The "you" exercise

This is where you belong. The muddy heat, the street mobbed and bursting at the margins. Your skin slicked with sweat, constantly wiping your forearms and swatting away the low tide building on your thumbs. This is an aching air, and you, you ache inside of it too. Your mouth is an open book in this country, it is filled with scrawled etchings. The word meandering on your tongue, only to fall back in retreat to your throat.

This is what I’m saying is happening to you. Though should it be this way. You were born to be here but these people. They see you and you walk in distance. Or maybe, that’s just how I see you. Maybe that’s just what we all expect. So who flinched first? Did you come to this country and wear America as your gleaming totem? Did you watch the shore and wonder why the shore set on the wrong side of the horizon?

How did this happen? How did everything become so unfamiliar? When everybody here looks just like you. They can see it in the way you carry your body through open space. The heaviness in each of your steps. They resent you. They resent how you walk in and expect to occupy a room. The well fed proportions of your body, this is an American body. A proud American body. Look at their bodies, like ripened vines, like dying wood.

They will come to you and ask for money. Their outstretched hands: a beggar’s language, they can smell the dollars. It smells like cedar and pork fat. It rests so comfortably in your right pocket. They know where it is, they know you wouldn’t keep it in your back pocket. Too much of an easy mark. A bulge like a beacon. But you, you’re too smart for that. It’s what the experienced travelers know and you are not, but you’re smart enough to know what they know.

You’ve read books. And not just any regular book, you’ve read books where the main characters suffer through existential crises, self referential bouts of meta-fiction. You’ve read stories where the main character was turned into a fruit fly, but it wasn’t a horror story or science fiction, but a long drawn out treatise condemning the effects unfair businesses practices have taken upon the nation of Fiji. You’ve read these books and understood them.

What did you expect to find when you came to this country? Did you expect them to welcome you home? Did you expect streams of men and women to stop in their tracks and exclaim “Look at this guy, this guy right here!” Were you expecting all the women to give a shit.That you could rope them in with promises of a life in the states with you-- that you could get enough liquor in them to buy into the prospect? And then leave them with enough liquor to forget?

Do you believe this country owes you something, since you were so gracious enough to return. Did you expect anyone to care. Did you expect, that when you spoke to your cousins about the malleable nature of faith, the belief in a universal spirit, your brief flirtations with Buddhist thought, Bahai’i Faith, Reiki, the 10 days of silent meditation, the sweat lodges and the sordid history of the Catholic church they would have taken it as nothing less than you thumbing your nose at their beliefs. Because you were. Because you didn’t make it about the scope of your faith, you made it about the narrowness of theirs. And sometimes your upper lip curls when you think said something profound. This is also something that does not require translation. Every person, of every culture knows a smug asshole when they see one.

And yes, about the prostitute in the karaoke bar. The one who told you she was from your mother’s hometown. The pretty one, who came to Manila to become the next Regine Velasquez. The one who told you after that second time you fucked her from behind like a goddamn beast (as you like to tell people) that she had finally found the man of her dreams; that you were a prince. Who cried in your arms because you were so perfect and she didn’t want to see you go away. Whose affection was a framework of trope expression and inexhaustible cliche? You bought it. You bought every single bit of it. And for once in your lonely, sorry life you thought someone loved you like that love you had given away to so many others. For a moment, you were almost validated. Almost balanced. Home was almost an equilibrium.