How to Get Born Before You Die

How to Get Taken in by Satanists

"Why is it called 'New Zealand?' What happened to Old Zealand?" my dear friend Mary Clare joked as we walked down the dirty old sidewalk towards one of the many coffee shops I was on track to visit that day.

"If you want to know the truth, I never thought about it." I quipped. Oh, God. So much I hadn't thought about, hadn't planned, hadn't paid for. This was my existence for the last four months before I left. A passenger on the anxiety tram.

Life was a whirlwind, stopping only occasionally for me to be able to write a song or to collapse into the arms of my fake girlfriend. The days were filled with work for me to do, whether it be physically at the burger joint I was dishwashing at, emotionally in the way of being with friends for the last time before I left, or trip work, which was my name I had coined for obsessively googling how much things cost/purchasing bus tickets far in advance/wondering if I $2000 was going to be enough money for me to survive for three months. In a way, I was dreading the trip.

"I could die, you know," I said, unwisely, to my fake girlfriend one week before my flight departed. "I could actually die."

Despite all of my negative emotions surrounding leaving, when the day finally arrived I was filled with that sparky feeling you get when you know how terribly underprepared you are for an inevitable situation (the sparky feeling has always registered as a good feeling to me. Thanks improv class). I said farewell to my family at the airport and paid the $30 fee to get my bulging zippered backpack checked to LAX (an outrageous price to me. I had Ramen to buy!).

I blinked and there was Aukland.

My dreams of immediately witnessing the majestic splendor that I was certain to see anywhere I looked were instantly dashed by an Australian who I met while stepping onto the bus.

"It's a fohggey one mate," he bellowed. "Prohbabley wohn't even geet to sey the volcaynoh!"

He was right. The bus driver was having trouble seeing five feet in front of the bus, and, one forty-five-minute bus drive later, I arrived in Torbay.

I had been emailing back and forth with my first host for a few months. Here is what I knew about him.

His name was Christian

He surfed

He painted

He had made a movie

When an almost-forty-year-old man turned up in a burbling red stick shift Subaru, I was taken aback. He helped me throw my bags in the trunk and motioned to get into the passenger seat instead of the driver seat (which were swapped, as I had read but not remembered), and drove me to his house. In all our months of emailing, he had never mentioned the fact that he had a family, but he took me upstairs and introduced me to his lovely wife Kirianne and their two 11-year-old blonde giggle machines Grete and Skye.

"See girls, now you can stop asking me how old he is," Christian laughed. The giggle machines did their thing.

The next few weeks were equal parts surprising, intriguing, and challenging. My first full day at work with Christian required something of me I had not even begun to fathom: woodworking skills.

"Today you're building a table," Christian said nonchalantly. "You can do that right?"

"Yeah."

Eight hours later, a shoddily-constructed table had been erected, born out of what seemed like hundreds of bent nails and old rotted wood that I had found behind the shed. By some miracle, it was perfectly level. Christian congratulated me with a backhanded compliment.

"I guess we're going for sturdy, not pretty."

Every day there were new jobs that needed doing, which kept me from getting bored or missing home too much. The highlight of every week was Thursday, or as Christian would excitedly pronounce it, 'boys night.' Christian's friend Craig would come over, and we would walk a quarter mile down the road in sandals to sit in a hot tub for thirty minutes with another friend, Guy. The conversations that ran through these hot tub sessions never delved beneath surface-level small talk, which frustrated me but was also quite fascinating. As soon as anything emotional was touched upon, the three longtime friends would mumble for a bit, touch their hair, and almost instantaneously change the subject: