My mother believes that her and America is a flirty fling, a temporary alliance, maybe call it a coalition. I’m not sure if that means the same as community or home. I wonder what America means to me, whether she wanted her eldest daughter to find community here or resents me for her failures to do so. I know deep down that to be American is to not have a place. It’s like this: America is a huge bed, and to some, that’s comforting. To others, that’s lonely. To me, I stay close to the wall, and slowly sink into the place between the wall and the bed and I’m stuck there and it’s not really a place at all.
I have to admit, it isn’t all bad. I’m with my displaced people. I don’t think I could put it into words. It’s more like someone taking my hand. Or when we say goodbye to people and places that didn’t want us. Here there is no tolerance, only acceptance. Here, we stop dreaming of hunger. Here, love comes easy. Or maybe that’s what I like to tell myself, saved from heaving up the ugly truth. Maybe I’ve been lied to, or maybe I’m a liar.
There isn’t a here, and some days there isn’t a people. Survival unmakes a person. The nightmare of the American Dream has raised me and I do not know how to make love my religion. I used to think my purpose was to become whole. I looked for proof of wholeness from my place between the bed and the wall. Children with whole parents who built homes, safe and whole, instead of houses that might up and move at any slight. Characters in books with epic loves, who know how to be loved in return, both whole and impossible. I wanted to be unhalved, unhollowed, undamaged.
Then, I thought that my purpose was to want—my curse, my acquired habit courtesy of my mother. I wanted until I was green with it, as green as the money and the tamarind trees in the home she had left. I didn’t want much, but want was much of me as it was her. I do not know when the want to survive became the want to leave. But here now, here leaving, I do not know what I want. What more could I possibly want?`
Then, I thought that wholeness was a sailed ship far from here, reserved for dreamers, liars. I am not either. The truth is...the whole truth…is that I need to be loved. I need community. I revel in the truth, and it finds me here. Here is what I thought would save me from unwholeness. It does not. Here, we might be broken things, but we take pieces and hand it to each other for safekeeping, to one day build a home instead of a place. Here, I try to make it love.
