A little over
7 years ago, our life was in a bit of a lull.
Still reeling from the failure of our Mexico venture and the emotional
chaos that followed Dusty’s suicide, we retreated to our house in Northern
California and watched the rain fall. Days
became measured by the interval between the morning news and the commencement
of happy hour, weeks by the gap in morning news programs, months by the stacks
of recycling piled beside the garage. With
no jobs, no prospects, and a dwindling savings account, Kevin informed me that
he had always wanted to live in Australia.
We came
over for a 2 month scouting mission, rented a campervan, bought a map, and set
out to see if a life could be made here.
We toured a large loop through the eastern half of the country,
exploring the capitol cities, visiting significant and insignificant landmarks,
and soaking up the flavour of the outback.
(In case you are wondering, it doesn’t taste like a bloomin’ onion, it
tastes like red dust and flies.) Although I always enjoy travel and the shift
in perspective that it brings, I wasn’t overly impressed with Australia on the
whole. I found it pleasant enough, foreign
yet familiar, comfortable yet confounding, exotic yet ordinary. I concluded that I didn’t especially want to
live there.
So
naturally, we moved to Sydney.
We settled
in Sydney and I quickly realized that living there was much more fun than
vacationing there – and yet, when I look back on my time in Sydney, it feels
like a paid vacation. Living and working
there provided an anchor, a feeling of belonging, of insideness. It is a very dynamic city, with much to
explore and discover. The harbour is a
magnificent center piece to the city and each morning, click-clacking across
the bridge on the train, I would smile down at the Opera House and the ferries
and wonder how the other commuters could remain so indifferent. Sheltered by their personal listening devices
and reading material, how could they ignore the majesty passing by just on the
other side of the glass – and I knew, that one day, I too would find it
ordinary, that the day I crossed the bridge and didn’t acknowledge the magic would
be my signal that it was time to leave.
So
naturally, we moved to Adelaide.
WHAT?!?! Sydney became ordinary so you moved to
Adelaide?!?! And do you also treat
rashes with a tincture of poison oak and stinging nettle?
Sydney is a
vibrant cosmopolitan city, buzzing with international visitors. Adelaide is a provincial cow town, humming
with domestic breeding stock. I can’t
really say anything bad about Adelaide – it is an easy, pleasant place to live,
convenient, comfortable, safe, and completely uninteresting.
Circumstances
conspired against us to make our life in Adelaide exceptionally mundane. Kevin’s dream job became a nightmare. I never had any delusions about my job – I fully
expected it to be a nightmare right from the beginning, and I was not
disappointed. However, I did not
anticipate just how much my new job would hijack my brain, that it would consume
all the energy that I would normally turn towards socializing and writing and
exploring. Like some hideous emotional
vacuum cleaner, my job sucked up all of my curiosity, all of my words, all of
my joy. By the end of a work day, there
was nothing of me left to invest in making a life.
Just as we
were to conclude that the Adelaide experiment had been a failure, Kevin
received a diagnosis of Hepatits C accompanied by a long and convoluted plan
for treatment that eventually took two years to come to fruition. The decision to remain and see it through was
clear and obvious, but strangulating nonetheless. Trapped, life once more became a matter of
passing time. It is a shitty way to live,
feeling like you are merely waiting…especially when you are waiting for nothing…
And once
the treatment commenced, life became less than ordinary. Lack of curiosity yielded to paranoid
agoraphobia. What was merely social awkwardness
became complete isolationism. Mild
amusement became obscured by a thick fog of depression, happiness only existing
in photographs and memories. And there
is no distraction in daydreaming. The
present is currently so dismal, that the future doesn’t even exist. The pipe dreams and fantasies that normally
sustain us through dark times do not bring comfort because nothing seems possible.
I often use
a river as a metaphor for life, flowing from humble beginnings, there are times
when the swift current keeps you moving, there are tumultuous rapids, and there
are peaceful stretches of lazy flat water and there are eddies – still quiet
spots where nothing happens. Against
that, my life at present is an oxbow lake – I am stranded outside the main
channel, stagnant, muddy, swatting mosquitos.
I can hear the tug of riverboats and steamships…If only a good flood
would come wash me over the banks.
So
naturally, we are moving to America.
The
decision feels both easy and complicated.
From a practical standpoint, it is not logical or financially sound, but
emotionally, it is invigorating, liberating.
The dark corners of my mind are now filled with details and plans, and
the stress is a welcome relief from the tedium of the last 18 months. A lot of factors weighed into the decision –
family, friends, Taco Bell - but ultimately it is, like most of our major
decisions, a matter of impulse. Oooh, I
just hallucinated that I was the captain “Impulse Power, Mr Scott. Take us out
of orbit.”
I have no ‘grass
is greener’ delusions about the next chapter of our life – quite the opposite,
I know moving back to the US will mean a step down in quality of life and
financial security – assuming that either of those actually exist. I know that moving to America won’t make
health issues disappear, won’t erase the signs of aging nor automatically bring
a sense of peace and belonging, but it doesn’t matter. It is what I am doing. I figure, I got about 2 or 3 more major
mistakes left in me…
I toss it
all around a lot in my head, and depending on the day or the hour, I draw a
different conclusions, as if I can distil it down to a singular essence that
makes sense to me and everyone else.
Sometimes it is that I want to be closer to my family, sometimes it is
that I want desperately to be away from Adelaide and my horrible job. But if I had to pick 1 reason for making this
drastic change it is this:
On June 26th,
Kevin will complete the treatment regimen that has consumed our lives for the
last 12 months, and while I know that things won’t get better immediately just
because he has taken the last pill, I want it to be very clear that that
chapter of our life is over. I want
there to be a clear demarcation of life ‘after treatment’. I want Hepatitis C to be something that
happened ‘back there’.
You got to
know when to hold ‘em,
Know when to fold ‘em,
Know when to walk away,
And know when to throw the whole deck into the air, watch the cards flutter
down, pick them up one by one and deal the next hand.
