Shane

Shane is one of Tom's friends. We met recently at a party.At first glance, you would know that we have nothing in common.....NOTHING....and yet when asked, "What do you think of Shane?", my knee-jerk response was "We get each other"

You see, after the initial glance, Shane opened his mouth and I heard his accent. I asked where he was from and he, with the tiniest hint of reluctance, revealed that he was from a small town very similar my own- in fact just on the other side of a forest.

And there it was.  Relief.  I felt it as a flood of assumed common experiences joined our conversation. Someone standing right in front of me knew what it felt like to come from a place that thought you should never leave. He knew how it felt to always remember to muffle the accent (I could hear his watered-down drawl).
- I imagine that he had an idea of what it meant to dress differently at home than at your other home or to try with relentless hope and absolutely no success to explain "what you're doin' down there in the city" when you actually live in the suburbs.
- Without a word of conversation, I wondered if he felt like a foreigner in his hometown only to come "home" at night and feel like he could never fully morph into anything else.  I wondered if his grandparents, like mine, thought only bad people lived in the city, if he loved going home to visit, but hated seeing the hint of judgement from old friends when they ask "so where ya livin' now?" I wondered if he felt a fleeting inner exhale as he came eyeball to eyeball with someone who knew the pride and the pain of getting out and never going back.

I did.

And it's a familiar feeling, one every expat of the small town feels when they find a similar other. The feeling of being able to celebrate the leaving without having to explain that it's not in insult to those who stay. I think it's part of the reason that my cousin, Ryan, and I have become such dear friends in recent years. We are the only ones on Earth who will every fully understand where we came from AND understand why we aren't still there- a gift for sure.


I wonder how I will explain this to my own children, should I ever have them...that walking away from somewhere beautiful makes it more a part of you than ever....that staying doesn't mean betraying yourself anymore than leaving means betraying everyone else....that you will be a foreigner everywhere you go before heaven and your best best is to accept yourself knowing that you may often be the only one.