When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully. – Samuel Johnson
I now have something in common with dairy products. I have an expiration date.
March 15, 2007, in fact. In approximately six and one-half months, I will no longer be legally allowed to reside in Australia. At a minute past midnight, if I'm still here, I'll officially be an illegal alien. Granted, the odds of jack-booted DIMA thugs breaking down my door and dragging me kicking and screaming to the airport are pretty slim (thankfully), but it's a strange thought indeed to consider that simply by waking up in my bed on March 16th of next year, I'd be committing a criminal act.
There are a lot of things that most of us take for granted growing up, and one of them is that we won't have to leave the country on a specific future date, very possibly for good. In the other cities I've lived in (New York, Chicago and Prague), at some point I had a date set to leave, to get on a plane and fly somewhere else – but that was a choice I made, not a legal obligation. This time, instead of tracking the countdown in anticipation of my new destination, I find I have a mild, but constant, sense of mounting dread, watching the days fall away one by one. Options must be considered. Decisions must be made. Actions must be taken.
Don't I want to stay in Australia, people ask me frequently. Unfortunately, I don't really think I do. Nothing against Australia, per se – my life here is pretty comfortable, overall, and Melbourne really is a nice place to live, and even though I dislike a lot of the politics, they're not anywhere near as worrisome to me as the ones in the US that upset me the most. It's just that the distance is wearing on me. Except for a few friends and school colleagues, everyone else I know is 10,000 miles and 14 hours away, every minute of every day, and I don't know if I can keep it up past next year. My father is turning 80 this year, and I'm flying home in October for the big party. Five days in NYC, with about 24 hours of travel on either end, jet lagged the entire time; I'll be glad to see my dad but I can't say I'm looking forward to the travelling. (Especially if I can't bring my iPod or laptop on the plane.)
Of course, the sensible little voice in my head says, stay here, where you've got industry contacts and references with well-known names, and get a job and start taking your career to the next level. But if I got a job – and I'd have to get a job within three months of graduating to be able to remain here – I'd have to stick with it for what, year and a half, two years, at least? Two more years of late-night phone calls and expensive trips. Australians are well familiar with the tyranny of distance; anytime you want to fly anywhere international outside of, say, New Zealand or Samoa, it'll take at least 8 hours and cost you a grand, at least. Now, that's one thing if you grew up here and you only want to do some travelling abroad occasionally, but as a Canadian woman who's been here ten years pointed out to me, every time she wants to visit her family back home, it costs $7000 for airfare for herself, her husband and her child. Living abroad from where you grew up can really be quite a big investment.
But at the same time, I don't want to live in the US again, for various personal reasons. What I really want is to go back to Europe, where I started my little adventure three years ago before being struck dumb by the wide, warm smile of a young Australian guy in Prague. (Hey, it might not have worked out in the end, but at least I can definitively say that yes, there really is such a thing as love at first sight.) I've dreamt of living in London since I was still counting my age in single digits. And of course, it's a major publishing centre, and there are many jobs there that I know I'd be more than qualified for. Only problem is that I don't have the legal right to work there, unless I get a job offer from a company willing to sponsor me for a work permit. And of course since I don't have the legal right to look for work there, either, I'd have to get a job offer while I was still here, which is really unlikely to happen. (As in, pretty near impossible. Would you hire someone from overseas that you'd never even met?) Neither do I have British ancestry, nor enough points to qualify for the Highly Skilled Migrant Programme, nor a British guy who will marry me. (I am taking applications, though. Please send photo. Glasses a plus.) I have a grandfather who was born in Poland, and you hear a lot of talk on the interwebs about the possibility of getting a Polish (i.e. EU!) passport; I'm looking into it, but it's by no means a sure thing, as there are all sorts of laws regarding when your ancestor left Poland and when they were naturalised in another country that could disqualify me. And when your only chance is a longshot, you know you're probably not in too great a shape.
So anyway, assuming I don't end up staying here, I'm headed back to that place of trying to figure out how to move to another country again, and even though I've now done it a few times, it really still doesn't get much easier. I find myself sizing up all my possessions: what can I sell? What can I throw away? What can I take in a suitcase, and what can I ship? I've been moving a couple of times per year for the past five or six years, and it really is getting tiring. I'd like to find a place I feel comfortable in and just set for a bit. And all this wrangling with visas and immigration departments gets depressing. It makes you feel very, very small, and up against a very large, faceless bureaucracy that doesn't give a shit about you or your dreams and hopes and ambitions, no matter how pure your intentions. I don't want to just move to England, get free meds from NHS and collect money off the dole, after all – I want to get a job, find a place to live, settle down, get citizenship, pay taxes and live my life. Why should it be that big a deal that I was born on a different piece of land from that particular piece of land that I want to live on?
Alas, it's really not easy trying to be a citizen of the world when the governments of the world don't agree.