Yesterday I booked my flight back to England for 25th September. That will put me at roughly one year and five months spent living in Halifax, give or take a few days on either end.
I’m making this move without knowing exactly when our immigration case will reach the UK. I really didn’t want to do things in that order. I wanted to go back to England knowing that it would be finite, and knowing almost exactly how finite it would be. But flights are expensive and my housing situation here is precarious, so I’m taking the leap and hoping it isn’t an unduly long stay. At least I’ll have somewhere to live, where I won’t have to worry about rent or meals. At least I will have that security, which at this stage feels like a lifeline; I am barely in control of my own body at the minute, much less the processes required to keep it alive and working.
When Isaac and I first started dating, the time difference was pretty manageable. I would wake up in Oxford just as he was going to sleep in San Francisco, in time to say good morning and goodnight. By the end of my working day – full-time hours in an office, the perfect diversion from all that long-distance worry – he was usually surfacing. We’d text while I rode the bus home, check in intermittently during his morning at work. By his reckoning, I’d usually fall asleep around lunchtime. It wasn’t ideal – it was probably better for me than for him, honestly – but we made it work, mostly by spending hours and hours on video calls every Sunday. He’d wake up early for them, and I would stay up late. It was worth it. It has all been worth it, ever since.
My arrival in Canada was game-changing. Suddenly, I could be awake late enough to attend public-facing work events he ran in the evenings. He didn’t have to wake up so early to call me on Sundays, and I didn’t have to stay awake so late. We could talk after work, if we wanted to. Sure, it was still a four-hour gap (a gap that could have been three hours instead, if I’d sucked it up and moved to Toronto like a normal would-be Canadian), but after the eight-hour transatlantic divide it was a breathtaking luxury.
(Then, of course, it became a frustration. Why hadn’t I moved to the west coast instead? So it tends to go.)
I’m not looking forward to going back to England. I won’t have the working day to keep me busy while Isaac sleeps anymore; I won’t have the comfort of routine. I am just going to have to wait out the day until he wakes up – and fall asleep at night without knowing whether he’s made it home safely from work. (These things matter, at a distance. They matter especially right now, as the imminence of the Big Move makes me increasingly prone to irrational dread.)
My aunt and uncle have offered to house me back in England. They have a house that I have loved since childhood, which contains three cats and what feels (to me, a chronic renter) like an embarrassment of space. They’re really good cooks. They’re usually very happy to leave me to my own devices, but there is also an open invitation to join them in watching movies in the evenings. A few days ago my aunt sent me a photo of the new and expansive guest bed she has installed in the attic. I want the safety of that room so desperately that it makes me a little sick.
I had my first brush with the Nova Scotia healthcare system (I’m basically fine, don’t worry) recently. It was unfamiliar and expensive, exactly the kind of extra stress I didn’t need at this precise moment. In the rainstorms we had a couple of weeks ago now, my bedroom ceiling leaked – make that the fourth incidence of water in my lodgings where it shouldn’t be since I moved to Canada. Over the weekend, it did it again – make that the fifth. Right now I live in a houseshare with a lot of other people and my skin lights up with anxiety when I try to use the kitchen while someone else is there. And I can’t stop working, because I need the money to get me through the rest of this process. I’m exhausted. I want a place where it is safe to be exhausted, just for a little while.
Ideally, that would be Isaac’s place. But it can’t be, not yet, so I’m going with the next best thing.
What will I miss about Halifax? Sometimes I think I have fucked this up terribly, that I haven’t made the most of it at all. I wanted this, put effort and money and resources into this, then threw it over immediately to focus on a different plan. I should have travelled more widely in Canada. I should have gone out more. I should have done it all differently, and now I can’t, because I’m about to leave the party early, just the way I always have.
Did I ever really find traction here? I know the city better than I did. I’ve made a lot of friends who have been an incredible help to me. People showed up to help me move house. Tomorrow night, I’m crashing on a friend’s sofa bed in case my ceiling leaks again in the rain. That’s the win, I guess. I moved to a new continent and I found a safety net. It’s been hard, but I have people here now, and I will always have people here when I visit again.
I’ll miss people-watching at the waterfront. I’ll miss eating poutine by the statue of Winston Churchill outside the old library. I’ll miss riding the bus to Jenn’s place on Saturdays; I’ll miss Jenn’s weird cat trying to gnaw on my head because he loves me. I’ll miss watching movies at Shannon’s place, and hanging out with my writing friends at pubs in the west end. I’ll miss the little song that plays when it’s safe to cross the street, four descending notes that simply don’t happen anywhere else. I’ll miss the time when we all sang Barrett’s Privateers while drunk on Canada Day, because in Nova Scotia that’s the real national anthem. I’ll miss the cemetery I walked through with Isaac, on the first strange foggy night he ever spent with me. We were restless and we wanted to go for a walk. The lights from the weird awful skyscraper in the South End looked ethereal through the mist.
And I’ll miss, I suppose, the idea of living here. It meant something different before I actually arrived. But maybe that’s always true when you move to a new country: the idea is one thing, the reality another. Guess I’m about to find out a second time!
Good news:
I’ve been crocheting so much. Since I got back from San Francisco last time, it’s about the only thing that has kept me together. I’ve made what is basically a small nursery of yarn plants, as well as a few stuffed toys to act as wedding gifts for a friend’s two flower girls. I think they all turned out pretty great, personally.
Our immigration case was received at the National Visa Center at the end of last month. I’m now checking in every week to see if we have a case number (and to see if the case number indicates it’s going to the right consulate). It’s stressful, but it’s progress!
The night I arrive in London, I’ll be staying with a friend I’ve known since we were both pretty small. She’s married now, and she lives just outside of the city in a place with a spare room. Going back will be a lot, but it will be so nice to see her and her partner again.