Its Own Level Of Tiredness

I took the bike over to the Quiet Gardens today, just to get out of the house for a while, and brought my book and my paper journal with me. I amused myself for a while counting the iguanas (ten) and monitor lizards (three) and sandhill cranes (three) and egrets (three or four) and ibis (three or four million) and then found the swinging bench and sat there reading and writing and sweating for a while, thinking about nothing, thinking about everything.

Sitting there, swinging and sweating, I made a list in my paper journal about things I’m grateful for in 2008—there are so many and there is so much. I got to spend several months traveling in four different countries, I got to swim with dolphins and climb a glacier and scuba in extraordinarily cold water. I got a good summer in Seattle and I got to spend some extended time with my family here in Miami. I learned how to play Guitar (only on Easy, but you should hear me sing Are You Gonna Be My Girl by the Jets) in Rock Band. I voted for our new president-to-be. I flirted and had crushes and even found love for a little while, and am doing my best to accept the end of that love. I got the job. I got the visa. I get on the plane in three weeks to go back to my city.

So in that regard it’s been a good year and I have very few complaints or regrets—except for one big thing, and that is that I have spent almost the whole year in anticipation. From January to May I was always thinking, even as I descended through the saltwater layer at Milford Sound, about going back to the States, and pretty much since the minute I got back here I have had at least half my face turned towards the Southern Hemisphere. My head has been so full of Plans and Details and Contingencies and Things To Do—for a while it was bus schedules and hostel bookings and tourist opportunities, and then it was selling all my books and packing up lots of boxes and saying a lot of goodbyes, and then for the last couple of months it’s been job interviews and ticking off boxes on application forms and international faxing.

All of that has been necessary and is part of the reason I have so much to be grateful for—there’s no job without a job interview, usually—but I have to say it’s all made me sort of long-term tired. It’s a different feel than the kind of tired you get just from going to work and going to the store and going to your friend’s house and going to bed early, because heaven knows my current schedule can hardly be called demanding. It’s just the low-level, indefinitely sustainable exhaustion that comes with a long period of Not Knowing: where I’m going to live, who I’m going to be with, which country, which hemisphere, which work, for how long, where, when. I have a better idea, now, today, about how some of those things are going to work out—I mean I have a map of my new office and everything—but on the larger level I still have no idea, for so many of those things.

A huge part of me is really longing for more adventure right now, but then I realize that actually, this job is only for a year, and in twelve months there’s every possibility that I’ll be writing an entry about how it didn’t pan out and I have to go back to the States. Earlier in the year I’d been saying that I wanted to live in New Zealand for two-to-five years (hence applying for residency) and I guess I still do, but this evening as I was walking to meet Manya and Landy and the kids at Sir Pizza I realized that I don’t even know if that’s true any more, or if it’s even possible. At the same time I don’t feel like I have a backup plan, or even that same sense of what-happens-in-Wellington-stays-in-Wellington I had when I left the last time. I don’t feel like: well, it’s just a year, it’s not really my real life, I’ll be coming home as soon as I’ve had my little antipodean Overseas Experience. I’ll stay if I can. For a while. I think.

It’s just been so many months that I haven’t felt like I really belonged anywhere with anyone, I guess, that I have been staying just temporarily for who knows how long. It’s so hard just to be where I’m at because I have been at so many places. It’s its own level of tiredness–wistful, held-breath, dry-eyed.