Today I woke up late because I was up talking with Alice until three in the morning, drank some tea, had lunch at the Italian café with my friend Julie, submitted my New Zealand residency application, went to Farmer’s for moisturizer, and stopped at New World to pick up ginger nuts on the way back to Mt. Victoria. After all these months and all this money, all those documents and fees and worried calls and sprints to the post office, it’s finally out of my hands and physically in the Immigration New Zealand offices. All I have to do now is wait.
Well, that’s not all I have to do. I still need to find a flat, buy a bed, sort out my hellish commute to the suburbs, and figure out exactly how I’m going to pay over six hundred Kiwi dollars a month into my American account so I can pay my student loans, and sort out health coverage. I still need to buy a pair of good black pants. I have paid my outstanding library fees and embroidered at least one gift handkerchief so I’m not being a complete sloth, but everything seems so hectic in my last week (fingers crossed) of unemployment that putting in the application today was just one of my many to-dos, and as such oddly anticlimactic. I just bought a big envelope from the post shop downstaits and put the whole thing in the drop box, after making sure that I’d signed the damn thing so that I don’t have another stupid self-sabotage incident, and then just went down the elevator and back onto the street, as if I haven’t spent six months and hundreds of worry-hours and thousands of dollars on that thing.
But there you have it—and “anti-climactic” is a decent way to explain being back here in general—in a good way! I’ve been couchsurfing for so long that another couple of weeks isn’t any big deal, nor is a few more days of not working and watching my bank balance go steadily down. It does feel a bit novel to be more social lately but otherwise everything feels normal and natural in a way that nothing in the States really did, for reasons I still can’t begin to fathom. I keep saying “Sometimes you just find a fit,” whenever people say “Wow, you must have really wanted to come back!” but I don’t really have an explanation for it. I still don’t understand why it happened—I just know that it has. It’s happening as we speak.
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2 responses to “Anti-Climactic”
“Sometimes you just find a fit” is totally accurate, in my opinion. I’m glad you’re feeling at home there.
We’ve got Canadian friends that have a similar bank transfer/bill pay problem with their student loans. They wind up just sending a check to their mom every month to deposit in their Canadian account, although there HAS to be an electronic way to do that for you.
I am sometimes not sure how or why I ended up where I am, and I’ve been worrying more recently about the ramifications of my choices, but I can honestly say there is a a sense of peace and that this is where I am supposed to be. It is not a result of wanting, but of knowing. Yes, there was a lot of work to get here, and a lot more work to stay, but it is the right thing. Many folks won’t get it, but I’m glad you found your fit.