I have woken up and gone back to sleep at least five times since we went to bed at around 7:30pm last night. This time (around 7am), I realise I will not be going back to sleep. I have been listening to my boyfriend, Aidan, sleep for a while now. He deserves it. We both do.
The trip was unusually harrowing. I have flown Cape Town to San Francisco numerous times in the past three years, but this one certainly stands out. 45 minutes at check-in because of some dodgy data in our bookings, holding up the plane from Cape Town to Johannesburg. In Johannesburg, a sudden lightning storm developed after we had boarded our plane, delaying take-off by an hour. Finally, in San Francisco, I had to restart my passport/immigration control interview three times for unknown reasons.
The last few nights have not contained the best sleep. Co-ordinating travel with a 10 hour timezone difference can be troublesome at best, but I ended up on a Saturday morning hoping that my flight was booked for Thursday, but instead finding an email asking for dates of birth instead. The worry about whether we’d make it on time for my Monday 28th February start at work meant a weekend of poor sleep. Then, on Monday night, we were told we were flying on Wednesday! A whole 24 hours of last-minute apartment clearing gone from our schedule.
Before that, worry over my H-1B application being accepted, my visa interview, and Aidan’s visa interview periodically surged and were resolved over the course of four months. Before those, worries about how to fix my work situation, whether I would find a job I thought I would enjoy, whether I would get the job I thought I would enjoy were there for chronologically for the previous year and a half.
My mind is unusually clear now, though. The only immediate worry is that I need to fill in some forms and fax and mail them to get my bank account set up. “Far” in the future is finding a place to stay. But, mostly, I am thinking about writing this blog post (the first in about a year and a half after 6+ years of blogging) and feeling expectant about the time to come.
