samuel.bowles.es

After the attacks on 11 March my friend Kelly (who also lives in Madrid) and I were talking about how the events of the past month have effected us. As we were discussing our small window into what it means to be immigrants Kelly said, "Home is a big word for people like us." He was right, and a lot of our conversation centered around this word and what it meant to us. I wrote in my post "In Memoriam" the evening of the attacks that, "Today I don't feel so foreign. Today I feel like this is my city, this is my country, these are my people." That was true but Kelly pointed out something else that was true.

The longer I live in this foreign culture the more I become homeless. The experiences I am having here are changing me; I am adopting parts of the Spanish culture, learning to understand my own home in new ways, and yet I am inexorably American. Or am I? I know that when I go home to visit I will not be the same person who came to Spain a little over eight months ago. I will be a citizen of a new country, a country of immigrants, a country that has no borders or government, a country that has no name or flag. This country does have shared ideals, experiences, even a language of sorts. When I sit down with other expatriates we share something and nothing at all. Somehow it's in that tension that we can look into one another's eyes and see the sameness, the sharedness, the knowledge that this homelessness is our home.