Glass

Walked home in the rain. Roznava doesn’t have that earthen smell- nothing refreshed. Just washed of it’s nature almost, left only with the smell of humans. Trash left out to be collected. Soil washed from the street, and washed from the whitened worms that lay strewn on the sidewalks. Maybe rain doesn’t belong in Slovakia. Or maybe civilization doesn’t belong in Slovakia. That fits. In a way looking at this country is looking at a people who have failed themselves. They apologize for their uneven soccer fields and their homegrown music. They apologize for the Hungarians fenced out of their own country, the gypsies nesting on the edges, and in the end, when their sentences turn downwards and they lower their fingers, they apologize for themselves.
It’s in those moments of solitude, walking home without an umbrella, travelling backwards through the country in an old train, sun-warmed lightly in my first days here- that the words start forming. Fragments present themselves shyly in my mind and then disappear, leaving only a vague craving for meaning, as if unsure of themselves. And they appear without senses, so quietly that they’re difficult to grasp, adjectives as drained of color as the worms. So as I skipped through the water film covering the streets, I thought I would later sit down to a description. But nothing really formed- only fellow rats but with umbrellas scurrying past and denim pasted against my calves, and it was then, when I glimpsed a man for an instant in his garden, that the words came.
I feel like I’ve been living behind a window. I tap all day, and someone comes to me. But when they speak it’s the dulled sound of transference. The glass muffles their voice and I can only struggle to understand. And then I speak and they can’t hear me either, so they just tell me again and again to come out from behind the window. But all I can do is wipe it cleaner, chip through it. In the end I’m left encased in glass, and sometimes it’s just easier to remain there behind the panes alone with the fragments of the country I belonged in. And it’s in those days when they stop coming to me. I should be standing there with a hammer, pounding my fists against a wall that will never shatter, raising my voice and dancing something American so that they’ll laugh at me and let me out for a while. But I get tired. I can’t tap anymore, and I don’t think I want to, because I really never fell in love. I wrote when I came here that I hoped to leave with my heart split between two countries, but America has left no room for anything else. In a way I’m surprised I hadn’t known it before- how long has my heart been streaked with red soil and magnolias? And without my language I am left with so little. There are days when I forget the glass still separates me- but walking home in the rain and seeing my neighbor whom I’ve never spoken to standing in the street reminds me that he’ll never ask me to come in from the cold, or where I’ve left my umbrella, because it’s just too difficult to see through a window in the rain.