Stanca

“You got here at the right time,” everyone keeps saying, because apparently it’s been really cold in Seattle until, like, two days ago, and now all the northwesterners are wilting sweatily in the sun. Marcy came up from Olympia today and we went to Artopia (aka “Burning Man In Georgetown,” judging from the Utilikilts on display) and even I got a little sluggish and required a visit to my spiritual home, the West Seattle branch. My awesome cousin and his awesome girlfriend just made me dinner and it’s 11:20 at night as I write this and the sun has only been down for ninety minutes and someone is setting off bottle rockets even though it’s not Fourth Of July for another week. I got back to the States a full month ago, now.

I’d been saying, at dinner, that I couldn’t believe how tired I’ve been lately, considering I don’t, like, work or anything. I’d been saying that everything was fine and that I’m glad to be here but gosh I wish I had got a better pre-paid cell phone plan and man, it’s a little inconvenient to not have a car and wow, the visa stuff is basically eating my brain, ha ha, and I kind of still miss my mom but whatever, you know? And they just kind of looked at me and said “Sit down. Relax. Let us give this to you, okay?” when I was feeling guilty about not cleaning the kitchen after they cooked.

So the holiday part of this time in the US is over now, or it will be on Monday I guess. Tomorrow I’ve got dim sum with David and his girlfriend and then maybe I’ll go to Trader Joe’s (Trader Joes!) before I roll up to the Blue House, where I’ll be for a couple of weeks. Monday I’ve got to work on my taxes and call New Zealand immigration again so I can give them a lot of money and figure out getting some temporary work and a temporary car and how I’m going to get to Olympia to get my laptop. Maybe tomorrow, though, I’ll give myself one more day off and I’ll go to Sunset Park or the locks or the zoo or maybe to the Sunday market (berry season!) or just Cupcake Royale again, just to remind myself what living here was like.

Because I don’t really remember, anymore. In the past month I have been to six different cities and slept on six different guest beds and hugged what feels like six hundred friends and answered the question “So what’s have you been up to?” six thousand times in six million ways. I think about
these entries and it’s stupid to say it doesn’t feel like me who wrote them, because it was and I did and it was only two years ago that I left, just about, only twenty-four months, only five countries and seventeen dives and two jobs and several heartaches and one fabulous flatmate and four going-away parties and one glacier and eighty bajillion text messages and twenty flights and three hundred lemon-lime-and-bitters and seven singlet tops from Supre and one trip to Mt. Tongariro and twelve dozen trim hot chocolates at Fidel’s and a thousand walks down Cuba Street ago.

Oh, no wonder I’m exhausted. It’s all the math.