In The Movie

Last night after yoga class I walked down to the main house at Shambhala where Hannah and Ors and Donald were cooking up a red Thai curry to go over some leftover rice I had. The hill was so steep that I felt like I would walk smack into a hanging curtain of stars, the way I felt on the glowworm walk a couple of days ago. It’s getting chilly now in the evenings so I hopped down as quickly as I could in my socks and two jumpers and when I got inside the fire was going and everyone was laughing at me for being late when I had put up a bit of a fuss about going to the yoga class in the first place, saying that I would hate it and I would probably leave early.

It really all came together the last couple of days in Golden Bay, just the way it would if this were a movie and the feel-good music was beginning to swell and it was almost time for the credits. More and more cool people rolled up to the solar-powered house at the end of the long driveway, and all of a sudden there were inside jokes and expeditions to the good old Mussel Inn for a Freckled Frog Feijoa Cider and some table tennis, or drives out to Wharariki beach to see the baby seals again, or long discussions on the porch about intention and personal responsibility and fate and faith and the unconscious, or practicing salsa steps in the kitchen, or cup after cup of tea with biscuits curled up by the fire. I listened and talked and laughed and was possibly implicated in the salsa thing and now, of course, just as you’d expect in the movie, everyone is Facebook friends and discussing visiting one another in Amsterdam.

And now I am back in Nelson, after one last walk on the low tide beach this morning to say goodbye to the tube worms and the oystercatchers and the snails, and Alice gets in at the airport in two and a half hours, and tonight we’re going to have the big stupid over-the-top dinner I should have had on my actual birthday and probably I will be getting seconds on late birthday cake and then we will go on a kayak trip where we get to spend the night in a floating backpackers and where we hope to replicate the outdoorsy glory that was our triumphant trip to Tongariro only, like, with water and boats.

And on Monday night we fly back to Welly and then it will be time to go to immigration (again) and to shop my CV around and have working lunches and talk about timeframes and agendas and possible roles within the agency, as well as to go to Fidel’s and to Satay Kingdom (about whose vegetarian roti chennai I had an actual dream one night) and and the botanical gardens and Mighty Mighty and the Mt. Vic New World and A’s house to make dinner and watch awful reality TV just like in the old days and to be booked up with friends pretty much all day and all night. Which means this trip is half over, and America is getting closer every week, and in the movie where it all works out in the end the lights have come up and no one is sure when the sequel is going to come out. The story is still going on, I guess, even if you might not pay to see it in the theater, even if you prefer to know how things are going to end before you get started.