To what may be

Biking around Otsuka in the chill of late December everything clicks. Finally, after months and months of uncertainty, we are at the end of the year. So many of the changes we forsaw from the top of Primrose hill at the end of August have come true. I’ve been once again startup unemployed, though in a far better fashion than ever before. We have permanent residency in Hong Kong, a dream underway since we applied for the Quality Migrant visa in twenty eighteen from our tiny San Francisco flat. Apartment, I would have called it then. 5’s has finished her first semester of school. We have moved apartments.

The last fact is a reminder that we didn’t see all of the changes coming. Moving was just another thing thrown on top, a gift from our past lives to our current one. It’s also a reminder that the people we are every day affect who we become. Settling back in to the neighborhood we first fell in love with Hong Kong through has been final touch on this section of days. Sitting on a plastic stool eating meat off the grill of the car shop’s street party on the 24th of December after putting 5’s to bed, while my partner did the Santa preparations, was a gift. Having a Carlsberg at the table I have long joked was sponsored by the brand, being welcomed by the crew we say hi to daily, the odd group that has watched us grow from a couple new to Hong Kong to a small family, was a wonderful way to be welcomed home.

There are gifts elsewhere also: Tara’s startup granted new life, which will power more of our adventures in the coming year. Mostly for the better not all of the things we envisioned in London have come to pass, proof that prognostication is both an art of willing the future to be and not to be, sometimes with results.

And now, on vacation, biking around our second neighborhood, where we are recognized almost as much as in Tai Hang, I feel the success of our endeavors. We are not comfortable everywhere, not yet. Maybe not ever. But the list of places is growing, and more importantly the list of circumstances is growing. We are comfortable in more whens as much as more wheres. In trusting each other we are trusting ourselves. Each time we sit with 5’s, teaching her to breathe deeply when wheezing, we are sitting with ourselves, with all we could be. At first I think it a strange idea, before remembering it’s William Gibson’s mantra, that the future is here but not evenly distributed, recast in more personal terms. The changes we foresaw, the uncertainty we knew we were approaching, had resolutions we could also see.

We were merely uncertain in which to believe.