everything they are and found nowhere, yet, to put any of it down.

Night One.

Three hundred and sixty-four to go.