How do we anchor ourselves when we are truly unmoored from where we used to belong? I’m an international student in the United States. I grew up in Southern Africa, which is where I spent the entirety of my formative years and completed my education. Like many to come before me, pursuing higher education in the United States was one of the only viable options I had at my disposal. Though that was not a decision taken lightly, I don’t think any of us are ever equipped to truly stand in the face of the absolute unknown. And so, our story begins in my first college class, thousands of miles away from home.
The room was small, but the furniture stretched along the walls, making it feel infinite. The benches curved in on one another, snaking around the center of the room. The professor began right on time, his booming voice abruptly disrupting the thick silence. All at once, comparative politics was in session. We each had a note card, and the same question to answer: what makes a country feel secure, safe? I didn’t know then, and I still don’t know. But like everyone, my answer was a thoughtful commentary on what I do know. And maybe, in the between the lines, it was thoughtless commentary on what I didn’t know. We were asked to share our answers with the people around us. E, to my right, offered his list first. Though, it wasn’t a list so much as a conversation on whether he would prefer direct or semi-direct democracy. To my left, a girl with red hair chirped that the constitution of her country would have an evolutionary component, shifting as time elapsed and the future arrived. A third voice cited a modification to the Second Amendment, a clause I’ve come to understand is especially controversial. Their voices swirled around me, hot and cold all at once. Syllables and fragments and jargon swishing back and forth, like a little kid learning how to swallow juice. I looked at my own little note card. The first word on mine was water. “I took the prompt in a different direction,” four sets of eyes turned to meet mine. “More, foundational I guess. Secure water and food supply, those fundamental resources. I think that’s an aspect of stability, don’t you think?”
I don’t pretend to be a revolutionary. But, as the group transcribed my comments onto our collaborative note card, there it was. Evidence I existed, that I had been there in that moment. Beyond that, evidence that I had made a metaphysical scuff on this floor where thousands have walked before me. At the end of it all, I think that’s the purest humanness. That defiant little smudge in the fabric of space and time, loudly declaring we are here and for a second we were eternal. Is that what we do, as people? If we are not witnessed, do we continue to drift aimlessly? Maybe both, or neither. Maybe that’s too simplistic of an analysis, but I am not the woman I was when I left home, with the confidence of someone who had never seen much of the world outside her. Nor am I the meek woman who arrived in the United States, drifting aimlessly like a ship with no place to dock. Somewhere after these versions, a third appears in E’s untidy scrawl on our note card. The first glimmer of who I will become, actualized on paper. That’s what we’re searching for, I think, in every medium. Evidence that we exist and will continue to exist, over and over again.
Literary Musings 