“I’ve started to think of your place as home,” I told Isaac, on the brink of falling asleep one night.
“Then what’s your place?”
“My place,” I answered, “is a storage box. And I put myself in it whenever I can’t be at home.”
We were quiet for a moment, holding each other in the dark. “No,” I said, though I didn’t mean no exactly, “not quite that. That’s too sad.” That last part, at least, I meant.
I have been in California for Christmas and the new year. I arrived a comfortable week before everything went to ice hell in North America; it was a long and laborious day of negotiating air travel, but at least it was not interrupted by historic weather. I reached San Francisco on schedule, and enjoyed a week in the city before Isaac and I came out to spend the week of the holiday proper in the suburbs, where his parents live.
I don’t have to go back until mid-January. This is my longest visit yet, and I am so relieved to find that I am still not tired of this—of any of it, really, but the waiting.
2022 was weird. I opened it by booking a one-way flight to Canada, after roughly two years of Covid-induced inertia in the UK. It was a sort of promise to myself: things were going to be different very soon, for the first time in a while. Things were going to change. I texted my mother before finalising my flights, asking her if she thought it made sense to fly so early in the day. She texted back: you’ve flown more often than me by now, so you know best what to do!
I was all in on Canada, and then Isaac happened. We’d been talking for a while, hanging out on a voice call and watching TV on the weekends—his mornings, my evenings, while we were still eight hours apart. We formally started dating on 8th February. I remember that because not twenty-four hours beforehand, I had made a disparaging tweet about Valentine’s Day; the kind you make when you’re lonely and wretched and about to upend your whole life anyway. Existence surprises you. I came to Canada three months later, and I met Isaac in person a week after that, and in a way that was the end of the future where I fought to stay in Canada for good. We filed our US immigration paperwork in June. I have been climbing the walls, frantic to move to America, ever since.
2022 has been a huge year, and I am accordingly exhausted. But a lot of that hugeness was just the process of laying groundwork; 2023 is not, in my estimation, about to be much less huge. If the stars align, our immigration petition will start to move forward this year. If I’m exceptionally lucky, I will maybe sell a book. It feels like an enormous amount of things to have committed to wanting, all at once; like my reach is wildly exceeding my grasp already, and yet I am still reaching.
I’m trying to write this newsletter before I go back to Canada. You’ve all heard from me already when I’ve been newly back in Canada; and yet I never quite manage to write anything from the vantage point of California.
It’s harder for me to write reflectively when I’m preoccupied with my own happiness, the way I usually am when I’m with Isaac. People often ask me what I’ve done while visiting California, and my answer is usually a big shrug—even though we get up to plenty. Lots of little walks, usually a museum visit or two, and on both California visits so far we have ventured out on day trips with Isaac’s parents. But the real answer is that I’ve been happy. It is a remarkably consuming activity, happiness.
In Canada, right now, parts of my drywall are wet from a flood and my apartment no longer feels entirely safe for me. In Canada I probably have to worry about finding more freelance work this year, and I certainly have to worry (for the first time in my life!) about negotiating freelancer taxes. A lot of the respite I feel out here is illusory; it won’t last when I move here for real, because at that point I will bring my worries with me (they count as free checked baggage, I looked it up). But I feel wretched at the thought of going back. That isn’t how I wanted to feel about Canada, a country that has largely been kind to me since I arrived.
I know what will happen when I move out here. I’ll find myself steeped in a brand new set of political-climate worries, as urgent as the ones I felt living in England. I’ll bring the same old anxieties about money and work and writing, and pick up a couple of new ones borrowed from someone else’s ideas about marriage. Am I contributing enough? Am I still interesting, at home all day while I’m not allowed to work?
The trick, I assume, is to live from moment to moment; to take your eye off the future for half a goddamn second on occasion, as a treat. But it’s the first of the new year. It’s not the day for that, not quite.
“It will be a good year, I think,” I said to Isaac last night. Then, sort of plaintively: “It has to be. I hope it’s a good year.”
Reader: I hope it’s a good year. I hope this despite my suspicions and misgivings, in the face of evidence and precedent. Every New Year’s Eve I read John Darnielle’s end of year thread on Twitter; this year I did that for what may be the last time, and I felt it in my bones the way I so often do. I’m around. So are you. May we all stick around, together, for 2023.