Strange Balance

Yesterday I brought home about five library books, all of which are stacked up by my bed, and only one of which I have cracked, to read for fifteen minutes before falling heavily asleep at night. I am reading a lot, though, even if none of the books I read have much plot or character development, or at least not yet. My weird secret hope is that if I read enough guidebooks and websites about Australia and Southeast Asia then my own life will develop more character and plot when I go to those places in about six months.

I am not eligible for another working holiday visa because I am over thirty. I’m considering calling the New Zealand Immigration office and whining “But I don’t feeeeel almost thirty-two!” and seeing if they’ll cut me a break, but in the off chance that they don’t, I have to be out of the country by August 6 of this year. I’ve been in New Zealand just about six months and—I feel like I say this a lot—I can’t decide if it’s been a short time or a long time. It’s been long enough to make a lot of friends and slowly make Wellington my very own city, with old favorite things to do (Fidel’s! The Bach Café at the beach at Island Bay! New World, each and every week!) and new awesome things to find about (Promising-to-be-hilarious One Love concert next week on Waitangi Day! Trapeze classes! The Kapiti Bird Sanctuary!). It’s also been way too short to have traveled around this beautiful, beautiful part of the world and to have seen one quarter of one percent of all the amazingness there is to be had here. I have to be out of the country by August 6.

I am not ready to come home. Monday I got a really nice email from my old boss, saying that the awesome woman with whom my old work replaced me in July was going back to grad school in August, and would I like my old job back? “August 2007 or 2008?” I asked, and upon learning it was the former, I had to respectfully decline. I laughed at myself a little bit, thinking about my going-away party in Seattle, where I was saying things like, “Well, I might not like it there that much, I might actually come back in eight months instead of twelve.” I think even the first month or so I was here I would have jumped at the chance to have a secure and familiar job to go back to…and to be honest, if I could do so in eighteen months instead of six I’d definitely go for it. But I am not ready. I don’t want to come home yet.

As of right this second, sitting on my nice pink duvet cover with a cup of tea while the wind screams outside my window, what I think I will do is go to Australia (probably Melbourne again because Sarah and Georgina live there, and possibly by that time my sweet Jill will as well) in August. Then I’ll go to Thailand, and Vietnam, and Laos, and Malaysia, and maybe Cambodia, and maybe Indonesia. And then I’ll go to to Australia again–because if you think I’m not going to the Great Barrier Reef to get my dive on, you’re dead to me and I want my pink My Little Pony back—before coming back to NZ for another three months on a tourist visa, so I can actually see some stuff other than my office and the dairy down the road.

It’s a pretty scary proposition for a couple of reasons, first and foremost being money, honey. I’d have to be unemployed for about nine months, and not just any nine months: nine months of taking a lot of public transportation and eating out a lot and paying for a new place to stay every couple of days, and also doing awesome things like getting PADI certified and also buying a lot of vaccinations and plane tickets. I’m making NZ dollars at the moment, as you might expect, only I don’t get paid very many of them, which is a shame, because I need a lot of dollars. I need whole heaps of dollars, playas and hillocks and small inland seas of dollars. “Oh, but Asia’s cheap!” everyone says, to which I say, “It better be.” Right now I am all in a bother because I really want to take that trapeze class—I mean, I’m here for another six months, you know, and it might be nice to do something other than do my face mask and read books, at least occasionally. But then I think about all sorts of fun things to do in Chiang Mai or the Perhentians or Luang Prabang and I wonder if trapeze class will seem like a bad stupid idea. I wonder if I’ll return to New Zealand after Asia and not be able to do anything here because I’ll be broke; I also wonder what coming back to the States will be like with absolutely no cash, because I wanted to hang upside down on a swing.

And then there’s the small fact that while I have traveled abroad on my own before, as long-time readers of this journal will maybe hazily remember, I’ve never done so in a country where I didn’t speak the language, where I couldn’t read the signs. “Oh, Thailand’s easy,” says everyone at the Maple Lodge. I think about the first time I went to Italy, with my sweet friend Marah in 1998, and how I almost had a panic attack ordering a panino in a café. In Europe. How will I cope with constantly having to struggle to communicate? How will it be to be constantly on the road, constantly alone amongst strangers, constantly rehashing the backpacker questionnaire, not just for a week or two but for months? I’m scared of getting lost or hurt or damaged somehow, of making a terrible mistake somewhere along the way. I’m uneasy about being a first-worlder traveling in the third world; it’s been a long time since I was twenty and pouring concrete on a goat farm and cheerfully mistranslating the phrase “he was hung with a noose made from these vines” to “he made himself a backpack out of these vines!” in the Costa Rican rainforest.

Also…well, when I found out I was too old to get another working holiday visa, in fact, too old by just one year, it was a very bad day. I was stern with myself, thinking about the time, years ago now, that I first started to think about traveling abroad. It’s very hard not to see those years that I dithered about it as wasted. Yeah, yeah, I know: no regrets, I wasn’t ready, I had other things going on at the time, I got a lot of good things out of those years and changed and grew et cetera, blah bliddy bloo. But the fact remains is that things would be easier if I could extend my working visa, if I didn’t have to mess around with thinking about a regular work visa or residency (because while I am not ready to go home, I am also not ready to make a commitment to staying here, either. I am enjoying spending every night in New Zealand’s bed and spending Christmas together and all, but I am not ready to get married yet). I can’t help thinking that traveling in my thirties, when I’m supposed to be amalgamating responsibilities like barnacles on a drifting log, is very different from how it would have been in my twenties, when I could still sort of have the excuse of finding myself or whatever.

It doesn’t matter though. I can dither and wish all I want but I can’t be twenty-seven again, I can’t decide not to take that job in Seattle instead of going to London right after grad school, I can’t decide to get a TEFL certificate instead of starting work at my alma mater right after I graduated from college. I can’t be younger or freer than I am right now, so I guess I will just have to be older, but still pretty free—the most free I’ve ever been. I guess I will just have to be as awesome as I know how, and right now that means trying something new and scary and exciting. It means not going home.

So as I fall deeper in love with my city I’m also getting ready—slowly, randomly, steadily, as is my wont—to leave it. In my head lately it’s like “Okay make sure to make something for the dinner party next week and don’t forget to check out whether it’s better to get dive certified in Thailand or Malaysia and get the tickets for that show during Fringe and figure out whether to fly into Brisbane or Cairns and check out the free Maori course at work and find out about public transport to Paraparaumu and confirm that volunteer gig in Ubon Ratchathani and make sure to email Steph about her friends in Indonesia and see if there are going to be any good gigs when my cousin is here in three weeks and research the elephant camp and the rainforest trek and find some time to do the laundry and to stock up on fruit leathers somewhere because all of a sudden New World carries every flavor except the plum and apricot.”

It’s a strange balance, and one I didn’t imagine I’d be trying to strike this soon after leaving Seattle: the heart divided between the here and now and the very soon future.