Two Weeks

Here I am at the dining room table, drinking coffee, listening to the leaves rustle on the trees... breezes blowing in the windows, a green haze of sunlight filtering through a veritable forest of foliage, steady power, knowledge that the water is clean straight out of the tap, favorite Trader Joe's snacks in the fridge, laundry in the dryer. Everything is as I know it to be even though I have only been at this house for one month and a half.

This is Illinois. I was raised here. The dirt and the grass and the flowering weeds in the empty lots have a distinct and intoxicating smell that exists nowhere else on earth. The people look how I expect them to look, talk the way I have always heard, drive in the same bad ways as all the other drivers, eat where I expect them to eat making certain restaurants instantly popular, congregate for the same reasons, in the same ways with the same target picnic blankets. We all look the same. I can spot the Chicagoans in the airports now. You can just tell by the way they dress in black tops and blue jeans and the way they stand with cocky self assurance and the particular proportions of height and girth. These are my people.

I am leaving here to invest in knowing other people. People who belong to someone else, who mean home to them. I am not going to Europe as so many assume when you try to politely skirt the issue of voluntarily not having a job by saying you'll "be traveling". I am going to Mexico, a place I barely knew existed outside of mythical Spring Break Cancun, and the somewhere that all those Mexicans came from to live in Chicago. How's that for ignorant American? Mexico is just as North American as the US and Canada, and I know so little about all three. Yet I stand up and say I'm American as though that is different. There are approximately 900 million people (if you believe wikipedia) who can rightfully call themselves American and I can't see them because they are like my own face. I need to go far away and look back in order to have proper perspective.

I will have new people. In two weeks, I will have new people. I am not going to visit, I am going to live and to love and to be of a place. I am not going to be a US citizen on vacation, or a scholar doing research, although I will do both of these things. I am freely and fully accepting that there is a world which produced a human being who is more like me than most of my people. I am beginning to trust that what is foreign is actually kin.

This kind of blows my mind.