I don’t know quite what I expected,
but this definitely isn’t what I pictured.
No one can really relate...not that I blame
them, I’m glad they can’t...still in some weird
way I feel more alone here than I did there.

At times I was spied on, betrayed, hunted and
even had a price on my head, which is not ideal...
but nonetheless meant that I mattered somehow...
here, I literally have nothing anybody is looking for.
Worse, I seem to want nothing from them either,
it’s too possible to be self-contained...and it seems
a bit like having the first uncomfortable meeting with
a long-lost relative you know you should love,
but with whom you have nothing in common.

After two years overseas, it feels very much
like being a new immigrant...I thought
Paris Hilton was a hotel...had no idea a
spouse could be the prize for a game show...
and, no, I never heard that song before...

Everything seems so easy here...not that I
don’t like it, rather, it just seems too easy to be real –
the food is clean, the air is fresh, I can walk safely
where ever and whenever I want, streets are cleared
within an hour of the first flake of snow falling...
Sometimes it feels like a Disneyland existence
that is merely a final figment of a dying brain,
and I start to suspect that the plane really went
down outside Qandahar and I didn’t make it.

Other times I suspect that I really did, and can’t
help smiling to myself at how absurdly perfect this
all is, as I peer through the glass window of my exile.
Pondering this from its gelatinous sofa, my mind calls down
to the body for room service, so it can remain disengaged for now.


-- by Steve McKennon, 21 March 2005