Despite this, for the past couple of weeks, I’ve been distractingly blue. Sometimes thinking about Ruth. Sometimes not being able to sleep…

We just booked our tickets to go home for the holidays. It hit me so suddenly how good it will feel to be home for a little while. I’ve hardly thought about New York. It feels farther than it is.

But as November whips by, I imagine running errands on the Upper East Side. It’s dark out but it feels early. Daylight Saving has just started and I’m thinking about Christmas gifts. But there’s time, so today I won’t feel bad buying stuff for myself. I’ll text KL and ask him what we’re going to have for dinner. Maybe he’ll text me back that we should meet at Setagaya for a big bowl of steaming ramen. We’ll walk home holding hands with gloves on and shed our thick layers when we get back to our small but well-lit studio.

I miss it. I miss the cold. I miss a book. The one that has the poem. I would put it here now. Mark Wallace’s Standard Time.

As we were leaving the HIFF reception last week, my friend Sean joked that when we first met I still had alot of New York in me,  and now I have alot of Kailua in me. It was a remark in passing but I found it poignant.

It feels like eons ago that we stepped off the plane to make a home here.  I was still high off of my last event with MOCA. I had quit my job but believed that I could maintain my life in NY from thousands of miles away. I literally thought that if I woke up at 5AM PST to make my calls and write my emails that no one in NY would notice that I’d left. Which at the time was more important to me than figuring out how to make a life in Hawaii. When I think about myself back then I feel a little sorry for myself.

It’s been a slow process letting go…but I have. When this is over I will have lived here for a total of eighteen months over two years. It’s a funny combination of being settled, but not really.