Notes on Holding Two Homes in Your Head
Louisiana and Aotearoa do not share a holiday calendar. The work is holding both without turning family into a timezone problem.
[ journal ]
Mardi Gras and Matariki do not share a calendar. Holding Louisiana and Aotearoa in the same head means missing something on purpose and feeling it anyway. This is not the timezone ops note. That one is clocks, Do Not Disturb, meeting titles. This is the weight that shows up when the clocks are already correct.
Family calls from New Orleans land in my morning or my night depending on the season. I pick a window I can keep, not a window that makes me a hero once and a ghost for a month. Holidays are worse. Thanksgiving is an ordinary Thursday here. Christmas in Tāmaki Makaurau is a beach and a closed office park. Someone at home is at a table I can only attend by video, and the video will be wrong in the way all videos are wrong: delay, angle, the dish you cannot smell.
I keep two calendars visible. US federal holidays. New Zealand public holidays. The days my people actually gather, which are not always the official ones. I mark them before the month starts so I do not schedule a deep-work sprint through someone else’s hard weekend, or go silent on a Sunday that is a birthday at home.
Dual-calendar grief is a real weight. You are not in two places. You are in one place with a second place talking in your pocket. I do not solve it. I budget for it. A longer call on a weekend. A letter that is not a newsletter. A visit planned as a visit, not as a layover I pretend is enough.
Louisiana stays in my weather memory and in the way I talk to strangers. Aotearoa stays in the daylight and the paperwork and the harbour. I do not mash them into a brand. I let them argue in my head and then I make dinner.
When I cannot be at the table, I say so early. Surprise absence is the unkind version of distance.
— JV · Dark Heart Labs.