Away

Once you have gotten over the feeling of miraculousness that the car broke down with enough time to get it fixed before departure and the grandparents agreed to be caretakers of your two precious beings (the non-human, senior being requiring particular vigilance and care), you will settle in. Once you have adjusted to the sheer wonder that health and planning worked out in your favour despite the unlikeliness of that being the case in recent years, you will allow yourself to just sit with the fact that you are, indeed, away.

Here is the opportunity to sleep with true quiet and ease, even with planes flying overhead intermittently (as theAirBnB advertised that they would). Here is the leisure of a walk without a soundtrack of complaints, the ability to sit here or go in there without a need to convince or persuade anyone. The privilege of being absent-minded enough so as to wonder if you ordered your coffee with or without caffeine and to catch yourself staring at the bell you’ve never noticed on the front end of the ferry for minutes at a time.

Here you’ll catch glimpses of humanity you might not otherwise notice, like the way the woman seated next to you on the crowded ferry is slowly and carefully scrolling through obituaries on her phone. You might even feel generous enough after a glass of wine and some fish and chips consumed at the end of a bar that you will engage in extended conversation with a stranger. A man whose wife died of pancreatic cancer two years ago, who now finds solace in the boat he bought (that barely put a dent in his finances, he wants you to know), in his travels to New Zealand, and especially in the way the staff at this establishment treat him as family.

And when you return from away, you might notice the way your family looks more appealing after giving yourself space away from them, after you’ve been out solo in the world where you had room to create stories instead of just consuming and caretaking the stories of others. You will likely feel refreshed and reset just as everyone always says you will when they urge you to do these things to take care of yourself.

So settle in here as often as you are able and never take the luck and privilege of this feat for granted. This being away is an opportunity to remember and re-member, to become a whole being again, away from responsibility, for a time.