I kept applying for jobs in Christchurch although it was obvious — so obvious I wondered, then resented, why Russell hadn’t mentioned this in any of his letters or phone calls — that there were no jobs in the media or in any related field for an American with three to five years of experience. Each morning I spent an hour or two going through the paper and the Kiwi equivalent of Craigslist checking for new listings. I applied for, in order of increasing desperation, copyediting jobs, copywriting jobs, proofreading jobs, jobs in the various departmental offices of the nearby university, customer service jobs at the local library, jobs shelving at the local library, jobs working in a bookshop, administrative jobs in the city council office where Russell worked, and finally any administrative or clerical job I found. Sometimes I would receive a polite email thanking me for my application but typically I never heard anything at all. Every once in awhile a New York contact would help me land an informational interview with an editor at a university press or the New Zealand branch of a major publisher or one of the three magazines in print, during which I would be told, never outright, but between the lines (as it were) that I was job hunting in a middling city in a small country where everyone knew everyone else and hired their lifelong friends. After one of the pointless interviews I picked up a tuna roll in a food court and sat down to eat it in front of a TV that was playing American football. I wasn't a football fan then but hearing the accent was comforting and familiar and I allowed myself to stare at the TV. I loaded up my chopsticks and examined the tuna roll more closely. It was made with canned tuna, gray and flaky. The food court was oppressive in a particularly dull '70s burnt orange way and redolent with the dueling grease smells of five or six cultures. The only other people there were a group of thickly eyelined teenagers slumped nearly to the floor. I tried to identify something in my surroundings that wasn't obviously mediocre and failed. I thought about what my friends in New York might be doing at that moment, what it might feel like to be in a crowd, to hurry somewhere, to have a conversation that wasn't about rain or sports. I realized that the fabled “four seasons in a day” weather was making me sweat through my interview suit, and regretted that I was incapable of thinking about anything other than the weather as well. I rarely thought about how physically far I was from home except for moments like that one at the food court, when I wanted more than anything to call Emily, my best friend back in New York. It was mid-afternoon; I calculated the time difference and concluded she had probably just gone to bed the night before. Because of this I hadn’t spoken to Emily, or any of my friends and family really, since my arrival. I would speak to them only a handful of times throughout the following year. If I wanted to visit her, it would take at least three flights, several thousand dollars, and two full days of nonstop travel, which was slightly more manageable than visiting my family in Illinois. That would involve four flights, three days, and a long car ride at the end. I’d thoughtlessly mention "home" in passing, meaning only, home, the house on Gilmour Terrace where I’d change my clothes and cook dinner and hang out with Russell, or Home, the United States, where I got my accent and my taste for real sub-style sandwiches. At other times "home" would cross my mind —impatient in line at the supermarket or tired and waiting for the bus, or, browsing the library alone, in the middle of the day. Then I’d wonder which one I meant: 10A Gilmour Terrace? My Fort Greene apartment? The Midwest? My parents’ house, the house I grew up in? Sometimes I meant all of them, simultaneously. I remember reading in bed until late at night while Russell slept beside me, peaceful and happy, glancing over at him from time to time, at the little stocking cap he wore because our bedroom was so cold and wondering what was wrong with me. I knew he wondered what was wrong with me too, since we had started to fight a lot about it. He thought I should accept the circumstances and put a good face on them — “Just grow the fuck up!” he said, during one nasty argument, but I found this impossible. I had always relished new situations, never feared the unfamiliar, never failed when I put my whole weight behind something, so I did not anticipate having trouble adjusting to another first-world, English-speaking country. The tricky thing was that the differences were not so much differences as they were inversions or transpositions, just similar enough to fool you into thinking nothing had changed. Orion is there in the night sky, just upside down. Christmas is a summer holiday and people spend it on the beach. The climate is mild, but houses aren’t insulated or heated, so it’s completely normal to wear a hat and scarf and two sweaters inside and then take them all off when you go out into the sun. For a long time I would automatically get into the car and sit there until Russell rapped on my window — I had gotten in the wrong side. Again. A cart is a trolley and a pepper is a capsicum and trash —"rubbish" — goes in a bin. Sheep, which outnumber people 4 to 1, regularly join U.S. news in the headlines. Bars are open 24 hours a day, and people are reserved and unflappably polite except for the ones who are very drunk. But that politeness is not a temporary shield, not a shell, not a surface; that reserve is bottomless. As a foreigner you will never reach the end of it. I understood the language but communication was impossible. How could I justify a desire to stand out, to make something of myself, in the context of a complicated culture that values fitting in over individualism; how could I even begin to describe this to someone who desperately and rightfully wanted me to follow their clear social cues and talk about the weather? “That’s quite a change,” people would reply, when I said where I was from, and the right response — the only response — was, “It is, a bit.” I had failed to plan for this and the failure was like a pesky sprain that just would not heal. There was nowhere to go to lick my wounds, no crowd to disappear into, no ocean of work to throw myself at. There was nothing in my life before that I hadn’t been able to fix by being smart or working hard (how American, to even think that for a moment), and this, I was beginning to realize, would not always be the case. This was the first thing that I would not be able to fix. Finally I landed a job waiting tables at a breakfast diner. I left the house while it was still dark, rode the empty 6:15 bus into town and served plate after plate of waffles alongside a bunch of good-natured teenagers who couldn’t quite figure me out., I thought. The money wasn't enough so I got another job working nights and weekends at a wine bar. Now Russell and I really never saw each other, I was as bitter and sensitive as I ever had been, and I had unlimited access to free booze. Six months remained on my visa and it was clear I wouldn’t be renewing it, since the only way to do so would be to either get married or get a real, visa-sponsoring job. There was nothing to do but drink and fight with Russell, who still thought I should be enjoying myself. It wasn’t all miserable. When Russell took time off we went on long backcountry hikes together, and with time, I could sense although not really understand what made a certain part of him — the part that was so different from me — operate. Somewhere in a hiker’s shelter near the Cass Saddle our initials are carved together in the bottom of a bunk bed. I hated my 6 a.m. Sunday brunch shifts at the diner, but I always enjoyed my early morning encounters with the people lurching along in the opposite direction, finally on their way home after a long night out. The looks on their faces when they saw my uniform and realized that I was on my way to work were priceless, and sometimes these pub warriors told me good jokes while I waited to cross the street. Once a young man even offered me a bite of his McDonald's. I could imagine this happening in New York. I remember sitting with Russell in the back of our local pub, which was really cool, actually, decorated with Christmas lights and bits of kitsch straight from someone’s granny’s basement. A hand-painted portrait of John Travolta circahung next to the bathroom, the overhead lights were made of doll’s heads and you could peek through the slit-like windows over the booths and see people shopping in the grocery store directly below, unaware they were being watched. The same folk singer, a guy named Adam McGrath, played there every Wednesday night. He was great, but the crowd was never more than us and a few other couples. He always wrapped up his set with one or two covers, and the night he played “Atlantic City,” Russell reached over and grabbed my hand. When Adam went into the chorus I didn’t want to look at Russell at first because I was already crying, but when I did, I saw he was too.I had kept a list about him once. Generous, good cook. Hazel eyes with a darker fleck in the right one matching the one in mine, just like the lyrics in a pop song we both loved. He almost never got annoyed but when he did he made a very discreet face that he probably thought no one noticed, and it was unconsciously adorable. Wore funny T-shirts, Midwestern. Nice hands. Etc. From the beginning, he brought me flowers all the time, nearly every week, but the first time, he blindly chose my favorite purple wildflowers, and I took them in my hands and wondered how he knew. He still brought me flowers, usually proteas from the farmer’s market on Saturdays, and it was starting to feel like an empty gesture but I appreciated that he made it anyway. We had begun to avoid the subject of the future, except to agree that I got to pick where we lived next (anywhere but New York) and that I would move first, alone, and he would follow. One month before my flight back to the U.S. I got in a car accident. I had never fully adapted to driving on the left side of the road and was distracted for a moment by, of all things, the sunset. I drifted into the wrong (“right”) lane, rounded a sharp blind curve, and ran into an SUV. The road dropped off straight into the ocean on one side and I was profoundly lucky not to be hurt or worse. I was also upset that my attempts to appreciate the natural beauty of New Zealand had resulted in this. The car was totaled. “I’m so sorry,” I said through tears, as Russell held me. “I’ll pay for it, don’t worry.” “don’t worry. It’s our problem; we’ll figure it out together.” It was the right thing to say, but my knee-jerk response shocked me even as I knew it was true:. I kept quiet. The end dragged out for six more months but that was the day it was over. It’s been six years and I’m still paying for that car.