My America

Is not physical, is never has never been and never will be physical. The physical things are not America, because they could just as easily be Canada, or China, maybe, or even the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. My America is metaphorical, it is a state, a phase, if you will, just as solids and liquids and gases are phases. Yet it is best described with the physical things, especially in a narrative.

My America involves subways. I could have said trains (I wanted to, at first) or cars or boats or planes, I suppose, any of them, all of them. But it is a subway, and I am sitting "in the corner seat on the subway, one of the ones that faced the front and made it easier to look out the window." Staring, of course, not out the window, because "all I could make out were the streaks of white light scratching against a dark backdrop [that] gave way to a blur of shapes and shadows that eventually solidified into people as the train pulled to a stop."

And, of course, don't forget "the sickly red State Farm ad [urging] me to open an insurance account for a car I did not own yet," or the man "wearing a deep purple dress shirt and a deeply-etched frown [talking] on his phone." Or the crowds and "their bright red and blue and purple shirts screaming against the faint humming of indistinguishable voices."

Those are all part of my America. The noise. The chaos. The confusion. But most of all, the freedom of flight.

The freedom of "being able to go wherever you want and do whatever you want, and no one will stop you and call you crazy."

Amidst all of the chaos and the craziness, there is that urge to "pack up my bags and buy a train ticket to some unknown town and hitchhike the rest of the route to anywhere at all, as long as I kept on moving, [because] I wanted to go somewhere and nowhere at all."

It is the America of the roads paved with gold. The search for that inner calling that makes us defy ordinary and lead the life we dream of.

That is my America.