Hey america

Transcription of my video:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hqxKc670dsE

Someone once told me the grass was much greener on the other side

That’s a quote from a show which along other dreams and childhood bricks I imported from this place. Smuggled beneath the iron curtain of this is my culture and that is your flag, I started building my mind with these foundations so like raising a backup horcrux I could always feel home somewhere else.
Or at least I tried. The closest I got was a perpetual homesickness like a nostalgia for the things that never were, every time someone mentioned “America”. 

America, the land where both cowboys and astronauts had been birthed, responsible for my constant lack of attention during class time because of the battling G.I joes taking place in my head while I was rooted somewhere else. A place across the ocean that could make my mind burn with the tales of such beat mythology, drowning brick cities and paper towns being ridden by lonesome poets.

And I felt compelled to go if only to say thank you to these invisible heroes that had thrown corked up oil paintings into the sea so a boy like me, growing slowly somewhere else could enjoy them too. This oil gulf spill they left on me of daydreams and nightmares, which ill never be able to repay. And im aware these trips are supposed to feel like a flash but I felt suspended in the space that had been growing all these years between my joints.

In this culture which I now understand why is so prone to symbols and statues, to keep their godfathers walking among them, paintings of ghosts hanging hanging in their living rooms, whose stare tell them who they were and who they ought to be, like watery graves they will never allow to sink.

A nation that might embrace atheism with one hand and with the other shape statues to thank the fallen wherever they are and to remember the living that even if god doesn’t acknowledge sacrifice, they will. That produces icons and heroes as if it knew nutrition went beyond food, and a child using comic books as armor was starving somewhere, while a man pricks his finger every day with a needle to keep the flag in his porch red.

Whose yellow buses and plastic cafeterias were a high school dream that grew on me as if in some alternate universe Mr. Feeny had been my teacher, and Doug, Arnold, T.J., Mickey, Vince, Gus, Spinelli and Gretchen had waited for recess with me.

A place that birthed these magnets whose scriptures I’ve been reading since I can remember and naively assumed they were made from some dirt different than mine. But I realized they too are looking for the edge of this world, taking steps in spite of these imaginary turtles waiting at the edge to feed on the lost, learning that the strings attached are stronger than we thought, if you lean back on your end ill stumble forwards.

Here I realized the endearing fear we have of being forgotten if only by ourselves which leads to us fingerprinting everything around us, turning the coldest nights into the brightest like telling mother nature we can find beauty in everything she takes away, like telling neil, buzz and that other guy they only need to look down to remember why they went so far, to see how we lift our sons, pointing at that moon, our backyards and street lamps and say “We make stories from this, and then they become true. Not the other way around”.

Felt like alice through the mirror, meeting these electric crowds who like me had grown weary from building pedestals for our chymeras, and I had to cross the sea just to realize they never wanted to be up there. I suffered this trip because I learned the difference between tourism and journey and its that in the latter you allow the place to crawl inside your skin.

I collected snapshots of little towns with white churches, houses made for the winter parked at the seashore, burning with stories and lives I will never live. How I wish I could have been raised in each one of them. I was part of communities that try every day not to fall through the ice of this north they chose to live in.

And America, don’t think im obsessed or creepy but I’ve been picturing this moment so many times thinking of everything I would ask when I saw you. Like:
Hey America, when will you strip off your wars, when will you be angelical?
Hey America, were communists really that bad?
Hey America, how did it feel to have Louis Armstrong and Marilyn Monroe dance on your belly?
Hey America, I heard you would take in the huddled masses. Do you mind if I stay for a while?

And as I leave and you start to look more like the stamp im used to, im trying to remember what your streets felt like, how the people on them walked, how everyone carried themselves. Im gonna try to bring you down from that pedestal I had built for you. It looked cold up there.