On coming home

When you cross the border, they take you straight to a hotel off the Auckland motorway. You sign your forms with a sanitised pen. Everyone is so kind at every step, you find yourself crying in the shower when you finally get in. When they come to take your temperature daily, the two nurses in sci-fi PPE, they ask you how you are. They are listening for your answer. You ask them back, and you are listening, too.

*

After two weeks, you drive home, the city precariously spacious. Passing a Countdown on the drive you think, before anything else, no queue! Your first day, waking in an old familiar bedroom, is wild, ravishing. You walk to Glen Innes in the early sun and drink everything: the Herald blowing around inside the bin, the vegetal smell of the air, the whistling of construction men in high-vis vests. It’s impossible to savour or understand the bus ride you take, let alone the hour you spend wandering around town, eyeing the windows of Le Creuset dishes and designer sneakers and, somehow, freshly made pastries, to be bought by people for consumption in offices or cafes or streets crowded with — more people.

*

You drive to New Plymouth to stay with your boyfriend’s parents. Here, you can start slowly; avoid people to begin with. You climb Paritutu in the morning for an eyeful of sea, swim in ice at Back Beach, walk the family’s three-legged dog. Your old colleagues’ messages dry up: they’re reabsorbed into their time zone, and you’re reabsorbed into yours. You sleep the whole night now. The jetlag is through.

When they weighed your suitcase at the airport, it was under the limit. Your life was lighter than you thought. You find it easier and easier to pack up, to divest — and eventually you start housesitting, living in strangers’ landscapes. All their animals ask you for love: the dogs and cats rolling over to have their soft bellies touched, a two-week-old calf suckling your fingers between bottles. Depending on who asks, it’s wonderful, or just for a while.

*

It has always been hard to get a job, but now is a particularly inadvisable time to be unemployed. One of your friends’ dads, forty years’ experience, has started stacking supermarket shelves. Your aunt, long-time employee of Air New Zealand, is now a part-time medical receptionist. You remember the last time you were writing cover letters, at the same desk where you finished your thesis. You didn’t need to worry then, but you didn’t know that.

You find yourself with hours to look slowly at everything, which luckily has always been free. It doesn’t feel like something you should complain about. You listen to the kōwhai outside your window, loud with birds each dusk and dawn. You run your body to something far from softness. You read things you’ve been putting off for a while; you bake focaccia, waiting out its long slow rise. You’ve long stopped checking the news.

*

You cannot tell anybody exactly what it was like, elsewhere. Sometimes you are unsure it happened: the days and nights spent inside one room, the tiny park nearby soon exhausted from every angle, Boris Johnson babbling on the news, the weeks of empty shelves, the streets of NHS clappers. There were thousands of cases in your borough. You know it was bad here too.

*

Despite choosing to leave, you miss London. You miss the buildings rippling in their evening best under Vauxhall Bridge, as if the river were dreaming of them. You miss walking through the City after choir, everything rubato after Brahms. You miss your first office, with its Hobnobs and hobnobbing; the spaniels who stopped to inquire after your lunch in Brockwell Park; your tiny London Christmas tree, luminous with dried orange slices. You think often, fondly, of the fishnetted population catwalking Shoreditch at 9am; the twenty weddings’ worth of peonies on Columbia Road for the first weekend in spring; the Kit Kats in the biscuit aisle at Sainsbury’s; even ! the vomit patterning the Sunday morning streets. You could go on and on, never quite saying everything — but even now, the details are slipping away. Pretty soon almost all of it will be gone: the kitsch, the luscious, the live.

*

Perhaps, you think, eating a mint Trumpet outside the Maungaturoto Four Square, the whole street smelling of rain, it was a fair exchange. Here you are eating ice cream, after all, in a place where you can see open countryside and harakeke flax. You are finally noting the strangeness of your island at the bottom of the world. If you wanted to, you could drive in minutes to the ocean. You’ll eat kūmara tonight. Mostly, the thingness of things seems much more inherent here. Pak’n’Save is the archetypal supermarket. The chorus line of feijoa trees down the side of the house are The Trees. You know all about bushwalks and dollar lolly bags from the dairy, and the volcanoes of Auckland waving at each other high up above the city, and white cataracts of seafoam breaking over black sand, and where to buy coffee, and late buses, and how to greet every single person you meet. You were made of these things and now you know it.

You will know it for a while, how disgustingly lucky you are, always have been. You will keep telling people how nice it is to be home for several months. Then slowly, almost without your noticing, you’ll stop getting up with the light. You’ll find a job of some sort and start flatting again. You’ll visit your parents less. There will be traffic and bad weather and recreational complaining, and life will become Life: you’ll forget it’s a variant. As is natural and terrible, your island of knowledge will be subsumed in the tide of everything else.