I remember waking up on the day that I’d been in England for a proper month feeling extremely homesick. I rolled halfway out of bed and had one foot on the floor, the other half of me tangled in my blankets, and felt, as a literature student is wont to do, a metaphor in the moment. I remember realizing later that day that it was the month mark--that I’d been here on this “green and kindly island” for a full cycle of the moon, and all the other things a month is.
There is something odder, more significant, about the first day of a calendar month. This morning, sitting at my desk, peering over the top of my computer out the window, I watched the sun come up over the black spires of branches on a tree I’ve watched turn from green to waxy yellow with the weather. There are moments in my life in which I feel my boundaries wavering. What is skin to a person? It’s an old question. Everyone encounters it--the spirit and body, do they touch? It is equally pleasant and ectoplasmic to inhabit my skin and to extend beyond it. Sometimes I experience both in the same moment.
Lying in bed the other night I noticed that my feet didn’t really feel like feet. I could identify my fingers as feeling like fingers, my elbows as feeling like elbows. It’s not an actual sensation--I suppose it’s identity. And I wonder about things. What life below the skin looks like, how it would be to be alive if I felt everything. When I understood a couple weeks ago that I had adopted certain British mannerisms--saying “hiya,” carrying an umbrella, shrugging into the wind, queueing well, becoming extremely excited at the idea of simple things: a hot meal, a cup of tea, a warm room--walking in light rain to check my pigeonhole for mail, I paused near the chaplaincy and stared at my reflection in the dark glass, wondering how I should feel.
One particular hasn’t changed: I cry about everything. I saw a bird look both ways before crossing a street on foot while I was alone in town, and cried a little: I walked by a man standing at a street corner singing in Latin, and cried: I caught a glimpse of myself in my half-length mirror wearing a jumper and underwear, and I cried about it: I watched an elderly couple share dinner across a dining hall, and when he pulled out a newspaper and she sketched a landscape scene on her iPad and leaned over the table to show it to him, I cried into my napkin. It’s easy to let things matter when I spend so much time by myself.
I do enjoy spending time alone. But sometimes I despair at the awkwardness that results from not knowing certain social rules. This isn’t different than at home. I like to think that I understand the game from an outsider’s perspective, but when I try to take part, I can’t imagine where I fit in--besides on the outside, watching, with my few dear friends and family, with my books and poems and all the life in me, all the love and ache and simplicity and worry and questions and judgements and wistfulness.
Mostly, I have the same daily broods here as I’ve ever had. I wonder how many people look at me and see someone happy with her life, or if they see someone a little lost. I’ve always encountered difficulty understanding to what extent people are noticing or care. Sometimes I spend a day without saying much besides “hiya” and “thank you” when I buy a meal. I wonder how people must think of America. We watched Baz Luhrmann’s William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet in my Shakespeare module and when I expressed in seminar that it made me slightly homesick, people smiled at me with something I can only identify as indulgence. Understandably--feud, violence, foolishness, guns, gangs, drugs--are not things I miss besides that they embody something relatable to the culture I’ve grown up in. Sometimes I feel so, so distant from the culture here--the way till people at grocers here have seats and never know what page to turn to in a US passport for your ID, the way that the British refuse to accept the fact that their whole country is smaller than California and that it is easy to get from place to place if you have the will to go, the way that people live and breathe on land that their people have inhabited for thousands of years and that this is never fractionally as interesting to them as it is to me--and sometimes I feel almost spiritually aligned with the history and people of this strange place for no apparent reason except for that I’m sitting at my desk and the sun is coming up and I’m bearing witness to one of the only things that makes me believe I’m on the same planet as the place I left when I boarded the plane in Los Angeles.
But the sun is always rising. There’s a poem I’ve recently become obsessed with and which I sometimes chant to myself walking home from class in the rain, padding over wet leaves, looking at the moon through rolling clouds:
In spite of the overwhelming reliability of things,
the wind making rivulets on my sleeve same as window glass,
the same rocks shaped by the same reasons on Mars,
I am like a cricket singing to another sore voice. I hear it,
but faithful to symmetry, I don’t move closer.
It may not be singing to me. Movement may lead to dissolution.
Stars could make up new animals. The dragonfly
might chase the swallow as it did today in warning.
I am living at the edge of light looking out
over water that touches Mexico. The edge of the continent
holds hands with inlets and I mention them over and over
as if no one listened the last time. The common insists.
Lynx and orchids for some. Underwinter life below the ice.
From here I wave to you like polishing the air.
-- “The Common Insists,” Allan Peterson
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