It happened again last night. My second night back from almost seven weeks
in the US, I woke up not knowing if I was in the US or in France. Was this physical structure around me my
French home or my American home?
Ideally, I would be able to take our lovely home with all its memories
and its four members (five, if we include the cat) and transport it all to
America.
But this is not what my mind was capable of thinking yet as
I lay in bed realizing I had done this before, not knowing who I was somehow,
what life choices had led me there and which consequences I had been forced to
suffer. It is pure torment when this
happens.
Surely jetlag has a large part to play in my confusion. Plus fatigue.
I am completely drugged by it all.
I tried to come to terms with my surroundings – the wall-to-wall,
ceiling-to-floor closet in my bedroom that my husband and I had put in a few
years back. OK, so I am married (one
time I could not even remember that, so deep was I in my cross-continental
stupor) but where was my home? It is
actually a kind of relief to be in no-man’s land, to know that all things are
possible and I can hope for the best.
I then thought back to the night before and the fact that we
had had dinner on the terrace out back. That
clinched it and I knew I was in my house in France. The outside world had brought my reality back
to me. The cocoon of the inside was now connected
to the outside foreign world of France.
The funny thing is, this never happens to me going to
America. It is only in that dichotomy of
my HOME being in a foreign land that I experience this. My most intimate world – my home with my
husband and children – being inserted into a place where I somehow still feel
foreign after more than 20 years of living here must seem misplaced to me, somewhere
in my psyche. It must be this opposition
of logic that brings me to this state of physical ‘unbelonging’. Of not understanding where my place is
exactly in the larger scheme of things.
Two definitions of amnesia are 'psychological disturbance or shock'. I guess this is what I am experiencing: culture shock upon returning to my foreign home, after leaving what I have recently understood will always be my true home. No matter the downfalls of America, it will still be my home. It is where I feel the most myself.
Have any of you experienced something similar? If so, tell me about it!
