Half The Time Thinking

I have had a very busy week, really, which has involved welcoming A. home from her 30th-birthday trip to Europe; being blown down the street by the crazy wind as I try to go to the beach; finding a cool new store on the way to said beach which sells all NZ-made clothes and making friends with the awesome girl who does all the Fat Freddy’s merchandise design; actually putting in the actual work visa to the actual immigration office and hoping that it will come through by next Monday which is when I’m supposed to start work; a very earnest attempt to gossip coherently in Italian (“Non capisco gli uomini, io”); tight shirts; tricep dips and these horrible quad raise things Sylvia made us do in class; seeing Jemaine Clement on the street by the Mt. Vic New World and trying (and so far failing) to write a song commemorating that event; multiple dinner parties; multiple library books; duckling sightings at the Botanical Gardens; meeting a friend of a friend at a bar who happens to be on the board of my new work and who took a cameraphone picture of me while I was in the middle of a story about an imaginary lap dance “so I can tell everyone that I’ve met the new social worker!”; getting Kirsten Hersch tickets; getting an invitation to dress up as a pirate in this year’s Santa Parade; wondering if I should buy a bright orange singlet top; wondering if I should buy a pair of zebra-stripe high heels with bright red bows that totally match a bright red skirt I have; making plans to go to Tongariro National Park this weekend; making plans to go for a long weekend in the Wairarapa; making plans to go to a Dvice party in December; doing laundry; eating koko alaisa.

I’m in a bit of a limbo period, I guess—a decision has been made, a visa application has been submitted, but there’s nothing really to do at the moment. I’d have liked to take a slightly longer trip before I started work, of course, but I wasn’t sure if I was going to have to jump through a lot more immigration hoops until the end of last week, and I’m starting to get ever so slightly concerned about money, and I’m feeling oddly…lazy at the moment, too. I have not got out of my yoga pants today, for example.

I find myself wanting to be utterly and intensely alone. Lately, it’s been a lot of the time. I go out and meet friends for coffee and watch Outrageous Fortune, texting Alice during the commercial breaks (“I thought Van looked hot in the Love Sock,” she confessed last night) and walk around town and have dinner and laugh and joke and kiss on the cheek, and then, all of a sudden, out of nowhere: I want to be alone. I want to do nothing but what I want to do. I want to procrastinate cleaning the house, I want to read blogs and write email all day, I want to stay in my yoga pants. It feels strange and somehow not like me, to have such a ferocious desire for solitude. This past month of not working and living by myself has toggled some sort of switch in me, I think. I am not exactly sure what to make of it.

I’m spending about half this alone time thinking. I think about when the visa is going to come through and if I’ve done everything correctly. I think about what it would look like to apply for residency and stay for more than just another year. I think about where I was this time last year and where I might be this time next year. I think about traveling and about all the places I might like to go and how I might get there. I think about how I’ve made this home, the place I come back to.

I spend the other half of this alone time not thinking, refusing to think. I don’t think about the interest my student loans have been quietly accruing this past year and change, and I don’t think about what staying here means for my future, financially speaking. I don’t think about some of the difficult social situations that still exist for me, both in the States and here in Wellington. I don’t think about being far away from people I love, and the fact that the closer I get to people here means it’s going to be even harder to leave here, whenever that may be. I don’t think about the difference between one year away and two years away. I don’t think about how I may be alone in more ways and for longer, than I currently hazily expect.

And when I said “I don’t think about all things,” of course what I meant was “I think about them a lot.” So you can see why I need to spend a lot of time by myself—and why I still need to be around other people, too.