More

Now that I’m coming right down to it, the worst case scenario is that the miracle doesn’t occur and I won’t get any sort of job offer and I have to leave Wellington at the end of this month—you know, in two weeks. I’d spend a couple of weeks in the South Island and a couple of weeks in the North Island, finishing out my tourist visa, and then have to go back to the States.

I want to stay. I want to stay I want to stay I want to stay. I’ve done everything correctly: sent out the CVs and called my contacts and got in touch with immigration, all of those things. I’ve been doing those things since May, and now those things have to get me a visa, have to let me stay in my bachelorette pad with my awesome housemate, let me walk down to the beach in the wind and sun, let me get to know better all the people I’ve come to care about. It’s starting to be spring and the Southern Cross hangs chill and high in the sky at night and I want to stay stay stay stay.

“But doesn’t New Zealand need social workers?” and “Aren’t you the kind of person they should want?” and “You HAVE to stay,” say my friends, and there’s nothing I can do except say that you don’t get a visa just because your friends like you and because you have a favorite coffee place or five or because you say “eh” now or because someone is having a really awesome birthday party next month. I am too old to renew my working holiday visa, and I have to have a job offer to get a work permit. It’s that simple, that straightforward. The job I thought most likely—the job that wants to hire me—doesn’t have enough money to fund me, and again, it’s that simple and straightforward. A miracle has to happen, and it has to happen soon. I don’t know if it will.

I’m trying to stay positive and appreciate what I have and realize, you know, that everything happens for a reason, and that really my worst case scenario isn’t that bad. People at home love me and want to see me. I would settle back into my life in Seattle: start working and bellydancing and going to the farmer’s market as usual, all the accoutrements of the life I had there—a good life I had there. And it’s not like I can’t come back and visit, someday, maybe, right? I’ve had a year here, an amazing year, and that’s more than most people ever get. It should be enough. I am lucky. I know I am lucky.

But one of the things about being here is that I am no longer interested in enough because now I am a person who wants more. It’s not enough, this year here, I want more. It’s not enough to have made a ton of awesome new friends, I want more. It’s not enough to have been closer to the kind of person I want to be since the night I landed in Auckland, I want to be that person more and I want to do it here and I guess I am doing the equivalent of throwing a tantrum, right, beating my fists and kicking my legs and howling it’s not fair, it’s not fair! You and I both know that hardly anyone gets what they want all the time, so why should I be any different?

“This isn’t right…this doesn’t feel like part of the story, you know?” I said to Sylvia yesterday when we were out for hot chocolate.

“I know. I really thought it was going to work out.”

“I want the violins to start swelling now.”

“I want you to stay.”

So here I am, at the point in the story I have been fearing a little for the past couple of months, even as I’ve tried to be mature and accepting about it. The next couple of weeks will decide it. I’ve got plans either way; I always have plans. But I have no idea which way I’ll be turning, which part of my heart will be broken (because of course there are consequences that come with staying, too). But I don’t know which way it will go. Your guess is as good as mine.

Oh please, please, let me stay. Give me another year, give me this city and this country and everyone I love here. Give me the beach and the hills and the Southern Cross in my bedroom window, give me the person I am here, the person I’ve been trying to be for so long. Give me another year, give me one more, one more, one more year.