Finally Somehow

I mostly slept or watched TV on the flight and spent the three hours in the Auckland airport drinking hot chocolate and messing around with my New Zealand phone, charging it up at the gate and texting. One more flight and a truly exorbitant cab ride later I was in Mt. Vic, dragging my bags up the stairs into Alice’s house, hugging and kissing everyone and flopping down on the couch and very gladly drinking a cup of tea. I hadn’t been in the country for six hours before I realized that I’d managed to break my phone, somehow, between airports, so it was down the hill again and over to the Warehouse on Tory Street, past the tree ferns in the back garden, past the good old Maple Lodge, past the bus stop, past the cafes and the cinemas, out in Wellington once again—noticing things that have changed (“Hey they finished the New World!”), recognizing the things that have stayed the same (“Espressoholic!”), knowing my way around.

I’d thought I would want to sleep all day but some of Alice’s housemates were going to a concert in the Botanical Gardens in the evening so I hopped along with them, feeling a little dizzy and very tired, but so glad to out and laughing and talking with friends. I ran into about three people I knew, just walking around the gardens, because it’s Wellington and you always run into people you know at the outdoor concerts. One girl I’d never met before actually recognized me from this blog, a complete stranger, and she just happened to be a friend of a friend, and that was completely weird and awesome as we stood there laughing and exclaiming, as the sun went down and the lights went up and the music played on. Oh call me, everyone said, oh let’s get together soon, oh it’s so good to have you back. Oh welcome home.

Since then I’ve been looking for flats on TradeMe and getting in touch with my new work and meeting people for breakfast and looking up the Ministry of Justice on Google Earth and drinking tea and making to-do lists and calling my mom on Skype and going to bellydance parties and discovering that some of the girls who were in my sharing sessions two and a half years ago are now in their own troupe and are way better than I am. My new job starts next Tuesday and if I’m very lucky I’ll put in the residency application soon after that. My welcome-back barbecue is next weekend.

I walked back to Alice’s house through Lambton Quay yesterday afternoon, stopping in to look at the shoes on sale, buying some dried apricots at New World, spending an hour reading cooking magazines at the library. Nothing extraordinary, nothing special, just my first day back in my city, which I love in a way I still don’t completely understand, after a year of traveling. I mean, it’s a small city in a small country on the other side of the world from where I was born and have spent most of my life, very far away from many of the people I love. Walking under the fern ball in Civic Square I thought about last year—about Rarotonga and Samoa and Italy, about the North and South Islands, about Seattle and Miami and New York and Sunnyvale. The last seven months in the States, especially, seem far away and diaphanous, unstable, unreal. Did I really walk around at ten o’clock at night on the island in my tank top and flip-flops in the middle of December? Did I really play Rock Band at Sharon’s house all those times? Did I really get that visa, did I really lose that love, did I really say, “I don’t know” whenever anyone asked me where I was going or how long I was staying or when I’d be back? Did I really say goodbye all those many many times?

I guess I did. I guess it all happened. I guess it all led me back here—I’ve only been back three days and I know anything can happen and I don’t know what the rest of this year is going to look like—but I know I did right by coming back. I won’t say “forever” but I won’t say “just for now,” either—just that it only took twenty-four hours to lay down the burden of not knowing, to relax into the feeling that finally, somehow, I’m in a right place.