Whichever Comes First

I’m spending my last evening of being thirty-five sitting on the couch drinking tea and chatting on and off with my mom as we pack up for our trip to Golden Bay tomorrow. We just got back from Rotorua last night, where we saw some geothermic activity, had a hangi, saw a kiwibird, all the things you do up there. We’re taking the ferry tomorrow—since Mom is with me we’re traveling VIP style and get to sit in the awesome comfy lounge tomorrow, which might barely make up for having to get up so early on a Saturday. Three hours there if we get a good (sunny, uneventful) crossing, five hours to Takaka from Picton, dinner at the Mussell Inn, and that’ll be my birthday, that will be the start of my late mid thirties.

Usually around this time of year I get very introspective and existential and sort of boring at parties, all pondering what it all means, man. This time around it’s been too busy, it’s been too much. This whole summer I’ve hardly had an evening to myself: circus classes and yoga and dinner with friends, lunch with friends, coffee with friends, and parties and gigs and festivals. Lots of earthquake thinking. Then it was Giulia’s wedding and I was the maid of honor and her and Filippo’s families came from Italy and Texas and we did flax flower weaving for her hen’s party and the owner of the best Italian restaurant in Wellington personally catered the rehearsal dinner and I was nervous about being the MC for the reception and I didn’t really decide what to wear until the week before and I didn’t know what I was reading until two days before and my friends Adrian and Lynda stayed over and then my friend David stayed over because he was photographing the wedding and then the Japanese earthquake happened and we were sort of staring open-mouthedly in horror at the footage and the next morning on our way to wedding hair and makeup we talked about it and said that we would all make our Red Cross donations that evening when we got home, and then it was time to run around in heels for ten hours and make sure everyone got on the wedding bus and Giulia and Filippo both looked as gorgeous as I’ve ever seen them and I sort of teared up during the ceremony, much to my surprise, and it made it sort of hard to do my reading but everyone was very nice about it and I was so tired by the end of it but Amber’s birthday and leaving do was the same night so I dragged myself to that for a little while and then Sunday I slept until eleven and went to see Jez play a gig and to the beach at Lyall Bay and for pizza afterward and then cleaned the house for Mom and then Monday I picked her up at the airport! She’s just going to bed in my spare room as we sleep—today she went to New World for me and did laundry, in addition to leaving me a cute note on my chalkboard sticker thing.

Plus there’s work, and there’s all sorts of friend gossip, and there’s the fact that I get indefinite visa in May, which means that I can now get basically all the rights of New Zealand citizenship, including voting, and including the right to come and go from here whenever I want for however long I want. Several of my friends, on the other hand, have decided to leave Wellington—one permanently because immigration was not as kind to her as it was to me, and another on a long trip, so there will be more leaving parties in the next couple of weeks. A friend of a friend’s dad died suddenly yesterday and I’ve been thinking about that a lot too, especially since my mom is here and we’ve been talking about family stuff a lot. Oh and did I mention my sister is pregnant and I’m going to be an auntie? And that I’m trying to figure out when a good time to go to the US for a visit will be?

So there’s no time to really sit and think, it feels like, there’s no time for anything but long emails and texts saying I’m on my way, but I might be ten minutes late. There’s no time to really understand that my mom is here (currently in my spare bedroom) for ten days, only ten days, and I haven’t actually seen her for eighteen months and is this what’s it’s going to be like forever, or as long as I live in Wellington, whichever comes first. And everything I want to write about, I don’t want to write about. And is it really autumn now, or almost? And wait, am I really in my late (mid) thirties now?