For The Duration

For weeks, it seems, I’ve been just kind of toodling along here in Seattle, trying to figure out the details of emigrating back to Wellington verrrrrryyyy slooooooowwly. I haven’t had access to a car so I’ve been depending on other people to help me get things done; I haven’t been sure about how to go about getting work in New Zealand on the other side of the world (seriously, it was SO MUCH EASIER the first time around, and I have still not come to a good conclusion as to whether I did the right thing by leaving when I did) and so have dragged my feet a little on making decisions. Oh and plus I spent a couple of weeks in Italy as well, weeks I could have been stressing about documents and visas and fees but which I spent cavorting on the lakeside with my hot young international boyfriend instead. SLACKER.

And also–I don’t know, y’all, it’s been such a crazy six months now, crazy in a very low-key drawn-out longterm way. I’ve been on fifteen planes in the past three months, and crashed on six different couch-equivalents. I’ve given away or sold more stuff than I even remembered having and have seen all sorts of friends that I have missed very much while I’ve been away, completely denying that I’m going to be going away, very soon, and that this time there’s no safety net of “Oh, see you in a year!”, no sense that I’ll just pick up where I left off when I come back. I have been spending most of the past two weeks getting up at seven and going to work on the living room couch with my laptop, basically, eight or nine hours a day, trying to get this thing going, trying to cross all the Ts and dot all the Is, except I don’t get paid for this work, and now I am beginning, semi-seriously, to worry about money on top of everything else.

Long story short: after a couple of months of things being kind of casually, sustainably freaky, everything has shifted into a higher gear, as of about 4:00 yesterday. More applications have been sent off, more fees have been paid, more calls have been made, and, since I’m going back to Miami in two and a half weeks, at least one deadline has been set. There is still a mountain comprised completely of my shoe rack and my bed and my stuff that needs to go to Goodwill sitting in my long-suffering cousin’s garage that needs to be completely eradicated in the next ten days. There are still people I haven’t seen that I want to see. There is still a relationship with someone very adventurousto be had. There is still another plane to get on.

Everyone wishes they had your problems, I tell myself. Eat your vegetables and get enough sleep, I tell myself. There is no such thing as a permanent goodbye, I tell myself, and I hug people extra hard at the end of the night and then leap out of the car going “See ya!” as if I’m here for good, as if I’m back and there’s all the time in the world to be together.

And then I think about Wellington, how it’s freezing cold there and windy right now, how there has to be
(oh has to be) work and a home and a community, waiting for me, waiting for me to get it all right. How maybe this time next year I’ll be laughing about how crazy 2008 was and how boring 2009 has turned out to be, how I’ll be itching for a little change, a little something new. Unlike now, when all I want in the world is to just find a place, my place, to sink down and cover up and settle in for the duration.