The 22nd was a pretty rough day for me, just sick over what had happened.
After the initial message I received, I’d desperately tried to repair the harm I’d caused as we texted back and forth, but there really wasn’t much I could do.
So I spent until about 2:30 in the morning going back through my blog posts to try and make the posts private and anonymous like I should have from the beginning. That meant reading a lot of posts and redacting a lot of personal information.
I wish there were more that I could do, or in this case, undo, but I couldn’t do anything about the stuff I’d written that was painful to read that had already been read. It was… too late for that.
Stupid insecurities. Stupid choice to assume understanding with direct clarification. Stupid choice to horriblize.
Hopefully, none of you have the issues I have nor make the mistakes that i make. Hopefully, these are long-ago-learned lessons; but if there is anything that y’all can take away from my experiences that’s valuable for you, I hope that my mistakes can be of benefit to more than just me.
Anyway, so after that down up then really down day, I finally got to bed about 2:30, crawling into bed in the little spot that we’d picked out on the side of the road by the river east of Greymouth.
…
Morning, of course, came early, and I was very very tired. I tried to do more via text to repair the damage I’d done, but there was… not much I could do.
I was just sick about it.
Obviously, I didn’t write in my journal here that night, taking four ish days to finally get something written that i felt somewhat decent about.
I think I started that journal entry that morning, but didn’t finish for four days. I think I spent a good long time working on it that day, only to scrap most of it, nearly all of it.
I think I forgot to mention that while we were in Greymouth at the warehouse store, we talked to one of the employees there who pointed us to Mega Mitre 10, a store A lot Like home Depot or Lowe’s, just not quite so huge. She said that they sold stuff that we could make bug netting with that would be good enough to keep out the sand flies!!!
So if I didn’t mention that in the previous post, that’s why we stayed just outside of Greymouth, so we could go back in the morning and try and figure out our South Island sandfly problems.
So we went to Mega Mitre 10 after getting up and after I talked a bit with Chase about what happened.
The store had several different kinds of netting that might work. So I bought quarantine netting and I also bought screen that looked pretty much identical to the kinds of screens you put on windows back home.
The quarantine netting, oddly, had holes that were still too big and would let the sand flies in. At least I’m assuming so, as it looked about the same as the other mosquito netting we’d purchased.
The window-screen-looking stuff seemed more promising, but how to attach it to the windows?
I had thought maybe magnetic tape would be a good way to go, putting it all around the window frame, and then gluing or epoxying or something like that the mesh to the magnetic strips, but that turned out to be a bit more than we wanted to take on. It wasn’t long before I found a YouTube video that showed a guy using just simple small but powerful magnets spaced a little ways apart. He said it worked totally fine, so Chase went back in, bought a bunch of those small powerful magnets, and bada bing bada boom, we had it!
Now we just had to see if it actually would work, if the holes were small enough to keep out the pesky sand flies.
Hmmm… pesky isn’t nearly strong enough a word for those devils.
Devils.
Yes, devils.
Anyway, after getting all that taken care of, spending quite a bit of money to do it on a whole bunch of different possible construction and installation techniques, we called it good, and I dropped Chase off at a nearby park so that he could chat on the phone in private with somebody.
I then drove to the other side of the town, and parked in a little parking area for a local cave that people liked to explore.
I almost went in the cave, but in the end, I decided not to, spending the majority of my time on my phone in the car. I think I spent a little while working on the post that I uploaded yesterday, not really keeping any of what I wrote, though. I also spent some time looking at plane tickets home trying to figure out what to do there. I still haven’t bought my return ticket. Probably need to do that today (The 26th here, but Christmas back home).
I’m a little afraid that prices have gone up even more, especially with all the big storm problems back in the States.
Anyway, after 3 or 4 hours of being there, I went back and picked up Chase, and we headed south and then East to Arthur’s pass.
I was in really bad shape emotionally from what had happened, nearly in tears at one point as Chase asked about how I was doing and whatnot.
I just wanted to disappear.
I almost split from traveling with Chase, almost asking him to drop me off with all my backpacking gear and whatnot. I would have gone through with that plan, but he said he didn’t want to split up.
It took me a little while to get back to a more reasonable place emotionally.
And it was really hard to take my friends at their word when they said that there wasn’t anything to fix, that I felt worse than they did.
And it was really hard to just start communicating again like we had before. It’s all electronic at this point, but it’s still hard for me because how do you just start communicating like you did before as if nothing ever happened? That’s just not how my brain works. It feels so… I don’t know… Like I didn’t do what needed to be done, and now I’m just leaving it behind. Like the elephant in the room that gets swept under the rug but is still there.
I worry about the pain caused, what they might be thinking now, and how the dynamics of the friendship will have changed–or whatever the right verbiage is to explain the things will be different now.
But of course, maybe my concerns are just yet another example of toils of grief I’m enduring over evils which will never arrive.
I just want to do more to fix what I did. And I think I feel like I’m just washing everything under the rug if I go on as if nothing happened, but I know that sometimes doing more isn’t better. I know sometimes doing more goes too far and does more damage.
So I’ve done the best I know how for now, and if there’s some way in the future that I can do more, I would pay a pretty hefty price to be able to do that if it would make a difference.
The drive into Arthur’s pass felt a lot like Utah. The mountains look a lot the same from a distance. It’s just when you get closer and see that the vegetation is very different.
I’m definitely so much more at home in mountains. It’s so nice to have solitude here. People are so spread out in New zealand. I think there’s something like 4 million people in the entire country, and the vast majority of those people live in the bigger cities, leaving the rest of the country as mostly farm land, timberland, and parkland.
It’s just so so wonderful here.
Chase and I drove all the way up to the devil’s punch bowl Falls parking lot, I think, before heading back the way we came a bit and sleeping at the entrance to a hiking trail for one of the mountains.
Love and hugs. 😊
Lift the World
~ stephen
Lift the World 