Today, suffering a little from all the gin I drank last night, I packed two suitcases with a variety of stuff: Blood Bowl paraphernalia, climbing chalk, shoes of various purposes and styles, and an eclectic selection of underwear. Tonight I fly to Hong Kong, then on to Seattle, to start my new job on Wednesday.
I’ve been trying, on and off, to go and work in America for years. When I was in Kent and decided to move to London to work for Expedia, one lure was the potential to transfer to their US headquarters. So, of course, after a year and a half working there I moved to Hong Kong, and then four years after that I made the move… to Singapore.
And now, more than seven years in Singapore later, at last I’m moving to work in Seattle, proof that you can achieve your goals, if you wait long enough and remember to keep on living.
Facetiousness aside, it’s been a long and winding road to get here, and I’m grateful for everyone that helped me along it. Unfortunately, I’m starting this journey alone, because the school year in Seattle starts in September, and I had little hope that we could get the girls admitted to a school there for the last month of the present term. (Also, suddenly uprooting them without a decent amount of preparation would not be a kindly thing to do.)
So until the 27th of May, my wife is alone in Singapore with the kids, while I settle into my new role, sort out boring but necessary things like bank accounts and social security numbers and a driving licence, and then at the end of the month I reappear to supervise loading the women in my life onto a plane back to Seattle, so we all start the first chapter of the next part of our lives (the wife and girls having skipped the prologue) in Washington State.
Which is great, and it’s good to get what you wanted, but we already know from the summer of 2014 and the summer of 2018 and the winter of 2018 that I don’t deal well with loneliness. It’s different, perhaps, because this time I’m actively deserting my wife and kids, rather than feeling abandoned in a flat filled with constant reminders of them, but even now, an hour after I waved goodbye to them at the airport, I’m already feeling the loss in my heart.
So, a couple of weeks of gloom, self-medicating with Blood Bowl tournaments and whatever tomfoolery I can perform, and then a few weeks when I’ll be semi-domesticated and adjusted to a new routine (and feeding a friend’s chickens while she’s on a business trip), before being reintroduced to my family at the end of the month. I hope I can make it until then. I think I can.
And if I can’t, there’s a helluva lot of airline food to distract me until then.
2 responses to “Give me a reason for feeling lonely”
Yeah important things first – I miss airline food = only take short haul flights now.
The even more important things – your wife and family are so wonderful and adorable it’s no wonder you miss them. The way you describe it, I feel your loss.
I’m glad it sounds like you are going to a good and rewarding job, as opposed to some of the other set ups you’ve come across…
And a weird thing, waiting so long means your kids will remember Singapore cos it’s weird when they grow up and significant chunks of their lives, or things you did, they’ve forgotten cos they were too young.
So glad you are having the chance to follow your dreams.