Pretend that you’re in a another country, one that is an island and not a continent, one that is all green hills below you and snow-capped mountains above you and you’re somewhere in the middle, in a place called Queenstown, where there are wooden buildings against the rise of those hills, edges leading upward, and everything is beautiful. It reminds you of ski lodges in Colorado and elegant tourist towns in Michigan and is thousands of miles away from both.

Pretend that you’re staying in a hostel and one of your friends has just gone bungee jumping with the black sky behind her and the city lights laid out below her, and she didn’t tell anyone she was going. Now she is back and you are all laughing and you’re eating thin soup, but it’s hot and free because that’s what the hostels do here. You are on a tour of the country, through the highlands where you climbed a glacier, balancing over crevices with spiked boots and athletic shorts and sometimes a rope handrail that the guide never used, and the valleys, where the jungle was all around and you expected dinosaurs.

Pretend that you go to the store, because you need to buy something to eat for the bus tomorrow: peanuts, maybe, or Maori Hu-hu larvae, which are said to taste the same. You’re planning ahead, is all, just the little bit of planning that you still have to do.

Pretend that the streets aren’t even that full, and it’s nice. In America, this town would be packed from end to end to end with tourists and they’d all have cameras and packs around their waists and they’d be screaming at their crying children to stop crying and their happy children to watch where they were walking lest they be struck and killed by a car. But here, the streets are just pleasantly occupied. There are couples walking along the peer with space around them; the grass runs up to the docks, darkest green, to hit the stone wall that people are walking on, balancing, further along, and until it reaches the monument to a war that has passed. Below that, a quick crescent of sand and gravel, mixed, then the water, lapping at the shore where it looks like the bays you’ve seen all your life even though you know it’s the ocean. There are people who live here, chatting, their accents thick and swelling around you. It’s that ideal combination of activity and inactivity that leaves you feeling relaxed though not alone. Further downtown there is the beat of music, the shouts of people just drunk enough to be happy about it.

Pretend that you’re willing to lose yourself in this world, and it both scares and excites you. You like the crisp feel of the air, where winter is coming. You like the lights and the noise downtown, but also the quiet streets that climb the hills, the roads buckling back in on each other, what they call a switchback, lined with houses. You like that the cars drive on the other side of the road and that the people say rubbish instead of trash.
Pretend that you know you’re disconnected from the rest of your life, but that it’s all right.

Pretend that, just maybe, you haven’t even really noticed yet, because nothing has been there to make it stand out in such stark relief.

Pretend that you’re basking in it, forgetting.

Pretend that someone goes to the front of the store and gets a newspaper and then they’re coming back to you with their eyes wide and their tin of peanuts forgotten near the newsstand and their lips parted in a look that is surprise, horror, sorrow, unspeakable. They’re holding the paper up, just reading the front, and everyone is crowding around, all of your little group from the hostel, and you’re reading the headline and it says there was a shooting. There’s a picture of a student lying on the grass, face down, arms at the wrong angles. There’s no blood that you can see but maybe it’s just under them. Maybe you think it’s there, just soaking into the grass, because the student is dead. Pretend that the paper says the shooting was far away, in America, and it’s still on the front page, even here in this town, the perfect mix of everything, and you’ve never felt so far away in your life.