2 April 2016
Here is something I realized a while I was unloading the dishwasher: you can only unload a dishwasher so many times in the same place before that place becomes home.
It’s not all about the dishwasher, obviously, but I think my meaning here is clear – “home” as a place and as a concept is much less fixed than I once thought it to be.
I spoke of this briefly when I wrote about Kaiteriteri over a month ago (an amount of time that is shocking in its rapid passage), but the feeling of home I felt there is subtly but significantly different than the home I feel here, in this terribly managed yet charming Queenstown bed-and-breakfast. Somehow, without my conscious knowledge, this place has shifted from the “place where I sleep and store my belongings” type of home (the type I now realize I felt in Kaiteriteri, which is not at all a slight to the time I spent or the people I met there) to the “place where I want to go after a shitty day” type of home. Like I said – subtle but significant.
I’ve been in Queenstown for nearly five weeks now, already two weeks longer than I originally intended to stay, and I still have another three weeks left here. This is the longest I’ve stayed anywhere since I left California, so in that regard it comes as no surprise that I have grown so settled here. But it’s more than just the length of time – it’s the people, it’s the easy sense of family and routine that has sprung up in the house, and it’s the special magic that this part of New Zealand has that seems to take hold of nearly everyone that comes here.
Each morning, I get up in the dark and fumble around for my dirty jeans that are usually lying crumpled on the floor where I left them the day before; I shuffle bleary-eyed to the kitchen to make myself breakfast in companionable silence with my roommates who are in a similar early morning, pre-work fog. We watch the sun rise over the mountains outside our front window, and as we walk through the crisp morning air down the the hill to catch our ride to work, our breath billowing from our mouths and noses like smoke, we always stop to take pictures of the first light hitting the clouds and reflecting off the lake. Looking through the photos on my phone now, the days and days of sunrises start blending together – but each morning, it looks to all of us like exactly the type of beautiful thing you’d want to hold on to forever.
It’s getting cold in the evenings now, so we’ve started building a fire in the wood stove that’s in the corner of the front room nearly every night. We close the doors to the rest of the house until the room fills up with wood-smoky heat, and as the sun sets we let the light fade naturally until we’re sitting in the dark (this is usually an accident – we’re so involved in whatever we’re doing or talking about that we simply forget to turn on any lights). Last night, worn out, I curled up on the couch next to the fire with someone else’s jacket as a blanket, and fell asleep to the sound of quiet conversation and the crackle of the fire. It felt safe and warm, like a cocoon, like falling asleep on your father’s chest when you were small and tired at a family dinner.
Sometime in the past five weeks, and somewhere between the camaraderie of shared labor and countless meals cooked and eaten together, the five girls that I live and work with have become so dear to me. You can only come to someone’s rescue on horseback or share various cryptic, multi-layered inside jokes so many times before your mind says “friend;” you can only walk back from a bar all together in the dark at 5:00 in the morning, or eat a meal sitting on the floor, or fall asleep on the carpet next to the wood stove so many times before your mind tells you that this place is home.
I have only three weeks left here, and it doesn’t feel like enough. An unanticipated (but in hindsight quite obvious) side effect of feeling so at home in a relatively new place: leaving somehow feels even harder than it did when I left California. New Zealand, and Queenstown in particular, are so familiar to me now – I know the streets and the names of the towns, I know where to get a job, I know how to make my way from place to place – that going somewhere new feels like stepping back out into the big, cold world again, just me and my backpack. If I ever felt this way about leaving California for New Zealand, I’ve forgotten it now, which is in itself is a thing of wonder – only two months and a whole new corner of the world feels as familiar as the place I was born.
My flight to Australia is less than a month away now, and it sounds as foreign as anything – I have no plans and only a vague sense of geographical orientation within the country itself. But if these weeks in New Zealand have taught me anything, it’s that things will just work out, somehow – maybe not how I expect or plan, but work out they will. Uncharacteristically for me, I’m going to put my trust in myself and in whatever forces look after wayward travelers, and know that things will fall into place if I would only let them.
(This, of course, will be supplemented by copious amounts of research, bus ticket purchases, and job applications sent by yours truly. Magic never works unless you give it something to work with.)
One last thing on the subject of home: I realized as I was writing this (when I took a moment to step away from being sad about leaving) that if I have anything to learn from what I’m experiencing right now, it’s that I should feel comforted by the fact that I fell in love with this place so quickly – because it means that I am capable of finding other places like Queenstown no matter where I go in the world, places that feel safe and worn-in and fit like a favorite pair of jeans. It means that maybe I shouldn’t look at the rest of my travels as a series of questionably surmountable unknowns, but instead as a series of potential future homes.
For now, I’m going to enjoy these last three weeks in Queenstown with friends I hope to know for the rest of my life, surrounded by beautiful mountains and horses and delicious food. It’s a good life, everybody; I intend to fall in love with it every day for as long as I can.
So – I hope that you all are somewhere in this big lovely world that fits you like a favorite pair of jeans, or at the very least I hope you have a favorite pair of jeans to wear (because in my opinion, there’s nothing better); and, as always, before I go: safe travels.
-Sierra
SGBRSH 