Summertime makes me sick with how sweet it is. I hope I will still be
able to taste the sea breeze and remember warmth and soft kisses in a
month. I hope I will be able to smell the dope in months to come and
remember breaking it up in manageable pieces as he lies next to me. The
beach is relatively quiet, the vague cacophony of Vybz Kartel is the
only noise, a subtle reminder of what our culture is reduced to for
tourism. “Our culture” that will never really be mine and may not even
be his. But here we are, in sweet summertime, St. Lucians in our own
right. I used to fail at finding comfort in the uniqueness of my
relationship to my culture but now it feels so much better knowing that I
am not alone in my cultural confusion. Mixed. Black. White. American.
Canadian. St. Lucian. Preppy. Poor. Rich. Nerdy. Reformed Catholic.
Similarity in this amalgamation of identities has drawn us together in a
casual yet significant manner.
“I left Saint Lucia and never looked back.”
But here we are.
The breeze whips my hair out of my face as I stand on the porch, ancient cordless phone glued to my good ear. The porch is covered with egg containers, each filled with grotesque dried seeds for my mother’s garden. Our pink hammock swings in the breeze and a giant lizard shiftily crawls across the ceiling enjoying a feast of moths and other insects my porch light has drawn to its strategic position.
I’m leaning over the banister trying to measure the length of my hair against one of our house’s pillars and I’m listening to his voice, reflecting my experiences. Another person has gone through what I’ve gone through. I am not alone. Relating to someone about boarding school is one thing, but relating to a St. Lucian is another thing entirely, and it’s too rare for our meeting to just be hap and stance. We speak for perhaps an hour as I stand on the porch trying to see the full moon through the thick clouds that paint the sky a deep gray. Our experiences in the United States and our relationship to our almae matres are so closely aligned. It begins with culture shock and a complete lack of preparedness to work. Catholic School killed our thirst for knowledge and our love of learning. Readers, dreamers and creators quickly became stifled by rules and our unbearable lightness a problem which is far deeper than being a tragic mulatto of sorts. Children were not meant to be beaten into submission, to have their creativity massacred in favor of conforming to God’s rule.
Then of course, there’s the guilt. Who else understands the guilt that I’ve always felt? It starts like this: I don’t deserve to be the only person to have had this opportunity. He tells me about his cousin: his potential, his wealth and how he could have fit into a boarding school environment if given the chance. But the value system of his cousin’s family is different. And that’s what it comes down to for “people like us”. Our value systems are polarized to the general population of our country. We become drifting anomalies who will never quite belong because we value education over possessions and knowledge over attainable signifiers of wealth. We would have never been comfortable in a Ministry Job or at UWI. So we fled and in doing so we felt guilty.
“There are so many kids I went to school with who were a lot smarter than me and where are they now?” It’s like I’m speaking to myself or listening to a recording of every previous thought I’ve had. I think about their salaries that amount to less than 20,000 USD a year and their 90,000 dollar car loans and their meager houses and the fact that they are trapped here forever. They are trapped by this system because they did not get a chance to experience the world that we did. Our exposure to the evils of liberal American culture frighten them the way the thought of being like them frightens us. We become bonded by our guilt and our fear, perhaps not in a romantic way or even in a permanent way but it’s significant for us to get all this off our chests and push it out into the humid night because we have had these experiences alone for so long and all we crave is understanding.
The night is beautiful. I’m thrown back to my childhood feelings of loneliness and finding the sort of comfort you find when you figure out your emotions are not “crazy” and not every thought you have is a representation of how isolated you are from everyone else. The landline is pressed to my ear as if cellphones don’t exist, as if I’m so far into the past I’m making the decision to go to Groton again and again. Was it a mistake? If I could go back would I do it all over again?
“It was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made to this day,” I say, and as the words leave my mouth, I am certain this time it isn’t a lie. Finally I’m speaking about Groton without feeling totally tainted by either resentment or nostalgia — opposite sides of the same coin if you get to thinking about it. In hearing him talk about the person he has become and seeing that he is a few years further along than I am in his personal development, I feel renewed faith that everything I struggled with had a greater significance.
Our conversation reaches a natural conclusion early into the night. How do I feel? Alive. It would be cliched if I hadn’t spent so long simply feeling like I was surviving. I’ve survived Groton, Middlebury, summer in St. Lucia, but talking to him I feel more like I’ve been living. The dichotomy between simply surviving and living has been exaggerated by my feelings of isolation. For once I don’t feel an emotional ticking time bomb like I need to act fast or feel fast or think fast about anything. There is simply connection at the most basic level; it’s the ability to truly empathize and understand someone due to a shared experience. I press the little red button and remain on the porch staring at what I imagine to be Castor and Pollux for a minute or two before returning inside.
Emotional momentum from the deep satisfaction I felt about relating to someone about my high school experience has the odd effect of slowing me down. There is no need to rush into friendship or into love or into fretting about every emotion that pops into my head. I am comfortable with the breeze whipping around my brown legs and with the end of a phone call and with the end of my past relationship and in a sense with all my endings.
How do we fit in here? We never looked back when we left yet something seems to be compelling a return to a home where we may not be able to fit in ever again. Was it worth it? The response could only be an emphatic yes. Looking back into the past has never lacked loneliness like this. Before I return to the sticky indoor heat I wonder if I’m really looking at Castor and Pollux, twin stars, connected.
“I left Saint Lucia and never looked back.”
But here we are.
The breeze whips my hair out of my face as I stand on the porch, ancient cordless phone glued to my good ear. The porch is covered with egg containers, each filled with grotesque dried seeds for my mother’s garden. Our pink hammock swings in the breeze and a giant lizard shiftily crawls across the ceiling enjoying a feast of moths and other insects my porch light has drawn to its strategic position.
I’m leaning over the banister trying to measure the length of my hair against one of our house’s pillars and I’m listening to his voice, reflecting my experiences. Another person has gone through what I’ve gone through. I am not alone. Relating to someone about boarding school is one thing, but relating to a St. Lucian is another thing entirely, and it’s too rare for our meeting to just be hap and stance. We speak for perhaps an hour as I stand on the porch trying to see the full moon through the thick clouds that paint the sky a deep gray. Our experiences in the United States and our relationship to our almae matres are so closely aligned. It begins with culture shock and a complete lack of preparedness to work. Catholic School killed our thirst for knowledge and our love of learning. Readers, dreamers and creators quickly became stifled by rules and our unbearable lightness a problem which is far deeper than being a tragic mulatto of sorts. Children were not meant to be beaten into submission, to have their creativity massacred in favor of conforming to God’s rule.
Then of course, there’s the guilt. Who else understands the guilt that I’ve always felt? It starts like this: I don’t deserve to be the only person to have had this opportunity. He tells me about his cousin: his potential, his wealth and how he could have fit into a boarding school environment if given the chance. But the value system of his cousin’s family is different. And that’s what it comes down to for “people like us”. Our value systems are polarized to the general population of our country. We become drifting anomalies who will never quite belong because we value education over possessions and knowledge over attainable signifiers of wealth. We would have never been comfortable in a Ministry Job or at UWI. So we fled and in doing so we felt guilty.
“There are so many kids I went to school with who were a lot smarter than me and where are they now?” It’s like I’m speaking to myself or listening to a recording of every previous thought I’ve had. I think about their salaries that amount to less than 20,000 USD a year and their 90,000 dollar car loans and their meager houses and the fact that they are trapped here forever. They are trapped by this system because they did not get a chance to experience the world that we did. Our exposure to the evils of liberal American culture frighten them the way the thought of being like them frightens us. We become bonded by our guilt and our fear, perhaps not in a romantic way or even in a permanent way but it’s significant for us to get all this off our chests and push it out into the humid night because we have had these experiences alone for so long and all we crave is understanding.
The night is beautiful. I’m thrown back to my childhood feelings of loneliness and finding the sort of comfort you find when you figure out your emotions are not “crazy” and not every thought you have is a representation of how isolated you are from everyone else. The landline is pressed to my ear as if cellphones don’t exist, as if I’m so far into the past I’m making the decision to go to Groton again and again. Was it a mistake? If I could go back would I do it all over again?
“It was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made to this day,” I say, and as the words leave my mouth, I am certain this time it isn’t a lie. Finally I’m speaking about Groton without feeling totally tainted by either resentment or nostalgia — opposite sides of the same coin if you get to thinking about it. In hearing him talk about the person he has become and seeing that he is a few years further along than I am in his personal development, I feel renewed faith that everything I struggled with had a greater significance.
Our conversation reaches a natural conclusion early into the night. How do I feel? Alive. It would be cliched if I hadn’t spent so long simply feeling like I was surviving. I’ve survived Groton, Middlebury, summer in St. Lucia, but talking to him I feel more like I’ve been living. The dichotomy between simply surviving and living has been exaggerated by my feelings of isolation. For once I don’t feel an emotional ticking time bomb like I need to act fast or feel fast or think fast about anything. There is simply connection at the most basic level; it’s the ability to truly empathize and understand someone due to a shared experience. I press the little red button and remain on the porch staring at what I imagine to be Castor and Pollux for a minute or two before returning inside.
Emotional momentum from the deep satisfaction I felt about relating to someone about my high school experience has the odd effect of slowing me down. There is no need to rush into friendship or into love or into fretting about every emotion that pops into my head. I am comfortable with the breeze whipping around my brown legs and with the end of a phone call and with the end of my past relationship and in a sense with all my endings.
How do we fit in here? We never looked back when we left yet something seems to be compelling a return to a home where we may not be able to fit in ever again. Was it worth it? The response could only be an emphatic yes. Looking back into the past has never lacked loneliness like this. Before I return to the sticky indoor heat I wonder if I’m really looking at Castor and Pollux, twin stars, connected.
