A child is born, a new subject of negligence and trauma of modern day parenting. But at the age of nine you toss him out of his native environment into a land far, far away, into a language so utterly alien and a heritage worlds apart from his own.
The minds of children are malleable. Time goes by. The child grows, an ugly little cygnet lusting after green-eyed blond haired ducklings. Old ways and childhood memories fade, he melts into the land, learning strange new words in which to love and think and philosophize. He loves his home fervently. He thrives in its gloom and rain, and cherishes its crappy food and bitter winters and rich stories and beautiful poetry. Though he is clad in strange skin and capped in strange hair, he becomes a zealous guardian of his adoptive society.
And then at the end of his teens, just to fuck with him, you tell the kid that his life is always transient, that he is to abolish his learned ways and return ‘home’…. Because: ‘passport’.
But hey, the kid is resourceful. He figures out a way to prolong his stay and make a home here. Each day he shoves down the creeping realization that time won’t change his ‘otherness’.
So he pickes up his new-world-ass and returns to the place of his conception, still an alien in human skin.
He’ll be fine. He’s adaptable. He blends into wherever he goes. The winds raise him high one moment and shatter him upon the rocks the next, but he is always resolute.
But he will always be pained by a gaping wound, a bleeding, festering, churning chasm in his identity.
#00117F 