Foreignness is buoyant

Foreignness takes some time to aclimate to. You don’t realize how foreign you are. Like stepping off the plane you dove face first to the bottom of an ocean. You can almost touch the dirt. But inertia soon wears off and slowly the ocean floor begins to fall away. The water begins to reject you. Your body helplessly sinks back to the surface. The culture you felt so close to. That once you could touch, now seems unreachable. Above you burns the same sun as before. You are floating in a vast sea of misunderstandings and differences. And all of a sudden it seems that the few words you share have no meaning. That even if your eyes were to meet or your hands were to brush. You would pass right through one another. For you are isolated to different realities. A chasm wider than your uncommon languages.

Walking home you adopt a fixed stare. A tunnel twenty yards long. As you march, you remain sitting in the corner of your mind, tossing a baseball at the wall.

Tuh tuhnk. Tuh tuhnk.

You laugh in your chosen space. Your four concrete walls of self constructed confinement. You are not angry, just lonely. And tired of fighting against it, you build a house to assuage it. Your thoughts begin to wander. As thoughts do when the senses are dimmed. They bounce around like that baseball. You forget about the people around you, the steps you take, the sounds of the cars and the chatter. All you can hear is your baseball.

Tuh tuhnk. Tuh tuhnk.

Then the door opens. The ball bounces outside and rolls beneath a bench. Sitting there on the bench in the park at night, three high school girls. The same three you met that one time. At five in the morning. The four of you with stained breath watched the sun rise from a swingset.

They tell you to sit down. So you do. They ask you if you remember them and you say of course I do.