Saturday, December 10, 2011

I will never stop being American

Sunday, December 4, 2011
My bedroom in Michigan.


I’m sitting in a pile of my past, carelessly tossing things into a big plastic bag slated for give-away. Dresses and pants and sweatshirts and t-shirts and shoes and purses and pajamas. I work at a comical speed, feeling nothing but relief as my closet slowly empties. My friend Abbey catches the soon-to-be-forgotten items and places them in a giant black bag. Hours go by and we fill up two bags, three bags, four bags. I’m astounded and a little embarrassed by the sheer volume of crap I’ve acquired over the years.
                                                     
For a while we work in silence, sometimes we chat about unrelated things, and every once in a while I uncover an entertaining memory and tell her about it. But we’re working on a deadline and there’s no time to get sentimental. Eye on the prize: A clean closet, a fresh start, less crap for my parents to store when my mom moves to Chicago and I head back to Tanzania. We throw the broken or otherwise useless stuff away and I marvel at the quantity of crap that will very, very slowly decompose in some landfill somewhere. I try to imagine how much space a lifetime of my garbage will eventually claim.  It makes me feel a little queasy.

I get deeper into my closet and further into the past. 

Toss another shirt printed with inside jokes I no longer understand. Another homecoming dress. Another pair of high heels I bought specifically to match that homecoming dress and never wore again. Another hoodie with the name of a play I was in or a team I was briefly affiliated with. 

I wonder if I should save some of these things—relics of my high-school self. But I’m in the zone now, tossing away sentimental item after sentimental item. No regrets, no second thoughts. No first thoughts, either, really. Just the mechanical act of tossing away.

I don’t need stuff to have memories. I repeat this to myself when the regrets start to come, hours after the stuff has been hauled away for good.  

I can’t bring myself to toss my prom dress. For a while I leave it hanging on the shelf—the lone survivor of my war on the past. Later I decide to give it to my cousin, in the hopes that she can find it a happy home. That dress deserves to be worn.

Things get a little more personal as Abbey and I begin to attack desks and drawers. We go through books, notebooks, pictures, journals, old schoolwork. This time I’m careful to place certain things in the “keep” pile.

I carefully, almost reverently, collect my old journals from their various hiding places around the room and place them in a backpack for safe keeping. I take a moment to hold each notebook and flip through page after page of big, sloppy writing. Rather than read the writing, I try to remember the feel of pen on paper. Try to remember being the person who wrote those words. I can’t. I look at the pages and think about the young girl who filled them. I try to picture myself as this girl, or this girl as me. It doesn’t quite work. I have the eerie feeling that the girl who covered those pages in sloppy scrawl is not the same as the young woman who is currently home on vacation after a year and a half in Tanzania.

~*~                                                                                     

Since I’ve gotten back from my brief vacation, PCVs keep asking me what the weirdest thing about America was. There were definitely moments—hundreds of them--when I thought, “Wow, this country is super bizarre.” I was especially shocked by how easy everything was. Want Taco Bell? You don’t even have to leave your car. In the mood for a hot shower? Just turn it on and hop in. Bored? Turn on the TV, or computer, or Wii, or any of the million other entertainment options regularly available to you. Want new stuff? Hop in the car and go buy it.

That’s weird, right?  

But, really, America’s no weirder than it was before I left. More people have iPhones, fashion’s changed a bit (thanks letting me raid your closet, Mom), but the country is still fundamentally the same.

What’s changed is the way I look at it.

One day Abbey and I were driving down Orchard Lake Rd, and I realized that the two of us were not, strictly speaking, alone…but we sort of were. Sitting at a traffic light, I peered through the windows of the cars around us. Old men, teenagers, mothers. Very few cars contained more than one or two people, but when added together it turned out Abbey and I were actually surrounded by hundreds of people, each one alone inside her individual ton of metal, and we were alone inside our ton of metal, and no one was really alone but no one was actually together. My head hurt.

In my village, there is exactly one car and it’s currently broken. Walking at a leisurely pace down thin dirt paths, I come in contact with hundreds of people each day, and greet most everyone, friends and strangers alike. We exchange “the news of the morning” or confirm that we “woke up peacefully.” We see each other and, for a brief moment, we connect.

That connection between strangers exists in America, but it takes special effort to seek it out. You can smile at strangers, and sometimes they’ll smile back. Bartenders and baristas will pretend to be your friend as long as you keep buying drinks. You can make small-talk with the person next to you on the plane, but only until you’ve reached cruising altitude and you both put in your headphones and slip back into your independent worlds.

Maybe I’m being unfair. I actually had a wonderful time in America. But besides the incredible selection of delicious delicious food, the material aspects weren’t what made the trip worthwhile. It was the human connections... Hours spent looking at old photos with my grandparents. Answering insightful questions posed by West Hills 8th Graders and Model High Schoolers. Reconnecting with my oldest friends.

America might not always feel like home, but the people there will always be my people. I will never stop being American.
                                                                                  
But something in me has shifted over the past year and a half. How weird and sad to feel like a stranger in your homeland. How strange to walk down the aisles of Plum Market and be torn between buying twenty different kinds of rice, just because you can, and running out the door screaming “do you people seriously need twenty different kinds of rice to choose from?” I will never be able to walk into a supermarket without imagining my neighbor’s children—eyes full of hope, bellies full of nothing. I will never be able to clean out my closet without being haunted by little Razaki’s bare feet.
                                        
I wish that last paragraph were true, but I’m almost certainly exaggerating.

Here’s the truth: A day will come when I will walk into a supermarket and feel only my own hunger. I’ll probably own an iPhone at some point, and I will talk on it as I drive mindlessly down a crowded, lonely street. One day I’ll have another closet full of clothes and nothing but pictures by which to remember little shoeless Razaki. 

Here's the truth: One day I'll read an article about something terrible going on in Africa, and I will feel nothing. 

Here’s the truth: I will never stop being American.