So, I am finally here. One year and four days after my husband moved to Chile, I have finished graduate school, said my long goodbye to the friends and familiar places that made it impossible to leave San Francisco for seven years, enjoyed four full days of sun (an eternity for an SF summer), and arrived in the middle of winter, six months into my marriage. My husband and I can look at one another and know we no longer have to do the count down (five more days together, four, one…). Now, we have all the days.

I don’t have all the Spanish words. Anything but. I’m in nesting mode, being patient about venturing into the six-million-strong wolf pack five flights down. I like unpacking and moving from closet to closet the things my husband has had 12 months to grow accustomed to in a certain position — and now I’m here to move his hard hat there and the ironing board there and is that the same sour cream from when I visited in March? It doesn’t matter. These are the very things I’ve fantasized about: the simple motions of coupled life. Ordering pizza on a Sunday night, kissing goodbye at the start of the day, crawling into bed at night and knowing we don’t have to check another 24-hour block of togetherness off the calendar. An open expanse of time lies ahead of us, bordered by snow-capped Andes and punctuated with tall glass buildings.

June Reunion

Our first weekend here, we took a plane 8,000 feet over those dense mountains and spent the weekend in Mendoza, Argentina, where we were each exhausted enough, from our respective year of honest labor and sheer missing, to order room service at the hotel and watch Talladega Nights in subtitles. We ventured out the next day of course, but for the time being I was in a city I’d never been, in a borrowed bathrobe, splitting a hamburguesa with my husband, and feeling right at home.