Body And Mind

Even though I started my new job last week, this past one was the first full-forty-hour week I’ve worked since (I KNOW) and so, since that wasn’t stressful and exhausting enough, combined with sorting out the commute, figuring out that I needed not only to bring lunch for five days but that I needed to wear a different work-appropriate outfit those same five days, I thought I’d add a little sleep deprivation to the mix, opting out of getting home at a reasonable hour for staying out late in the rain and rocking up the four flights of stairs to the new house at eleven o’clock on three separate school nights.

You’ll be happy to know that after such antics I thought that going out and being social alllllll weekend instead of sensibly camping out under my new duvet cover would be a good call—today when I met Alice in town (after a visit to the fruit market with Deirdre but before afternoon tea with Danica at my house) I was babbling with exhaustion, interrupting my own monologues about my hair and what is to be done concerning it to excoriate the Wellington public transport system and then to enthrall poor Alice with my thoughts on the private love lives of all of our friends. It’s still summer here so it’s not dark until 9:00 but I’m wondering if maybe it’s okay for me to just get into bed now, while the sun shines and the wind blows outside my window and while I think about how there are actually way worse problems to have, the problem where all your friends want to see you and hang out with you and catch up with you and laugh with you and drink hot chocolate with you (trim milk please, and no marshmallows, thanks) and tell you they’re glad you’re back.

Yesterday Dark Rachel was kind enough to take me to pick up some furniture my friend Stormy was getting rid of before he moves to Sydney on Tuesday, and in the car I was just sort of free-associating to her about how tired I was and how much I wanted to sleep past 7:30 in the morning but somehow can’t manage, and how I was worried (really worried) about money and how I wanted to feel like I was competent at my job and how I wanted to feel more stable and settled and secure in my new room in my new house with my new flatmates and how even though Wellington isn’t really new for me anymore there are still some newish parts of being here and how it was all sort of clashing around in my poor head and I was just so tired. Dark Rachel, very sensibly, told me to relax. “You just got here,” she said, helping me negotiate a bookshelf down three flights of stairs from Stormy’s place. “It’s all going to be fine.”

She’s right. It’s true. Everything is going to be fine—everything is fine right now, actually, because as I say, most people would love to have my problems. What’s slightly inaccurate is the sense that I’ve just arrived, because for so long I’ve been inclined this way, towards this city in this country in this hemisphere, always slightly turned away from whatever I was supposed to be doing in the States—playing Rock Band, spending time with my family, getting rid of three hundred books, marinating in my own isolation and loneliness and heartbrokenness on my home island—always thinking about being here.

And here is where I am, body and mind in the same place for the first time in months. I may be totally, ridiculously tired at the moment, I may be completely terrified of my job, I may have had to make an executive decision that I will not be accepting new appointments for the next week (except, fine, okay, maaaaaaybe Fur Patrol on Thursday but I would make sure to get home early, for sure, I wouldn’t go out for hot chocolate after the show or anything) but that’s what I wanted. That’s what I’ve got. It’s early days and the future is still opaque to me—no word on residency, for example—but at the moment I can think of no other place I’d rather be exhausted.