"Nostalgique"

If you leave, there is this fear, a mounting worry that you'll be seen as a traitor if ever you return. When you've spent your life in one place, you claim it like only a native can. No one is "of it" more than you and that, for me, was a point of pride. For god sakes!...Half the friends I grew up with have their zip code tattooed somewhere on their body. We were the ones that walked the street at night throwing bottles just to hear the after hours echos of breaking glass.

As dark and angry native children, we shunned the laughing pastel masses. They weren't trapped like us. We knew they had more than us because they had come from somewhere else. They didn't look like us. Wealth had afforded them the opportunity to travel, move away (to our city) for college, to bar hop in polo shirts with cash in hand. Beneath the flickering sulfur street lights, we huddled in anonymity near the downtown payphones. Those bobbling fools never even saw us. Like dirty shrubs in a sidewalk landscape, we were constantly overlooked. When they passed us we would mutter things like--"Look at this cool breeze motherfucker. He thinks he's running something with his collar up. Little nut hugging bitch". They were the Jones' children. Their appearance and the fact that we were invisible told us they were born inside a foreign, yet, American dream. Trapped is--hurt, angry, jealous, intoxicated, exhausted, desperate, violent, and yes, in that order.

I am away now. I live far from home. I miss my people. They understand me because of time. You cannot replace the years it takes to know a person. You can keep up appearances with an acquaintance because they only see you once in a while. I have friends that stood next to me those midnight hours insulting the Jones' children. I will always love these people by name as if we are standing in the same room. Because we have fallen apart together over and over, our friendship is an automatic negotiation. There are no dues to pay that we have not paid by living parallel lives. It is truly a unique thing to flash a crooked smile across a crowded room, where, on the other side sits that one person that knows exactly what it means. This type of friend will fight or flee just to save you. In this city far away, there is little understanding. In crowded places I stare at the floor. What's crooked here is me.

Sometimes, I wish I'd look up and see someone I know from home. I think,... maybe they've come to visit Paris and didn't tell me, AND, that we'll happen upon each other in a cinematic reunion where everyone on the Metro applauds Friendship's triumph in a cold world. It's dramatically silly I know. However, my brain is a like a metaphor that produces emotions. It mulls, and rolls, and leaps, and tumbles, and scrapes, and compares, then spits out a general conclusion that I, me, myself, and I, must then consider with my own two eyes. Often, this conclusion concerning my life is but another riddle. External circumstances aside, I often have very little concrete evidence to support what "fortunes" my brain frequently computes. Therefore, I go back to my little world with more questions. Thus, onward spins the drama of living and, in this case, the simple fact that I'm homesick.