Tuesday, June 01, 2004
Wait for it to call
Crinkles in the wood tell me
all I need to know
about the previous epiphany
Natural light will illuminate
the wonders that anxiety
brings as sleep abates.
This place is still foreign to me. Long ago I consented to embrace both sides of the Atlantic, becoming this Anglo-American hybrid that is utterly bewildered by both of his cultures. There is a certain side of me that is content, as I sit at the small wooden table by my “Gothic” style iron bed, which just may the most comfortable thing I’ve had to pleasure of sleeping on since last year. I cannot deny the fact that I am supremely comfortable here, but at the same time I feel like I lost something during the turbulence over the Atlantic. Maybe it was my drive that disappeared, breaking off of the chassis and plummeting to the streets of Dublin as my Delta flight passed overhead.
At the time I was sitting there, pondering whether or not the turbulence would let me sleep, when I began to think about the man who sat next to me. I never did catch his name; you tend to leave names out of your conversations on flights. It would be dangerous to get to know someone well enough to ask his name, just so you could add it to a long list of people you will never ever see again. Mr. Nameless Pakistani was a cheerful fellow, especially since I was not originally fated to be next to him. While illegal in some countries, airlines in the US will overbook a flight on the hopes that enough people will drop out at the last moment. This failed to happen on flight 064, and so anyone who got on the airplane as a group ended up getting separated, prompting millions of in-flight seat exchanges. The first time I had been the sole person separating a boy from his sister. The second time I gave up my seat so a pretty English/Indian woman could sit with her two toddler children, and so I ended up next to the Pakistani.
His life story is irrelevant, as he was an American now. The slate is wiped clean when you move to Silicon Valley and stick your kid in university. Nether less his past had come back to him in the form of an ill father, and so he was destined to spend 24 hours traveling from McDonald’s and Christianity to McDonald’s and Islam. I envied him, not because the color of his skin allowed him to wander streets I wouldn’t be able to risk for many years, but because he had a past to return to; a mission to fulfill.
I would like to think I have a past here, but little green forms being handed out at the International Office of Manchester University say that I’ve been gone too long to be considered normal. It is then with the British government’s greatest sympathies that I, a citizen of her Majesty’s United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, must pay as much as three times the standard amount to go to university here. I open and examine the two little booklets which are my identity:
PASSPORT: United States of America
The front cover is imprinted with the famous image of the American eagle: clasping a branch in one claw, and a bundle of arrows in the other. In its beak is a piece of parchment that says: E Pluribus Unum. Inside the passport states:
The Secretary of State of the United States of America hereby requests all whom it may concern to permit the citizen/national of the United States named herein to pass without delay or hindrance nd in case of need to give all lawful aid and protection.
PASSPORT: European Union, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
The front cover in imprinted with the UK symbol of the lion and the unicorn surrounding the crown, with a hard to read phrase. An easier phrase is on the bottom: Dieu et Mon Droit. The notice on the inside concerning helping me is the same as the US notice, except that Secretary of State is replaced by "her Majesty" or something along those lines.
The US passport is full of records of my travels, the European Union one is empty. Shall I embrace a future without a past, or shall I continue to remember?
Listening to: Alkaline Trio - Queen of Pain
