Monday, September 23, 2013

Out of Season


“We got along really well,” is what I usually say when I have to describe our relationship, which doesn’t convey much unless you’ve had that kind of relaxed, thoughtless rapport with someone you’re also sleeping with. But when we always wanted to see the same movie at the same time, or go to the same gallery exhibition, or fall asleep together on a Friday night after work then wake up and walk around the corner for a late takeout dinner, when we liked every single one of each other’s friends, it felt like everything. He could charm me out of a bad mood — no easy feat — and had a knack for random gestures of kindness and affection. Our birthdays are exactly six months apart; as I was walking down Bedford Street to meet him at our favorite restaurant for his birthday, thinking proudly of the theater tickets I had bought as his gift, I saw him waiting for me and felt the small thrill of secret, happy recognition I always felt when I had a moment to enjoy his presence before he noticed mine. He also was holding a gift-wrapped package. “It’s your present,” he said. “For your half-birthday.” It was exactly what I wanted, an iPod.

But Russell had wanted to leave New York for years, and he was stubborn. He missed fresh air and open space, so much so that after we had been together for about a year and a half he issued what was essentially an ultimatum: I’m going, with or without you, preferably with you, but I’m going. It meant giving up everything I had worked so hard for, the toehold I had carved out in my career, the identity I had assembled, and everyone else I loved, so of course I said yes.

I said “yes” to moving but I hadn’t really said “yes” to a location. Because Russell was an urban planner, with experience that was in high demand, he could work almost anywhere. He had been a Peace Corps volunteer and was interested in living abroad again — somewhere English-speaking, he conceded, so I could get a job. He wanted to be close to places to canoe and hike and climb. He wanted to live in a smaller city. Wherever we ended up, it was understood that we would stay there for a year or two before settling down back home in the Midwest. In theory I was on board with all of this, and as he started to look for jobs and then started getting offers, I remained theoretically fine with all of the potential locations; I was in over my head at my own job and barely had time to get coffee in the morning, let alone ruminate on the implications of these very important decisions.

When Russell asked, almost in passing, how about New Zealand? I thought about Lord of the Rings for a second and told him to apply for the job. I really did not think he would get it, and if he did, there was no way he would say yes — it was so far! And all of this was far less real than the onslaught of demanding emails and sensitive situations I dealt with every day at work and the numb comfort of sinking into bed next to him at the end of a hellishly long day. In the end, one offer was from Calgary, another from San Francisco, and there was probably a third that I can’t even remember now. But he accepted the one from the city council in Christchurch, New Zealand, and moved there in the summer of 2005.

I had only been at my terrifying yet oddly fulfilling job for a few months, and I wanted to stick it out for at least a year, so we agreed to do long distance for an unspecified amount of time. “Long” distance was so accurate it was funny, almost. Depending on the season, the time difference was between 14 and 16 hours, which meant that to talk on the phone one of us had to either get up before 6 a.m. or stay awake past midnight, and this was pre-Skype/Gchat, so we were both spending a small fortune on phone cards. He wrote me a lot of letters, and when I find them now, they still make me cry. He was so happy, and I, in retrospect, distracted and confused and utterly unsure of what I actually wanted.

After eight months of this, he returned to the U.S. to visit me and his family. Bad weather and travel delays cut “my” part short, and I remember riding the subway back to my apartment after saying goodbye to him at the airport, crying in an orange seat in the corner and thinking I could not do this another time, that any amount of career stagnation or uncertainty or opportunity loss was worth not having to say goodbye another time. That’s when I started making plans in earnest, started shopping for tickets, giving away my things, began to acknowledge I was really going to leave. Four months later, in June of 2006, I left.

by Ruth Curry, Buzzfeed |  Read more:
Image: Justine Zwiebel / BuzzFeed