The Realization Of Desire

I leave in a couple of days for my summer holidays (and of course it’s still winter weather in Wellington, of course it is) and have been busy with many parties and much wrapping-things-up with work and much trying to see everyone before I leave for the usual lunches and coffees and dinners. I’ve been wearing a lot of cute dresses and cute shoes, lately, spending more money than I ought and staying out later than I usually do. I don’t care about Christmas at all but I do like all the little get-togethers and the dressing up, that it’s light late and that people generally seem in a good mood. It’s been pretty fun around here lately at the end of the year.

Mostly, though, I am just glad it’s almost over. For one thing, 2009 has not the best year for a lot of dear friends of mine, in so many awful ways. I’ve had a lot of secondary heartbreak on behalf of many of my true loves, and it’s just reinforced how far away I am from some of them, how difficult it can be to stay in touch. It’s one thing when you’re away for a year or eighteen months, but it’s quite another when you’re not away anymore, you’re just gone. I have spent quite a lot of time this year wishing I could be in multiple places with multiple people, all at once, and have had the worst time reconciling all that with the realization of the desire I’ve had since what feels like forever, to live in New Zealand.

This year I’ve learned what happens when a dream is fulfilled, after all the paperwork is done with and all the moves have been made, after you get on the plane and go back to the new city, this is what happens: you doubt yourself. You let emails languish in your inbox for weeks yet check Facebook obsessively. You try not to think too hard about the exchange rate on your student loans, try not to think that there is a dollar amount attached to your being here. You go to work and go to the store and go to yoga and go out with friends. You prefer to spend hours on Etsy rather than update your blog because you don’t want to sound ungrateful, you don’t want to seem as though you’re not one hundred percent aware of how lucky you are, how much you appreciate where your effort and time and money have gone—they have gone here, to this city in this country in this hemisphere, they have gone right here to where you’re sitting now.

So maybe it’s not accurate to say it’s been a hard year, because what’s so hard about just living my life, day to day. Maybe more accurate to say it’s been an uncomfortable year, a year that didn’t quite fit right, a year that perhaps needed to be hemmed up or let out or taken in a bit. It’s been a quiet year, where I thought longingly about my bed in my room in the midst of fun nights out. It’s been a cold year, where none of the hugs and long talks and cups of hot tea that were offered could warm me up. It’s been an ugly year, where I lost every bit of confidence I’d gained and could not bear to look in the mirror for weeks at a time.

Most of all it’s been a shame year: I could hardly keep my chin up over the very gentle waves lapping softly at me while all around me people have been drowning in storms of grief. I keep saying I’m grateful, I’m glad, I know how lucky I am—I think about the sunset over the bay in the long late evenings; running into five friends, minimum, when I walk up Cuba Street; the work that keeps me in hot chocolates and ineffective hair accessories; tui in the flax bushes outside the house; the people who were waiting for me to come back and the ones I’ve met since, the ones I have yet to meet. All these things exist, all these things are good and great and make up the fabric of my life, and yet it doesn’t cover me, it can’t be made into a dress that will fit.

Last year when I was constantly running down the street to the post office to send yet more documents to Immigration, people kept asking me why I wanted to come back to Wellington, what exactly was so fascinating about the place that would engender in me the desire to go to all the trouble to live there long-term. Why wasn’t I, one person asked, happy just to go back to Seattle and remember my two years here with fondness, to tell the stories at parties? Why did I want more?

What I said then was that I liked who I was in Wellington. I liked (and still like, and still love) the city, of course, but I just liked who I was able to be here, and what I was able to do: ask a random person for a job and actually get it, flirt shamelessly and come home at eight in the morning, talk to anyone about anything, learn the public transport systems of five different countries. The first couple of years here I felt I could go anywhere and do anything: the money would work out, the job would come through, the night would go well. Of course there were hard and frustrating and stupid times, of course there were, but that’s not what I think of, now, when I think about that green backpack and that first flat, about learning how to live here, learning how to be my favorite parts of myself. I guess it was the romance of the temporary that influenced me so greatly, but I was probably the most powerful I have ever been in my life.

I did not expect to be that way, when I went back to the States last year. It didn’t occur to me that that sort of thing was possible in any of the cities I spent time in—I was back to the self that would have been very familiar to my friends back home: sort of silly and ridiculous, well-meaning, prone to overanalysis, easily stymied, easily hurt. Just like you automatically become a thirteen-year-old when you go home for the holidays, I thought all I would have to do would be mark time until I could get the visa and get on the plane, and there I would be, just like the first time: my real self, my best self, the thing I’d been going towards, the happy ending of the story.

I did not want to think that way, because of course I knew how unrealistic it was, but that is what I did think. I did think that. I have not completely recovered from the disappointment, and I have not even begun to be done with the shame and anger about not being completely recovered from the disappointment.

Which leaves me here, now: sitting on my bed as I always do to write, thinking about having some yogurt and tea and bickies for a pre-party-food snack, wondering whether to wear the leopard-skin flats or the plain black wedges, wondering whether I have said too much here, wondering if I should write a post that counts my many many blessings instead, wondering if I should just get the fuck over myself, wondering what 2010 will bring me, what I will bring to 2010.