Never to return!
Jun. 1st, 2024 11:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dornishviperxAdieu, ma chérie ! Je ne serais jamais plus celle que j'étais !
[Fair warning, I think the way this is written makes it a fairly incomprehensible diary entry for people outside my head.]
Last week I was in the United States again, specifically with the purpose of unofficially attending my 5-year college graduation reunion (unofficially meaning I didn't register or attend anything, I was just hanging out on campus). This is a place I go to with... alarming regularity. I didn't go there last year, but I did go in 2022, 2021 and even 2020. I saw one of my partners, who I met in college and who still lives over there, and several of my friends. For the record I did mostly like seeing them all. I do want to say that first of all.
However, as for everything else about the trip? I hated it! It made my skin itch! There was something in the air, something that felt uncomfortable to breathe! I hated the buildings and the roads and the way people spoke and how far apart from each other they walked and I hated how much their words in my mouth sound just like them. It's summer over there and it's humid and hot and normally I love those things but I hated them, I hated them so extremely and the conclusion is inevitable and here it is, it's screaming at me from inside of my bones: To the United States of America, adieu adieu! I am never to return! A full-body allergic reaction to an entire country.
I don't know why. Surely it is a sum of things. The labyrinth of choices unfolds before me and here I am choosing the cobblestones that lead me far and away from that place, far and away from anything that those friends I made back then would expect or could even conceive of. That's one thing: the persistent feeling of un-fitness. As much as I had an allergic reaction to the United States, a puzzle piece that's missing in my brain is whispering that surely if I let myself simply be, the United States would develop a rash about me, too. But that's not the only thing. What A Ghost did last year and her callous disregard for any life outside the borders she so comfortably resides in after 8 years of friendship, must be playing its part because now I feel like I can't trust anyone from there. This was a serious conversation I had with my partner even, when I had to look her in the eye and say, after what A Ghost did, I can't trust you to think of me as a person. You understand, yes? And she did, actually, understand. But it's true, I see now people who wouldn't blink if I was sacrificed on the altar to empire, because I can see every day just how much they don't care. Outside their borders we are empty bodies. Soulless. Eyeless. You can guess of course then the third thing that might be causing this sudden onset allergy and it is of course the continuing enthusiastic participation of the United States in the occupation of Palestine. Of course, it's a country that's been complicit since day zero, in this and a million other things, this isn't new - and I think that's in itself a factor. History weighs more every year. It's just gotten too heavy. And then the very last thing is my grandfather, who swore in the 70s never to set foot there and died in March this year. Maybe I've inherited his allergy posthumously, maybe this is how my body honors his memory. Tata, you've made me allergic too. I love you.
Here is the bottom line: I cannot go there again for a long time, I think. It itches too much.
[Fair warning, I think the way this is written makes it a fairly incomprehensible diary entry for people outside my head.]
Last week I was in the United States again, specifically with the purpose of unofficially attending my 5-year college graduation reunion (unofficially meaning I didn't register or attend anything, I was just hanging out on campus). This is a place I go to with... alarming regularity. I didn't go there last year, but I did go in 2022, 2021 and even 2020. I saw one of my partners, who I met in college and who still lives over there, and several of my friends. For the record I did mostly like seeing them all. I do want to say that first of all.
However, as for everything else about the trip? I hated it! It made my skin itch! There was something in the air, something that felt uncomfortable to breathe! I hated the buildings and the roads and the way people spoke and how far apart from each other they walked and I hated how much their words in my mouth sound just like them. It's summer over there and it's humid and hot and normally I love those things but I hated them, I hated them so extremely and the conclusion is inevitable and here it is, it's screaming at me from inside of my bones: To the United States of America, adieu adieu! I am never to return! A full-body allergic reaction to an entire country.
I don't know why. Surely it is a sum of things. The labyrinth of choices unfolds before me and here I am choosing the cobblestones that lead me far and away from that place, far and away from anything that those friends I made back then would expect or could even conceive of. That's one thing: the persistent feeling of un-fitness. As much as I had an allergic reaction to the United States, a puzzle piece that's missing in my brain is whispering that surely if I let myself simply be, the United States would develop a rash about me, too. But that's not the only thing. What A Ghost did last year and her callous disregard for any life outside the borders she so comfortably resides in after 8 years of friendship, must be playing its part because now I feel like I can't trust anyone from there. This was a serious conversation I had with my partner even, when I had to look her in the eye and say, after what A Ghost did, I can't trust you to think of me as a person. You understand, yes? And she did, actually, understand. But it's true, I see now people who wouldn't blink if I was sacrificed on the altar to empire, because I can see every day just how much they don't care. Outside their borders we are empty bodies. Soulless. Eyeless. You can guess of course then the third thing that might be causing this sudden onset allergy and it is of course the continuing enthusiastic participation of the United States in the occupation of Palestine. Of course, it's a country that's been complicit since day zero, in this and a million other things, this isn't new - and I think that's in itself a factor. History weighs more every year. It's just gotten too heavy. And then the very last thing is my grandfather, who swore in the 70s never to set foot there and died in March this year. Maybe I've inherited his allergy posthumously, maybe this is how my body honors his memory. Tata, you've made me allergic too. I love you.
Here is the bottom line: I cannot go there again for a long time, I think. It itches too much.
