We're moving!!

A major life update. Plus: learning to live with waiting

Last week I picked up my biometrics residence permit from the post office. I am now legally entitled to work, study, and remain in the UK for the next two and a half years. My months-long international move from hell is finally, actually, truly over. I live here now!!!!!!!

In all of the last minute chaos, I somehow didn’t officially update newsletter readers when my visa got approved at the end of last month. I’m so sorry if I confused anyone when I was back in Preston all of a sudden. I’d waited around in the US for weeks while my biometrics got processed, and once I got the all-clear to come home to Lynette and Gus, things happened really, really quickly. I was on a plane the very next day, and I’ve been back for nearly a month now :)

Lynette and I have spent over a year of marriage and four and a half total years together being separated for months at a time. It’s still hard to believe, that now I’ll only have to go back to the US when I want to. (Next trip will be to Connecticut/New York for Christmas, New Years, and my beloved Grandma’s 80th birthday.)

I’ll admit that I did get a big rush of fomo watching everyone’s Instagram stories from Dyke March over the weekend. In recent years I’ve tended to avoid most official Pride events in New York, having been lightly traumatized early in my career when I ran BuzzFeed’s disaster of a Pride float and organized a couple of the company’s public Pride parties (which got progressively worse with each passing year as BuzzFeed lost money and influence).

But I did always love going to Riis, the people’s beach and historically queer enclave in Queens, to escape corporate Pride during the official weekend’s festivities. And there’s nothing in the world better than Dyke March, which isn’t officially sanctioned by the city; it’s a protest march, not a parade, though it’s also celebratory, in-your-face, joyful. I miss the queens who sing “God is a dyke” on the same street corner every year. I miss seeing people of all gender expressions and ages and races and abilities, with their clever signs and cute outfits, and running into old friends and avoiding exes, and splashing around topless in the fountain at Washington Square Park.

Lynette and I could really use a queer community over here. I wrote earlier this month about going viral for #lesbiancouple content, which brought dozens if not hundreds of lesbians and queer people who live in and around Preston out of the woodwork. I’ve since been DMing with a local drag queen about throwing a big queer event here later this summer <3

In the meantime, we’ve been enjoying events thrown by other people. Last weekend our second favorite pub in town, Plug and Taps, celebrated their 5 year anniversary with a delicious pizza pop-up, and the weekend before the city honored the 75th anniversary of the HMT Empire Windrush docking in Tilbury, Essex, carrying passengers from the Caribbean who’d been encouraged to move to the UK to fill post-war labour shortages. Windrush has come to symbolize the wider mass-immigration movement from the late 40s through the early 70s from across the British empire, encompassing a generation of many tens of thousands, including Lynette’s parents, who immigrated from Jamaica in the 60s shortly before she was born.

Windrush has also become synonymous in recent years with political scandal. In 2018 it came to light that at least 80 people who’d come to the UK as a part of the Windrush generation were wrongly deported from the UK by the Home Office, while many more were wrongly detained and denied their legal rights. This horrific treatment of Black immigrants who’d lived in the UK for many decades, helping to rebuild the country’s battered economy, was a direct result of then Prime Minister Theresa May’s hostile, lackadaisical immigration policies.

75th anniversary celebrations around the UK this month were in part a corrective to the scandal, as well as a means of honoring and commemorating the generation’s enormous influence on Black British culture. Here in Preston, on the main field in our gorgeous Avenham Park, the city enjoyed a full day of live bands, Caribbean food carts, and a mechanical bull that both Lynette and I took for a spin after our friends all refused to try it. Weenies!

Lynette at the Windrush 75 festival. Credit to our friend Jonny’s dad who was photographing the event

We’re having a really lovely summer. It’s bittersweet knowing now that, if all goes well, in just a couple of months, we’ll be relocating an hour away….

…to Liverpool! Where our offer was recently accepted on a little 2-bedroom house!!!!!!

When I say “our” offer, I really mean Lynette’s. I have no credit history in this country, so I can’t be on the mortgage. But once we move, I plan to get a stupid job, and start making art again, and sell my book, and, hopefully, sell more books, and maybe also a movie? 5 years from now, when I’ll have the opportunity to apply for an indefinite leave to remain in the country, I fully expect to be in an entirely different place financially than I am now. It’s been tough on our relationship, Lynette being the primary breadwinner through my painfully expensive immigration process while I get myself settled over here. I want her to know that in the very near future I’ll be able to take care of her, just as she’s taken care of me.

I almost didn’t want to share this news, mostly because I don’t want to jinx it; something could go wrong, this particular house could fall through. But I’m choosing to believe that everything might just actually work out.

Neither of us know a single soul who lives in Liverpool. We’ll both be starting over from scratch, which is both scary and terribly exciting. Lynette will be able to watch every single match of her beloved team among lots of other people who care just as much as she does (which is a lot). We’ll be ten minutes away from a tennis center where I’m planning to take lessons. Our new neighborhood is very lively, with lots of students, and there’s just so much stuff on offer, to do and to see. Every time I take a little wander around the area on Google Maps I discover something else I can’t wait to check out: a local makers market that offers sewing classes, a huge community center, craft breweries, parks, art installations.

The other night I showed my friend Jade some of the jewelry I used to make, when I realized that she’d never seen any of it, or known me at all as someone who makes things, even though we’ve been friends about a year now. I gave her a pair of real rosebuds in resin on gold hoops and she was so delighted with them, kept telling me how talented I was. I wanted to cry.

Early in the pandemic I’d unlocked this huge well of creativity deep inside of me that had been mostly dormant since childhood, and having to kind of stuff that all away again while going back and forth between countries and apartments over the past year has been so frustrating and sad. I miss making things!

In Liverpool, where I’m planning to rent a little art studio space as soon as I can afford to do so, I feel like my whole self can really come alive. A whole self I maybe haven’t even met yet.

Lynette’s Comment Corner

To say I’m overwhelmed is the understatement of the year, but all in a good way. It’s like I’ve gone from obsessively checking my emails to deal with Shannon’s visa, joining Facebook groups for advice, waiting on 1am Home Office updates, always on red alert. That’s come and gone, and that’s been replaced by obsessively checking Rightmove and making house viewing appointments. And now THAT’S been replaced with checking in on emails about the legal side of things now that our offer’s been accepted.

Our whole relationship has been so much waiting: for travel bans to end, for my divorce, for Shannon’s visa. Once we’re finally in our home, we won’t have to wait anymore. Thank god for Sex and The City. We’ve been rewatching the whole series and it’s a godsend.

But we’re good. I’ve imagined us together in this house. This is nice waiting now: waiting to get a little sister for Gus, since we really want another dog. Waiting to do up the place the way we want to.

Does it mean I’m getting old, that I just want to be done with shit? I just want to be together in our house. But like Shannon I’ve also sourced some local quiz nights, art centres, so much to do.

Who would have thought that four years ago when we both got on that cruise ship for different reasons, both of us unhappy but both of us full of hope for something better, though we didn’t know what. And now we’re farting our way through the night in our too-hot flat. It’s truly amazing.

It really is amazing.

Thanks so much for reading. Til next time!

xxSK