Short Duration

I meant to go for a beach walk today but the tide was too high and the sand was trashy with sargassum and the wind was too windy. I spent the rest of the day shopping with my mom, eating Sir Pizza, petting the cats and packing for my flight back to New Zealand tomorrow.

It still feels like I just got here (because I just did) and I haven’t even had a chance to write in my paper journal during this trip, because I’ve been seeing people non-stop: my sister, my brother-in-law-, my mom of course, Manya and her family here in Miami, and my dad and Peter and Tracy in New York. Every moment of every day has been full of quality time, which on the one hand is really great because hey, I get to see people! Things like reading bedtime stories with Manya’s kids, or sitting on the couch with Tracy and Peter sipping tea and gossiping, or seeing Where The Wild Things Are with my children’s-librarian sister, or just going to Target with my mom, have been very simple and low-key, and very pleasureable in the most fundamental and sort of stripped-down sense: nothing fancy, very quotidian, but easily, gently satisfying anyway. I am not into getting very obviously emotional about going and staying anymore, if I can help it; I like to keep things pretty casual—I still don’t ever say goodbye to anyone ever, I always say see you next time, because I do I plan to see everyone next time, I plan for there to be many next times. I still haven’t worked out exactly what to do in between all the next times, of course—how much time should any one individual spend Skypeing, for example, is a question over which I often mull—but whatever, that’s the plan, to the extent that there is a plan.

You lose time, I guess, when you leave one hemisphere for the other for such short duration. This trip has made that loud and clear. I mean you really do lose a day—this coming Thursday? Does not exist for me!–but you lose the sense of really settling down, of relaxing, of getting into any sort of rhythym, because there’s no time, there’s so much to do, there’s just no time, no continuity. It stops and starts: “so how do you like New Zealand?”, the minutes and days mixed up and turned around, not to mention the in-between hours swirling down the drain of security theater and the plainly inadequate legroom in coach class, of endless guilty-pleasure magazine articles and stiff airplane necks. The idea of returning to any sort of normal life: house, friends, work, seems so outlandish as you skate along the surface of all your worlds.
I’m sitting on the couch downstairs as I’m writing this, a bit too wakeful from too many cups of tea that my mom now stocks specially for me whenever I’m here. It’s rainy and windy outside, but warm and soft instead of cold and splintery like Wellington: I’ll sleep just covered by a sheet tonight. Tomorrow I will try for another beach walk, finish packing, and get in the car to go to the airport again again again, back to the place where I spend most of my time, back to the place I am trying to belong.