In one month, I will have been living in this country for 15 years. 15 years is a consequential bit of time, it cannot be dismissed as an experiment or an act of whimsy.
When people ask, as they will, how long I've been here, where I'm from, why on earth I'm here, I answer with facts. But that's not what they're looking for.
Behind their questions I hear hidden ones, or maybe I project them there myself.
How can you remember who you are when you are so very far from where you grew up? From everyone who knows you? What anchors you?
I never really answer. I weave pretty tales of cross-cultural communication and assimilation and integration. But I do not tell them how far from stable, in the most literal sense of the word, being a foreigner is.
I always come home after one of those conversations unsettled. My perpetual state, but worse on nights like those.
And so I end it the only way I can. I pour a glass of thick red wine. A tale of the dirt and sunshine and wood that surrounds me but is not my own. And raspberries, like those I picked off bushes at my grandmother's house decades ago. A fruit that can be sweet, but not that much. An echo of home but no more.
When people ask, as they will, how long I've been here, where I'm from, why on earth I'm here, I answer with facts. But that's not what they're looking for.
Behind their questions I hear hidden ones, or maybe I project them there myself.
How can you remember who you are when you are so very far from where you grew up? From everyone who knows you? What anchors you?
I never really answer. I weave pretty tales of cross-cultural communication and assimilation and integration. But I do not tell them how far from stable, in the most literal sense of the word, being a foreigner is.
I always come home after one of those conversations unsettled. My perpetual state, but worse on nights like those.
And so I end it the only way I can. I pour a glass of thick red wine. A tale of the dirt and sunshine and wood that surrounds me but is not my own. And raspberries, like those I picked off bushes at my grandmother's house decades ago. A fruit that can be sweet, but not that much. An echo of home but no more.
4 comments:
Nic, Glad to see your still writing here occasionally.
Oops,...you're
Right out of the Lost Generation, you. But I suppose there's comfort in brave decisions, and beauty. And your stories are interesting to me still, maybe because sometimes I feel like a foreigner here where I grew up and where my parents grew up. Home is such a funny word.
Not often enough, but yes. From time to time.
JMH : Ceci would explique cela! Home is the oddest word ever.
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