When I left that small town on that sweltering summer’s day, that town that wasn’t quite home but was the closest thing I had, I didn’t say goodbye.
I’d spent my teenage years there, in that region of apple orchards, hop vines, tourists, beaches, and weed. It’s a place where people go when they’re trying to escape the rest of the world and I can’t deny that’s valid, but it’s also why it’s a place that doesn’t quite feel real. To me it’s a place that’s locked in time, framed by adolescence, and it felt off somehow when I went there as an adult.
“It’s a good place to visit, not so much to live,” I joke when people ask where I grew up, and they tell me their fond memories of summer holidays there, or the season they spent picking fruit, or the way the golden beaches meet the bright blue sea, surrounded by green hills, and it’s so lush, they’ll say. So beautiful. Wrapped in their memories of salty water on the perimeters of their lips as they lick ice creams from the corner dairy quickly before they melt, while they wait in the line for the trampoline at the Top 10 Holiday Park because there’s already the maximum number of children allowed on at once. Others will bring up the murders or the drugs or the car crashes and we’ll half-laugh about that too although it’s no laughing matter because they really happened, but it was so long ago that to most people they’re just things that briefly made newspaper headlines, or stereotypes about small towns that are true and common and meaningless.
I spent my teenage years there, and it was all I had but it wasn’t true home, which is to say I wasn’t born there but it had been so long since I’d lived anywhere else that nowhere else felt like home either. I’ve spent my life looking for home and I don’t know how I’ll know I’ve found it? When I was a child, before we moved to that small town I couldn’t wait to escape, we lived in the south west of England for a couple of years. Recently I described to a friend the overwhelming feeling I once had, at the age of eleven, standing on top of an overgrown iron age fort, as I felt that deep connection to my own history. The iron age was so long ago and there was nothing remaining at this site except an unnaturally shaped mound. There weren’t any drawings or bones or other remnants of my ancestors, just this shape in the countryside, and it brought me to tears. “That’s the closest I’ve ever come to feeling like I was home,” I told her. “That’s how I feel in Aotearoa,” she told me from her apartment in Brisbane, and I suddenly understood in a way I hadn’t before, how tangata whenua feel about this place, in this place, and maybe I will never feel that way, as a Pākehā, though I was born here and have lived most of my life here. It made sense.
When I left that small town, my band played one last gig at a local music festival, then my friend Elena and I went to her car, which we’d already packed, and drove away, back to the city I was born in. I didn’t know how to say goodbye to all the people I loved deeply and needed to leave, so I didn’t. I had just turned nineteen. At that time I only had one banana box of books and sentimental things, my guitar, and a bag with my clothes. In the years since I’ve gathered so much stuff, so many more banana boxes of books, that I need movers to move it all. I no longer have that guitar, or any guitar.
We drove through the winding Rai Valley to the Picton ferry, and as we sailed over the Cook Strait, the sun set behind the hills of the Marlborough Sounds. On the other side of the strait, as we began rounding the bays into Wellington harbour, lights appeared in lines against the blackness, increasing in density as we got closer to the city. There’s this moment when the ship rounds Moa Point and the city is suddenly displayed in front of you, the lights suggesting the shapes of buildings snuggled into the hills.
We stood on the ferry deck, feeling the cool wind blowing our hair across our faces, as we laughed with sheer delight at its beauty, at our audacity, as if no one had ever moved to a different place before. As if it wasn’t a mere 80 kilometres away as the gull flies. How adult we were, to go to a place for no reason other than that we wanted to. We weren’t following anyone, or fleeing anything, we simply wanted to be there. And the shining lights tracing the sweeping curves of the harbour were magic in the freshness of the night air. I felt each shining dot flutter in my gut; they weren’t just something I saw, they were inside me. Rarely have I felt beauty or certainty so viscerally, before or since. Here, they said. This is where you are.
I don’t like goodbyes, so I avoid them. I pretend that we’ll see each other again to make the goodbye unnecessary, and then I leave.