Little Patriot by Karol M
“Travel is like adultery: one is always tempted to be unfaithful to one’s own country. To have imagination is inevitably to be dissatisfied with where you live … in our wanderlust, we are lovers looking for consummation.”
- Anatole Broyard
I once visited a zoo in Kathmandu, Nepal. The zoo was like a poorly-tended hospice; a wasteland of sickly, under-nourished animals who’d been abandoned to die. The lion cage was lined with garbage and the hippos waded through a thick soup of sewage. But perhaps the worst off, were two twin black bears who’d gone insane from being trapped in a six by six foot cell. They paced their cage, back and forth and back and forth and each time they paced past the barred window that faced the entrance of the zoo, they’d bash their heads against it.
This morning I woke up thinking about those bears. Sometimes I feel so trapped here in the US; so stuck. ‘Clawing-at-the-walls desperate to escape’ sorta stuck. And it’s frustrating because I can’t pin-point why. There’s nothing specific about my life here that I dislike, it’s more just this general feeling of unease; this haunting need to break free.
I think Bill Bryson described it best in I’m a Stranger Here Myself: Notes on Returning to America after 20 Years Away, when he wrote:
“I felt as if we’d made a terrible mistake. I had nothing against America, you understand. It’s a wonderful country, splendid in every way. But this felt uncomfortably like a backward step – like moving in with one’s parents in middle age. They may be perfectly delightful people, but you just don’t want to live with them any longer. Your life has moved on. I felt like that about a nation.”
Recently, I visited in an old friend from high school. As teenagers, we had a lot in common. Our mutual love of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, for example, our crush on Ben Afleck and our shared habit of cutting class to watch tapings of MTV’sTotal Request Live in Times Square…These were the bonds that held teenage friendships together.
But about 20 minutes into our lunch in New York two weeks ago, it became clear that our lives had diverged in two completely opposite directions. And after playing catch-up and reminiscing about some of crazy shenanigans we’d gotten ourselves into back then, we found we had nothing to say. The friendship was familiar and comfortable, but at some point over the years it’d gone stale. It had expired.
And that’s precisely how I feel about my relationship with America. It’s expired and no matter how hard I try to breathe new life into it, it’s too late. We’re just too different.
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