Letter one: Leaving

It did not feel real until a stranger rode away on my motorcycle.

I had been preparing to move to Texas for the better part of a year. Applications, interviews, forms, a visa appointment, lists that spawned other lists. You can do an enormous amount of preparing without any of it actually reaching you. It stays a project. Something you are organising rather than something that is going to happen to you.

Then a man came to look at the bike. A Suzuki SV650, my first motorcycle, bought the day after I got my licence, the machine that had carried me through years of rides I still think about. We talked for a while, he paid, he sat on it, and he rode off down the street on the thing I had spent more time enjoying than almost anything else I own (except the snowboard).

That one got through.

The admin

Because that is what uprooting mostly is. Not a dramatic departure. A long sequence of small, necessary endings.

Cancel this, pause that, redirect the post, find the document you last saw in 2019, tell the bank, tell the accountant, tell the tenants, hand the project you built to the colleague who will now run it. And at the same time, on the other side of the ocean: set up the new bank account, the address, the insurance, the keys, the internet, the things you will need on day one. Two separate lives, two checklists that refused to stay still. Every time you crossed something off, three more appeared. Good preparation is supposed to make the hard part easier. In practice it just multiplies.

We met the woman who now lives in our flat three times. She seemed lovely. She now sleeps in our bedroom, cooks in our kitchen, and will discover for herself which of the windows sticks, how the sauna turns on, and that the blinds work with a single button. There is no ceremony for this. You hand over a home the way you hand over a car: a short explanation of the systems, a note about the neighbours, and then it is hers.

I paused my Estonian phone number, which turned out to be harder than it should have been, and not for practical reasons. A number is just a number until you switch it off. Then it turns out to have been the address where everyone you know expected to find you.

What fits

Normally, packing a suitcase is the easiest thing in the world. I do it the night before, right before bed, in about twenty minutes. Some clothes go in and that is that. Whatever does not come along is still sitting at home when I get back, and nothing is lost.

This time it was different.

Laura has taught me a number of good things over the years, and one of them is that you do not turn up at someone’s door empty-handed. So, gifts. Which raises the question of what, and immediately after it the question of space, because every box of Kalev and every bottle of Vana Tallinn is a pair of sneakers, a jacket or some gadget I will actually need, now staying in Estonia. And not everything is allowed across the ocean anyway, so the “kilu” (the tinned sprats) stayed behind.

I had a plan involving cutting boards and Estonian linen, which looked thoughtful in my head and absurd on a luggage scale. That did not make it either. What did: black bread, dried black bread (a separate and non-negotiable item), Vana Tallinn, boxes of Kalev, and a book of Estonian landscape photography for the professor hosting me.

Henri packed like a fifteen-year-old, which is to say efficiently and without visible sentiment, and brought the PlayStation. Correct call. There is a version of this year where he is homesick in a foreign living room, and in that version I would very much like him to have his own games.

The thing I minded leaving most was smaller than the flat. Our pug is eight. She is a shadow by nature and anxious outside her own rooms; every unfamiliar place costs her. She gets on well with my parents, so she is safer and calmer there than she would have been here, especially in this heat. I have thought about her more than about the rooms we emptied.

The forest

I read the Grimm brothers obsessively as a child. I loved the stories, but I think what I really loved was the moment when somebody set out. A piece of bread tied in a cloth, a stick over the shoulder, and then into the forest.

Between the house they leave and whatever is waiting for them lies the forest. Nothing much happens in the forest. It is not where the story is. It is simply the thing you have to walk through before the story can continue.

I spent about three weeks in the forest.

Physically still in Tallinn. Mentally already gone, because every hour was spent preparing to leave, so I was no longer really living there, only processing my exit from it. Austin was not real either. It was a rental listing, a map, a set of names in my inbox. You cannot be homesick for a place you have left but not left, and you cannot be excited about a place that is still a folder of documents. So you sit in the middle, in a flat that is half-packed, having conversations that are mostly logistics, in a country you have already checked out of.

I did the twenty-first-century version: two suitcases instead of a stick, and rather more bread than the tales usually allow. Artisan black bread and the dried kind. The essentials, at least, were correct.

By the end I badly wanted to go. Not in an adventurous way. In the way you want a dentist appointment to start.

Eighteen hours

Tallinn to Helsinki, Helsinki to London, London to Austin. Eighteen hours in all. Laura came a few days later, so it was Henri and me. He was better company than I was.

Somewhere near Greenland the abstraction finally ran out, in the way it does when the map on the seat-back screen shows you have gone well past the point where turning round makes sense.

We landed in the evening into a heat I had been warned about and had still somehow filed under “I am sure it is fine.”

One night in an airport hotel. The next day, a house in North Loop with a porch and a peach tree, and neighbours who turned out to be the reason any of this worked at all.

The clock

Jet lag is not really jet lag. It is exhaustion. A week in I started waking up more or less normally, but my eyes still hurt in that specific way where you keep checking whether you are getting ill and you are not. You are just tired at a level sleep has not yet fixed.

The eight-hour difference is stranger than the tiredness. If I want to speak to anyone at home I need to do it before noon. After that, Estonia has gone to bed. My entire previous life is now a morning activity.

The first morning

I got up early anyway, because there was no reason not to, made coffee, and sat out on the porch in the dark waiting for the day to start.

It got light. Birds I did not recognise began. And then a rabbit came out from under the fence and spent about ten minutes in the yard, entirely unbothered, going about her business as though I were a piece of furniture that had always been there.

I sat there with my coffee and watched her.

Alright, I thought. We are here.

More soon.