Lost in transit

Going Back

Seventeen hours in transit and I'm back in the US for the first time in a year. The money is strange-looking, and suddenly everyone in the shops has a funny accent. Oh, yes, that's right – it's mine. I keep forgetting which way to look before crossing the street, and whenever the car I'm in takes a turn, my heart skips a beat as I wait for the head-on collision.

But the weather is hot and sunny, unlike the dreary winter cold I left behind, and I'm forcibly reminded of just how far I've gone. No matter how fast our broadband, how low our international phone rates, how frequent our emails, the laws of physics can't be abandoned, and I have hurtled through the air in a metal tube some ten thousand miles, to the opposite side of the entire planet. A side so far away that not only is the weather different, but they're in completely opposite seasons.

The security procedures at the Los Angeles airport are also a sea change. Everyone's in their stocking feet, shoes in plastic bins, divesting themselves of the slightest pieces of metal; the legions of TSA workers look bored and restless, the guards with loaded guns resting casually on their thighs. And yet with my meal on the flight over I was given a metal fork and a thick plastic knife – does anyone seriously think that they couldn't be used as weapons? Has everyone really just accepted the rampant paranoia as part of everyday life here? I feel like a convict in prison, stripped of personal possessions and pride, shuffling down the hallway and doing as I'm told.

So here I am, jetlagged and washed out, back in the country of my birth. I know I sound and look the same as anyone else, and yet I feel entirely different, and the juxtaposition frustrates me. Surely I'm not an expat simply out of some petty desire to stand out from the crowd? People often seem a bit put out when you tell them you're hoping to find a job so you can stay overseas, that you'd prefer not to come back to the US to live; after all, they live here just fine, so am I implying there's something wrong with them? Of course it's all so familiar at the same time as it's different, and if I had to, I could certainly live here again; it's not as if I'm an impoverished refugee fleeing a war zone. I still have my passport; I still speak the language; I could get a job and settle back into living here. Being an expat by choice is a luxury, and one that I'm sometimes hard-pressed to justify.