Crystal Palace Park still carries the name of something that is no longer there, a building of plate glass and iron from the high Victorian age. The Palace was moved to Upper Norwood from Hyde Park in 1854. It cost more to move it than it did to build it in the first place. So much so that despite the opulence, despite how much money it made in Hyde Park for the Great Exhibition, it was never really profitable again.

I have been told again and again how high it stood, how overpowering it was, how many people came on the new train to visit it in its new place, this vantage point over London. And, of course, how it burnt down.

But the park remains, still haunted.

I first wondered into the park on a warm night in early April, years ago. The fair was visiting and, as always, had set up by the parade at the top.

The temporary fence was propped open, but the fair itself was unlit, silent. We found our way by what little moonlight there was, and by the overspilling lights of the city. When I say “we” I mean myself and the man I was seeing at that time. We had known one another not three months, and he was half a stranger. Another country. But close enough that we entered the park with his arm wrapped around my shoulder, mine around his waist.

The closed rides moved slightly when there was a breeze. Clinked. I held tight to him because you could imagine a horror movie here. You could imagine animate things moving amongst the machinery. Watching as we walked, tentatively, from one stalled ride to the next. Stilled waltzers. A carousel with the colours of the horses and cars muted into grey. A blocky ghost train, whatever horrors inside hidden from view.

From the direction of the bus station a truck rumbled onto the site, spotlighting us with bright headlights. We ran from it, frightened of a door opening, of being asked to explain what we were doing. We disappeared through and in to the park.

I didn’t expect Crystal Palace Park to open up the way it did. The way it does. In the half light the broad footprint where the palace once stood resembled a mountain plateau. White, overlarge statues observed us. Even the headless ones watched our progress. A jogger drifted past in tracksuit bottoms, white hooded top. He passed within a few steps of where we stood and didn’t see us in the dark.

*

Through closely packed trees we followed the path down. By now he had hold of my hand. The path broadened and twisted, down and across. I was losing the sense of where we were but I wasn’t frightened.

We couldn’t make sense of the concert platform as it loomed out of the dark. Modern art? A gap in the fabric of reality? Were we mis-seeing? It looked like it had recently landed, all angles, all definition in amongst the scrabble of woodlands that surrounded it, against the soft rise of the hill. The sky was big, no visible stars. The then-unfamiliar path was so steep it felt unsafe.

He took my hand and led me off the path, with little resistance. Around the back of the concert platform (known by some as the “rusty laptop”, because of its shape) and into the woods. Woods is too big a word. It was a cluster of trees between two paths, but in the dark it felt large enough to be a whole forest. I was worried there might be rats. I was worried of getting dirt on my dress.

He kissed me. With him kissing was a different language. Or it was a liquid that you sink into. And I didn’t care about the dirt, or the rats.

When I first met him there was a half-line from a translation of Gilgamesh by Derrek Hines that ran around and around my head: “he robs the world of horizon- / for no one’s gaze lifts beyond him”. I often thought – is this too much? How can I find myself when I am so overwhelmed? When I cannot see the edges of the thoughts that are about him and the thoughts that are about myself?

A place can be overwhelmed also. By, say, a palace made from glass and iron.

We stayed in the little piece of woodland and he told me to kneel, to bend down. Lifted the skirt I was wearing (a black and green thing I have now lost). The night air of course was cold and I was looking out across the light grey path, the dark grass, the inexorable slope.

There, both of us almost fully clothed, he kneeled and pushed himself inside me. It hurt. I asked him, “Is that all of you?” – making room for him within myself.

“Yes, that’s all of me.”

I think of that moment often. It has become somewhat abstract. I don’t remember any discomfort other than the sex itself, the pain of which I experienced with something like pride.

Afterwards. Brushing dirt from knees and hands, replacing underwear. We stood, a little embarrassed, as in love as before, or more so. We walked along the plane of the hill and out of the park. We missed the maze, the dinosaurs, even the stadium.

We came out, with luck, close to the station. We left.

I had scraped my wrist on the tough bark of one of the trees and didn’t notice until we were back in the light of the world, not having to peer at everything to recognize what it was. The scrape still shows now, a tiny patch of rough skin.

*

Years pass quickly. Now I live only a minute’s walk from the park. On my birthday I took friends from Scotland there so that we could walk past the dinosaurs (yes, dinosaurs, from 1854 no less), hire a boat, attempt (and fail) to find our way into or out of or through the maze before it got dark.

I take classes in the gym in the middle of the park now, once among the country’s highest profile sports facilities, now in decline. I feel at home in its vast, almost derelict spaces. Once I came face to face with a squirrel in its school-like corridors. Sometimes the big changing rooms are empty and a shower head might fall to the floor of the disabled shower and make you feel, again, like you might be in a horror film.

I watch the crows now. One in particular has an off voice and I can hear it when I am waiting for the train in the morning. I look for the parakeets. Grudgingly admire the industry of the rats.

That lover? We’re no longer together.

The night that Crystal Palace burnt down, musicians were rehearsing. One of them may have dropped a cigarette into the tinder-dry gap between warped floorboards. The Palace, vast as it was, didn’t stand a chance.

The place where it stood, however, remains. They keep a replica panel: just one corner. In the garden of a house that borders the park they recently uncovered a Victorian turnstile buried in the undergrowth. Crystal Palace is still here and it shapes the place. The station and the land around it still bears its name.

I think I have some understanding of what that is like. To be shaped by something that is no longer there.