migrate

I don't want to be the kind of person who says this, but I'm going to say it anyway: I was born in the wrong country. I swear! No, really! Do I believe in reincarnation? In a way, yes. In another way, I have no idea and I don't really care. But maybe, because why not, I was living in another land in another life and my current body is severely displaced here in Family City, USA and is longing to get back to a land I can't quite remember but can't quite forget.

I think about gray stone motels with attached cafes. Dim bulbs and barely noticeable figures in the back being alone and drinking. I think about what I would think about as I sat there with them, yet completely alone. I would tap my foot, I'm sure. A nervous habit, something I don't even think about anymore. I would reach into what I assume is my clutch and pull out a cigarette case. Cigarettes were in their mythical phase of being purely glamorous and not at all dangerous. Then again, even if they were dangerous, they were still glamorous. It wasn't like I was trying to be glamorous, though. I was trying to be invisible with these other figures in the back alone, drinking, under a bulb inside of a cafe attached to a gray stone motel somewhere in some other place that isn't here.

Maybe it's not that I was born in the wrong country, but that I have stayed too long within the confines of a place with no pulse. A girl can only do so much wandering around a city park full of octogenarians and poodles before she loses her marbles and begins wearing all black, you know? A girl sometimes needs the barely noticeable spaces where she can tap her foot freely and be dangerously glamorous. Or at least just be. I am perpetually in other places in my head and hardly ever get to just be.

I wonder what it will take for me to finally grab my clutch and go to where the heart beats faster, to where the heart is illuminated under that one dim bulb, to where the heart returns to the home it has known throughout many lifetimes. I wonder.