Loving And Leaving

It’s seven in the morning and I just got home four hours ago but Marcy leaves today and she’s graciously agreed to be a mule for me and take some of my stuff back to the States, including this laptop, so have only a little while to tell you what an amazing time I had at my leaving do last night.

I’ve been thinking about this leaving do for at least a month and by the time Marcy and I got back from the beach and I had my awesome new dress on and A. had put makeup on me I had worked myself up into a bit of a state. I always get like this before I host a party—I freak out and attempt to hide in the bathroom and hope that no one shows up so I can put on my yoga pants and curl up on the couch with a bowl of pasta and the Snoop Dogg reality show. I’m always afraid something will go wrong, and by “wrong” I mean that people will not like each other and won’t talk to each other and it will be awkward and terrible and all my fault.

This thing, especially, had the potential to be extra super awful because everyone…because everyone, in my mind, was so different to one another, all the different friend groups. I kept thinking (and worrying) that the last little remnant of the people l’d met a year and a half ago at the good old Maple Lodge wouldn’t like the Italians who wouldn’t like the gay boyfriends who wouldn’t like the people I’d met through the internet who wouldn’t like the bellydancers who wouldn’t like the people I used to go to work with who wouldn’t like the people I used to have Global Dinner with. I’m almost thirty-three years old but I have never lost my old high school fear of mixing the worlds, of believing that it’s only me who can navigate the requirements of each group, that if they meet each other somehow the whole thing will go up in flames.

Well, you know where this is going. We got to the Southern Cross—where I have been going for nights out since the week I arrived in Wellington–and the lounge area was “reserved for Chiara” and Marcy and were going to play Battleship because we were right by the games corner, and then David showed up and then Sapo and then Toni and then Deirdre and Nahum and then Alex and then Leigh and Todd and then Duncan and then Alice and then I lost track because I kept having to leap up and totter over to new arrivals on my high heels and hug them and compliment their tops and introduce them to everyone else and answer texts and tell everyone my itinerary and say that I’m looking forward to my trip and to seeing everyone in the States, but that I want to come back, I hope to come back, I have to come back.

And everyone adored each other. A lot of people had heard about A., for example, but because this was literally the first time she and I have been out together (Why? WHY?) many friends hadn’t met her and she was an instant hit…people kept coming up to me and yelling, over the band, YOUR FLATMATE IS AWESOME WHY HAVE YOU BEEN KEEPING HER TO YOURSELF. People kept asking me for other people’s numbers and telling me they thought other people were cute. People kept flirting. People kept getting into conversations with people they’d never met before and telling each other how gorgeous everyone else was and what great hair everyone seemed to have. “You have such great friends,” all my great friends kept saying to me.

At one point in the evening, right about the time my voice was starting to give out, I sat down in the corner in my fantastic dress that gave me cleavage for which I had to take out a special advanced practitioner license. I drank another glass of water and leaned back and watched everyone swirling around each other and felt my face open up into this huge big ridiculous smile, the kind that involves eye crinkles and teeth and a little lump in the throat. I fell in love again right there, sitting on the leather couches by the games table: with everyone, with everything, with the entire city and with my whole life here. The axis of my whole entire world spun for a moment around that little sectioned-off space of the Southern Cross and my heart just expanded, you know, almost more than I could bear. This is what these brief months have given me, I finally understand it: the ability to love more people in more ways than I ever thought possible. Bittersweet, bittersweet, loving and leaving this time and place.