My lovely sister-friend who has been helping me feel loads better lately reminded me yesterday that it would be ideal if I could do more than survive, and I'm bottomlessly thankful that she loves me like that. She does deserve a nod for that. I have, though, been reminding myself not to fall into a thought-pattern that endlessly lauds everybody for "loving me when I'm so hard to love"...blah.
I'm not hard to love. I am pretty easily loved, lovable. I am, however, not hesitant to call a spade a spade, especially when the spade is destroying me a little and burying me a little and when the spade very much incredibly sucks.
I met an old man on the road who was sort-of on my level, but way more so. He was raised here; not in Reykjavík, but somewhere on the island. As we were driving between Búðardalur and Hólmavík, he wondered aloud why I wanted to go to Súðavík in the first place but readily agreed with my necessity of getting out of the city.
"Reykjavík is a terrible town," he said; something with which I agreed but don't necessarily believe all the time. Reykjavík is not what's ruining me, but that was a time for solidarity.
At some point, he asked me about my religious background and I told him I had been raised protestant. "Protestant?" he asked, "Why not Catholic?" And that question caused me to stop for a second, wondering to myself why not Catholic; my wonders having nothing to do with Catholicism itself but everything to do with the history of the immigrants who shaped Michigan, and why protestant but not Catholic; where was our Bible Belt, who made it and shaped it and kept it growing? But he mistook my silent thought experiment for a defensiveness, offensiveness, a search for an excuse or explanation for the God to whom I turn my face...and he quickly redacted his question.
"I don't really care either way," he said, backpedaling. "It doesn't matter. I don't believe in anything. I believe in those mountains."
"The mountains are easy to believe in," I said, pointing at them through the windshield. "They're right there."
He chuckled. And by the time he left me to head farther north while I trekked on westward, he had instructed me to find an old, lonely farmer who could "die pretty soon of any sort of circumstance, really" and take over the farm, happily minding my own business in the Westfjords.
I didn't hate that idea. I still don't. I could stop fighting with immigration. I could find some peace and quiet. I could have a bit of Earth, it could be all mine...after I "accidentally" poison my husband...or, ya know, whatever.
I don't know, shit happens in the Westfjords, man.
Allt í lagi. Ekkert mál. Þetta reddast.
My deportation countdown is nineteen days and I don't know how I'm supposed to live, or silently count down the days while not actually believing that it'll happen, believing instead that the papers will somehow finally push through in that time. Crying and packing my clothes without actually putting them into bags, laying in bed all hazy while realizing that my thesis actually did somehow write itself. Some miracle.
Quarantining myself. Watching my energy. Handling it. Handling several jobs, managing time, not starving, approaching some semblance of financial stability, planning a real actual vacation.
Trying to graduate.
Knowing that Defense and Deportation all kinda happen in the same week. And something about for every mile of road, I gotta dig two miles of ditch.
At least that's a halfway decent use for a spade.
