I’ve never loathed flip flops more than I do right now.
And moving walkways and automatic cars and fat white people and the letter R over-pronounced in a southern drawl. Even things I used to love, like smartphones and sunglasses, now just seem so ridiculous and unnecessary and... American. Everything is too perfect, too organized, too efficient. People stand to the right on the escalator to let other people pass. A forgotten purse sat on the airport train seat, untouched.
I think I offended the customs official in Houston when I approached the desk and, noticing that his badge read “Gonzales” I said, “Hola, buenos días.” He responded, “Hello, good morning” in a Latin accent, but a stern voice. I didn’t mean to make it seem like I thought he was incompetent, I was just desperate to speak in Spanish to anyone.
I had a four hour layover. Four hours to hang by metal hooks from my soul over the abyss of nonbelonging. As much as I already missed Bogotá, I wouldn’t Dream Of Genie myself back to Colombia even if I could. I have no place there anymore (and after five different Despedida parties it would just be awkward). And as much as I wanted to curl up in my bed at home, I felt asphyxiated just thinking about being back in suburbian sprawl.
“Ladies and gentlemen, we are now preparing for descent into Colorado Springs. Local time is 12:46pm.” The words pushed me off the cliff of denial I had been clinging to with clenched eyes and white knuckles and I felt my heart rise to my throat from the G-force of my plummet. The plane dropped down a latter of air currents into the cookie cutter world of square front lawns and slanted shingled rooftops. I was exhausted. My eyes were dry and my cheeks were salty. I couldn’t even wallow in my sorrow gazing reflectively out the window because I got stuck with the stupid aisle seat, so I stared instead at the seat back and tray table in front of me in their full upright and locked position. I turned on my portable electronic device (sorry Mr. Pilot Captain, you can kiss my...) hoping the music would calm my accelerated heart beat and tightening esophagus, but the “Shuffle” setting on my iPod turned out to be a playlist of “Songs that will remind you of everything that you just left behind.”
The tires stuck the runway and I hit the ground at the base of the cliff like Wylie Cyote after the descending tone whistle, a puffy cloud of dust rising from the hole shaped in the outline of my body. As the plane taxied to the gate, I took a deep breath, crawled out of the hole, dusted off my shoulders, and prepare myself to embrace my hometown (flames and all).
Not a speck of dust had changed in my house. Yes, the sinks had been replaced, the upstairs bathroom repainted and my parents had acquired some extra furniture from my grandma’s house, but to me everything was exactly the same: the magnets on the refrigerator from the library, the stack of newspapers on the corner of the kitchen counter, the box in the pantry of plastic grocery bags to be recycled. It was as if the 336 days that had passed between my departure and my return had never even happened.
And it was picture perfect. There were cherries in the refrigerator and a ziplock bag of chocolate-covered toffee on the table, boxes of multi-grain cereals, trail mix, vanilla almond milk, bottled orange juice, whole wheat tortillas, Greek yogurt... Everything was so pretty and packaged and effortless and free and abundant and, frankly, overwhelming. I didn’t understand how it was possible that one week ago I would have died to have any of this and now I see it all and I lose my appetite.
And I just... can’t... throw... the damn toilet paper in the bowl.
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