Work is its own cure. You have to
like it better than being loved
- Marge Piercy (via Jessica Stanley)
2022 is here! January is over! It is high summer and people have come over to stay here in the little house on the island, so I have moved my desk from the main room to the garage so that everyone can enjoy the communal space. For the first time I do not have a desk against a wall and my back to the world. Instead I am sitting in the gap created between the ply-lined wall and the pulled-out desk, facing the door. It is my best work space to date. It is a creaturely gladness to have this confinement, knowing I can’t be approached from behind; a few seconds up my sleeve to decide how I might triage any disturbance walking towards me. It is hot as hell in here but I don’t care, I am facing the world.
After days spent in the glad gap the city feels unfit for human scale. Martin Amis once observed that, in Los Angeles, “the only way to get across the road is to be born there”. Auckland feels the same. Walking doesn’t work so well. One can go for a walk, but it’s harder to walk here as a mode of transport. Traipsing vast tracts of hot concrete at 3pm in January is a hell of closed cafes and not-yet-open bars, no refreshments or rest stops, barely a soul on the street, everyone driving. It can be a lonely city for a walker. Imported palms rustle above, pōhutukawa roots reject the pavement below, seeking their birthright, the coast. The sprawling urban dysfunction made me wince when I first returned, but already it is just Auckland: normal, easy in its hardness, living off the fat of its eighties inequities (both the 19th and 20th century versions).
We’ve had a certain kind of peace here recently with the diminishment of delta and the slow release of omicron. Elsewhere people have had to lose their minds or their health or their social fabric or whatever else is left to lose. Here the summer of ease has been made possible by high vaccination rates and the hard sovereign border. The policing of the border has saved lives inside these islands, undoubtedly, and it is also a harsh technology. What goes on inside the border can be harsh, too. An inequitable vaccine rollout means that right now it is Pākehā who are safest here, with the most timely access to boosters as cases start to rise again. The place called New Zealand has always been a settler sanctuary.
Finding a Managed Isolation and Quarantine voucher was a near full-time job last year, and now the vouchers are all on hold. This is not the only place that I could conceivably call home, and even I felt demented by the border when I was on the outside. My veins were sick and fizzy with the blockage. The other day I found a scribbled note from my first day out of MIQ, newly reunited with my mum: it’s not that I needed to come home, it’s that I needed not to be unable to come home. It was a yearning without a positive definition, more the haunting not this of separation. Last year, in the UK, I didn’t manage to fully inhabit the wait-and-see required of the new arrival. Each month I thought, keep going, keep pushing, but the technology of the hard border had me looking over my shoulder - what will happen if the keep going, keep pushing turns to need home, can’t get home. I was the world’s most boring Odysseus.
The reunion on this side of the border was beautiful, don’t get me wrong, but it was the release from the quest to achieve the home-going that flooded me with peace. Whatever came next, I was in that moment at least relieved of the demented decision, and the demented search for a voucher to get through the border. There were unpleasant things awaiting me here too, in world’s-most-boring-Odysseus fashion, but in my return I had come as close as physically possible to a balance point in the one-legged wobble of life: I am with my people, I can leave again if I need to, but right now I don’t need to leave; I am where I need to be, I do not need to seek.
The other day a social media app user broadcast a screenshot from a closed online support group for people returning to New Zealand (yes I did enjoy using the generic ‘social media app’ - how very Beautiful World Where Are You? of me). The secondhand poster’s caption read CRY ME A RIVER. The original post was from a group of four returnees feeling claustrophobic in their single-hotel-room seclusion. The secondhand crowd crowed: fresh food! A place to sleep! What about the people who’ll never see home again! You should feel lucky to have this spot! Looks like a holiday to me!
Maybe it was time to hold a funeral for the imagination. I probably should have been saying a prayer of thanks each day to the people stuck outside who made the low internal caseload possible. A mottled kind of thanks, though - mottled by the conscripted nature of their service, doubting whether many inside the settler sanctuary would sign up to do the same if they had also found themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time, wanting no one to be blocked from a home place against the beat of their homing heart, wanting both freedom from premature death and morbidity and freedom from the crude and technology of borders.
This is all quite awkward. I sound like I’m making a speech. The truth is I don’t have a policy proposal, I just have the sense that capital-H Home is a concept that you don’t want to mess around with or make painful or injurious. It’s hard to know how to carry ourselves when the emergency measure becomes the norm - hopefully a case of the weird dance of self-centring and self-abnegation finally making way for solidarity. I did make it back here and, at first, I wasn’t even particularly happy, I was just relieved. I was also a certain kind of ashamed, slowly accepting how much this stolen (and exclusive!) place means to me. Maybe in January I have met joy, a big wink of it after the months of regret and relief.
I’ve been swimming a lot. I’ve been swimming morning and night, going out deeper than I used to, with only a small fear of stingrays still lurking, and now fully fine with the tiny jellyfish that look like neon-hearted frogspawn. I’m still living inside the too-well-adapted quiet life, sometimes forgetting that isolation is no longer compulsory. I haven’t RSVP’d to things and I haven’t opened and replied to other things. It’s all in a soup of Out There that doesn’t make sense in these summer-addled loops. Are you behind on things, too? Are you struggling to slot externally-required reality into ongoing surreality? I’ll put down my guilt whip if you put down yours! Give the whip the slip! I hereby decline the ample opportunities afforded to self-flagellate for my errant ways!
Right now my back is happily against the wall. I am going out there for another swim.
Until next month,
H xxx
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Enjoyed that, thanks Hannah. Also brought back memories of spending days walking around Auckland when I stayed there for a month or so in my twenties with no money. Long story!
"it’s not that I needed to come home, it’s that I needed not to be unable to come home" - I felt that very deeply.
It is a pleasure to read you every month and this January letter rings very similar to how I feel. I'm definitely behind on many, many things. But somehow the guilt of not answering to RSVP and so on is slowly easing out. I enjoy the quiet and some isolation from time to time. I'm not ready to go 'back' in the world, I didn't fully enjoy the world before, and maybe that's ok!