Guy Fawkes Night

You walk along the waterfront with a friend you didn’t even know last November, flinching at the fireworks’ boom and watching their shattered reflections in the windows of Oriental Parade. You’ve run into five or six acquaintances this evening in town, all out enjoying the late afternoon sun and looking forward to a weeknight’s rather low-key family-friendly fun. It’s the celebration of something that happened a couple hundred years ago on the other side of the world, but what the hell, right? It’s not as cold as it was last year, when you shivered in a scarf and hat on the boathouse roof—Wellington, it seems, is getting a spring—and people are running around in light jackets looking for their friends and getting good seats on the seawall and taking cameraphone pictures. You walk out under the lights and watch the glow on the upturned face of your city, all along the harbour.

It turns out the second year is very different from the first. Your accent is no longer the most important thing about you. You can be, now, nostalgic about good times you had in various places. You’re able to give directions into town, you’re able to have opinions about cafes and politics and urban renewal schemes. It’s getting a little harder to keep in touch with the other side of the world, now, a little harder to imagine going back. A little more difficult to think about fitting in there the way you do here.

Your favorite hummus and your yogurt maker, your walk into work past the new condos that used to be the old construction site, the eradication from your wardrobe of the clothes you packed up trepidatiously during the last week in the cloud room, the late afternoon cricketers at the Basin Reserve today, the beat-up pots and pans in the kitchen and the talks with your housemate: all etched irrevocably into these passing days. You think about getting on that plane in Los Angeles, how everything that came before had got you on that seat and over the Pacific to the other side of the world, to the other side of your life. You think about the next time you will get on a plane: where it will go, where you will be when you get off. You will pack up this pink flowered room where the moon shines dark in the window, you will make your farewells, you’ll talk about coming back for a visit. You’ll leave a chunk of your heart behind when you go; part of you will never make it past customs back into America.

Personal fireworks will probably be banned next year but you might light a sparkler or set off a bottle rocket for Guy Fawkes Night anyway, no matter where in the world you are. Sitting on your pink bed underneath an extra blanket, getting ready for work tomorrow, dunking your ginger nuts into your tea: you’ve been here before. You do this all the time. You have things you do, routines you follow, a soundtrack you listen to when you want to feel this way, when you want to know that you live here here here here here.