25 April 2017
Writer’s block is a bitch. I should know – mine’s lasted over three months. This is, I will admit, due in part to laziness on my end of things; I have never been the most disciplined of writers, and inspiration and dedication to the craft have been sadly easy to push aside in favor of things like impromptu day trips to Glenorchy, pancake dinners with friends, and (if we’re being honest) nights spent watching movies in a haze of exhaustion after a long day of work.
This is not something I’m proud of. I wish I had the energy and will to write a thousand glowing sentences before breakfast each morning, instead of the hasty chicken-scratch notes I sometimes write to myself in my journal before I fall asleep; but it is what it is at the moment, and hey – I’m writing now, aren’t I?
It is autumn in Queenstown these days, and it is a kind of magic. The light slants so beautifully here, in a bright yellow-gold coming down in rays from behind the clouds, the sun following the arc of the mountains across the sky. Colder nights have come down from the mountaintops and have begun to crack their frosty knuckles – I’ve actually started closing the windows at night and bundling up in an extra layer to sleep. The fields and hillsides are decked out in brown and gold, and on a clear day, driving down the country roads outside of town, through all those miles and miles of open space and sheep standing in fields, the landscape takes on a burnished patina. It looks like an oil painting. Autumn was the season that I first fell for Queenstown, and so it makes perfect sense that I love it with such tenderness and nostalgia now.
As I write this, I have exactly thirteen days left here. It is a pittance of time, and the fact that I am so abstractly calm about it tells me that it has not truly sunk in yet. Then again, there is the thought in the back of my mind that this time I am simply ready to leave. I have only two things left on my list: hike to the summit of Ben Lomond, and drive out to Moke Lake one last time. I am content with that – in my last weeks on the South Island I would rather savor a few things slowly than try to see and do everything at once. I have loved and resented this place (the latter usually at the end of the week, exhausted from work, stuck in traffic; the former most often in the mornings, when I wake up and see the sun rise in a riot of color and light from behind the mountains), and I have lived the right time here. It will be bittersweet, but infinitely gentler than the first time around; after so many too-soon goodbyes this year, it feels like a privilege to leave a place when I am ready.
The season and the times, as Dylan sang, are a-changin’. It is a strange thing to actually watch one era in your life come to an end, and a new one begin; it is usually something visible only in retrospect. With it comes the usual anxiety – am I doing it right? Am I appreciating it enough? – but I am doing my best to let that go as much as possible, and remind myself that I should probably just try to, you know…live it. In two weeks, I will be leaving Queenstown. I will spend a month on the North Island, another two weeks in Thailand, and then, finally, I will fly back to California to spend the summer at home before starting school in the autumn – completing, in a way that is incredibly satisfying to my pattern-hungry mind, the vague loop that this year and a half has been. The end is the beginning; the snake eats its tail.
Academia has been on my mind since the minute I left it, of course, in the way that things left unfinished often are. My return is imminent: applications are done and dusted, and acceptance letters have thus far been rolling in. All I have to do is wait for the last few decisions, and make one of my own. It is a strange thing to think about starting university again; I feel rusty and out of practice, and more than a little worried (what if I’ve forgotten how to be a good student? What if it’s too overwhelming? What if I’m killed – or worse, expelled?). Mostly, though, I’m afraid that I will burn out too quickly, consumed by the pressures of college life and the sudden lack of freedom when I’ve become so accustomed to movement and self-direction this past year. This worry is showing its face in my decision-making process: when researching program requirements and courses at several different universities, I found myself drawn particularly to one because of the amount of time its quarter system would allow me during the year (an entire month free between the end of November and the beginning of January; nearly all of June, July, and August off between academic years. Think of how much traveling a person could do with all that time!).
Regardless, this is where I am at now: at the intersection of things, as I have often been this year – here and there, self and family, ideas to consider and decisions to make about my future. Everything is floating just a few inches off the palm of my hand; perhaps soon something solid will drop down and I can see what shape it will take.
These days, going home means leaving home. Thankfully, though, it will begin in a way that is comfortingly familiar to me now: the packing of a bag and the pressing of a nose against the window of an airplane.
Catch ya on the flip side, guys. And safe travels.
-Sierra
SGBRSH 