Foreigner

Just because you feel called to be somewhere doesn’t mean it’s easy to be there, doesn’t mean your roots don’t tell you every day that the soil you’re in is not your own, that you’ve been transplanted.

There is something incredibly alluring about living in a foreign country. Your senses are in hyperdrive all the time, and you notice things that people who have lived in the place their whole lives do not notice. For example, occasionally throughout the town of San Pedro--in the university, the sports complex, my own lane, or a random street between the heres and theres--every other waft of air I breathe is sweet, similar to yellow sweet corn. I love it. It’s soft and mysterious.

It’s soft because it’s gentle, like the smell of rising bread dough. Mysterious, because nobody else smells it so they can’t tell me what it is. They’ve breathed it their whole lives, are accustomed.

It’s possible it is corn, but I am pretty sure it’s the smell of sugarcane being refined; or maybe it’s the factory by the river that processes beer. I don’t know. I’m American.

I’m American.

I’m a foreigner.

I’ve been transplanted.

When I studied abroad in Italy, I didn’t fit in either, but it was different. Once I got my fashion a little bit more under control people frequently thought I was German; and whether “German” or American, if I kept to myself, often Italians wouldn’t look twice, whether male or female.

But here, even as I speak more and more Spanish, and thereby unlock the house that is culture, the way Khaled Hosseini said it would happen in his book And the Mountains Echoed, I remain a foreigner. It’s my skin, my hair, and--more so--my blue eyes. I do not fit in with the dominant culture, the way Haitians do not fit in either; except their ethnicity, in contrast to mine, gets them very few favors.

I am a foreigner.

It would be lovely, for a few hours, to feel normal. To not feel like all of the cultural parts of me, all of the colors of me, are alien.

But is that my mission in life? Is that what I am pursuing? Is that what I was created for? To feel normal, comfortable, in place, supported, at home?

Like I’ve written before, I feel all those things in the arms of my husband. He is my Knight, my best friend. But we do not live in a fairytale. He goes to work. Sometimes he’s away overnight.

And I am left as who I am without him: a stranger.

I am an exile of Eden, waiting to be able to go home to a city fashioned of precious gems.

We are all foreigners, truth be told. But we feel it more in some seasons of life than others. For me, it’s especially poignant right now because my strangeness is palpable. People treat me differently for how I look, shining the spotlight on me whether to give me positive or negative attention, and my cultural habits are an oddity, whether it be my propensity to prefer text messages over voice messages in WhatsApp (and be terrible at responding to either right away because dang it, if it’s an emergency call me), or my desire to always be on time.

Some days I feel like my entire personhood is in opposition to Dominican culture (“I don’t belong here”) and those are the days when I need to spend a lot of time looking at flowers. Those are the days when I also need to talk to people and remember that our differences are beautiful.

As Riley Armstrong wrote in a song a long, long time ago, it’s what every welcome mat is saying: “welcome,” only welcome, without discrepancy, without asterisks or clauses. It doesn’t matter if you’re different; in fact, different is beautiful. My parents’ welcome mat even says “welcome” in 7 or 10 different languages. Riley would be proud.

I may be a transplanted flower, I may look a little different, and move with the sun a little differently, but that does not mean that how I look or move is inherently wrong. The soil feels different, but I can still grow, still form bonds with those around me. If everybody in this exuberant, tell-it-like-it-is culture wants to call me out, okay. That’s beautiful. The excitement they are feeling makes their lives better and I can learn to do the same or at least appreciate it. In response to their enthusiasm in the street, much of the time the only thing my introverted self has to do is simply smile and wave and there, my job is done.

When, occasionally, the attention gets a little negative, I just have to breathe and think rationally and be brave and everything turns out fine.

I’m sitting here, at the desk in my room, kind of laughing right now, honestly. Because in the US, for much of my life, I spent so much time trying to be different. In such a big population, it’s difficult. I started wearing bohemian clothes and digging more into my pseudo-hippie roots as a young teen, and then what happens? The next year American Eagle decides that’s what we should all be wearing and boom, I was no longer original.

When I was 14, finding the wedding style of the day claustrophobic, I knew I wanted an exclusive wedding with a lacy, short white dress, wild flowers everywhere, in a barn or in a field, or both, with subs as the main course and pie for dessert. And then a few years later, that’s what everyone started doing. Like, America didn’t give me enough time to get married with my original idea.

Ya’ll know the state of the story: I got married without a wedding and now I wear mostly jeans and t-shirts.

(This doesn’t mean I don’t ooo and ahhh over everyone's wedding photos, and that I don’t glance through Free People occasionally.)

I guess one could say that my fight to be different backfired. Because now, I am certainly different, without even trying. Maybe that’s what it is: it’s one thing to be in control of your difference (you can change your clothes) it’s another to be intrinsically different (my birth certificate will always be from the USA).

It is one thing to be an American in America expressing my personal freedom (something that is culturally celebrated), and another thing to be an American in a different country, period.

In the first, I’m still not that unique, and in the second, I am a foreigner.

It’s an identity to embrace, not one to run from.

And no matter what I feel, like I said in the beginning, I have a genuine sense that I am called to be here, at least during this time of my life. One is called until they are not.

It is a coward who backtracks out from under their call.