Crashing and burning, so no day count today.
Over Memorial day weekend a couple of my friends and I were being driven back to college by one of those "ride share" drivers that you tend to find occasionally when you attend school so close to home. Though the guy was a fairly safe driver, I couldn't help but be nervous even as the skies stayed clear and we hit minimal traffic. This was a source of irony for me, because not even a month before you could have found me in the heart of Mexico driving around with my family and even on a couple memorable occasions, my younger friend who had just received her license. Oaxaca city is a combination of narrow streets, busy streets, streets with potholes, and very pushy drivers. But while I was there I hardly ever felt nervous. I wouldn't have wanted to drive, but I was more than comfortable enjoying the "seat-belt-less experience" that you can really only have in a foreign country. In contrast, driving in my sleepy town with my sister in the front seat or even occasionally with some of my friends I am always on the edge of my seat expecting the worst. Is my brain slightly dysfunctional or am I just regressing to my childhood mentality when I go to Mexico?
It is a constant worry of mine that I will never actually be fully "known" by someone. By someone I more often than not mean my imaginary future husband. I say this because despite the importance of my time in Mexico, I have no real way to explain it to an outsider. How do you explain something that was normal life to you? How do you explain how the Hispanic culture sometimes feels more like home than the everyday American culture? How can anyone, let alone myself, understand why I am equally comfortable in a concrete, dusty house covered in bad paint and graffiti and the average quaint country-style home in America? To explain the inner workings of my mind and my twisted up emotions about living in Mexico for so many years feels like an impossibility. And yet, I feel like no one will truly understand me in my entirety unless they understand how important these weird conflicting facts and memories are to me...
Where is home when your heart feels like it's tied and pulled apart in a hundred different pieces to different places and people?
