All the same, for the last few years, on days when the news made me particularly anxious or the weather made me particularly sticky, I would daydream about the other places I could go. Maybe I would bring Laura and Hannah with me, I told myself. Maybe I would move once Hannah went off to college, and she could come live with me when she committed some minor crime and needed to flee the country. I had a secret folder on my web browser where I kept pictures of my dream locations:Stockholm, New Zealand, the beaches of Thailand, the shores of Baja, Mexico. I never looked up the immigration policies of these places. It was never supposed to be real.
Then Covid happened, and I got permission to work from anywhere, and suddenly my daydreams became a little more concrete. My tidy but not luxurious financial writing salary could set me up in places that were a lot more reasonable than Brooklyn. I could be one of those ‘digital nomads’ earning my salary from wherever I could find an internet connection. But where could I actually go? My international ex-pat daydreams began to take a realistic form, and they included a few requirements:
Somewhere not too hot in summer or too cold in winter. Newfoundland is pretty far north, and it definitely gets snow, but it’s got the advantage of an island climate, so it’s warmer in the winter than Ottawa or Toronto.
Somewhere that speaks English, because I’m not going to be picking up Romanian or Mandarin anytime soon. This is hard-won self-knowledge, for better or worse: no matter how many language apps I have downloaded on my phone, I will never be proficient enough to navigate Oslo or Majorca in their native tongues. I’m not built for knowing four different ways to ask where the nearest coffee shop is.
Somewhere that’s walkable. As a long-time Brooklyn resident, if I can’t walk to a laundromat, a movie theater, and a local pub, I feel like I’m in a backwater. (And more importantly, I’m a terrible driver. If I had to live somewhere that required a car, I’d be caught up in an international sideswiping incident within about two days.)
A functional government, without too much political drama.
Reasonably affordable.
That last oneis the trick, isn’t it?
My research as a financial writer had taught me that the London and Vancouver and Auckland real estate markets had all been raked clean by fancy international investors and fierce demand, rendering them nearly impossible for even the locals to get a foot in the door. If cocky finance guys at my hedge fund were placing bets on Edinburgh property values, then they were already too pricey for people who lived there, let alone a foreigner on a middle-class salary.
So that left me with the places that were a little undiscovered, and after a bit of researching, I zeroed in on Newfoundland. It was a photo of St. John’s that finally sold me on it. The brightly colored row houses, the restaurant scene, the walkable downtown…it reminded me of a smaller, cuter Brooklyn, somewhere that I could even settle eventually, assuming I could deal with a lot more snow. Plus, I could buy a rowhouse for three hundred grand. You know what three hundred grand gets you in Brooklyn? A parking space.
I wasn’t stupid. I knew perfectly well that my fantasy about moving to Canada and writing in my pjs during long snowy winters was probably just that—a fantasy that would have all kinds of drawbacks if I tried it in reality. But when my sister picked up and left me for the humid furnace of the American South, I finally had a chance to try out the dream that I’d been secretly nurturing for years. I decided I would rent a place for two months in St. John’s, and I would deal with the reality of living overseas in a windy, foggy city with an active port.It was probably not going to live up to anyEat, Pray, Loveexpectations, but this way I’d get them out of my system. And by the time I realized I hated living alone, far from my friends and favorite bagel spots, Laura would be back in Brooklyn again, because Nick was not going to be able to live up to whatever high expectations she had for him. I would fly back home as soon as I got her inevitable tearful phone call and she’d run into my arms and tell me how right I had been all along.
“I know,” I’d say in my endless benevolence. “This is why I only signed a short-term lease.”
My plan did not involve making new friends, let alone falling for anyone. The funny thing about improv is, you have to expect the unexpected.
So there I was,the night of the kiss, sitting across from Mark at a thick wooden table in the back of a cozy St. John’s gastropub with a fire in the corner and a glass of wine in front of me. It would have been romantic…unless you know Mark.
Mark is dark. Mark is world-weary. Mark likes to talk about the pointlessness of existence, and more than one of his improvs has turned into an apocalyptic dystopia where zombie bankers are destroying the world. Mark is also exactly my type. Every guy I’ve had a crush on for the last few years has been like Mark—bitter and funny and a few years older than me. The problem is that most of them have been married, which hasn’t always stopped them from hitting on me. Mark at least had the advantage of being divorced.
“Here’s the thing you need to know about Paul,” Mark began. “He is never going to get serious with anyone, romantically.”
“It was just a kiss,” I said.
“And who kissed who?” Mark asked.
I opened my mouth and then settle on a half-shrug.
“He kissed you as much as you kissed him. I think you know that. But it doesn’t matter.”
