just like there, but i am here

i am fundamentally american. i smile too frequently, i laugh too raucously. i listen to the melodies before interpreting the lyrics. i want things done immediately, at my convenience. i take hot showers and never allow myself to run out of toilet paper. i have animals for pleasure, plants for aesthetic beauty, and all manner of knickknacky clutter. i expect stores to be open 24 hours, an exposed arm to not attract attention, the ability to operate a vehicle and be employed and curse loudly and receive sanitary medical care and have sex for mere enjoyment. i love idioms and bumper stickers and sarcasm and emotions and being able to, however abashedly, skate through life with a veneer of vapid comprehension without fact-based intellect.
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was just squirreled away at the odious chain bookstore, reading 'expat' whilst drinking a grossly corporate drip coffee out of a wasteful paper cup. 'expat' is a collection of women's experiences living elsewhere... obviously... and it clarified for me how, every time i have travelled to other countries, i have done so as an American, having my American Experience, filtering these new environments through an onlooker's interpretation and never becoming part of my surroundings. most of my time spent in france (that being my longest time in any 'foreign' place), for example, involved writing in my journal, introverted, creating my own universe, thinking of how i would describe what i'd seen or heard to friends back home. i blame most of that on my inability to communicate. i would be sitting on the beaches of the meditteranean, marvelling at the lack of vegetation and seagulls, admiring how people carry themselves, the way everyone has a calm assurance, smelling the lavender/kabob/galoise blanc/piss patina that would waft along on a single inhalation no matter where i was- and when i was approached by a local, i could only muster "oui, la mere est tres jolie." my american sensibility of "if it's not easy and instantaneous, it doesn't need to happen" tainted what should have been a much richer everything. that is merely one example.
my lifelong 'je voudrais habiter a paris' fantasy involves me, sequestered in a grimy room, writing the most devastatingly fucking beautiful novel ever. in english. about someone like me. writing it alone. in france. still not taking anything in, just letting the rest of the world riccochet off of me.
this isn't a fantasy in this respect. it is the horrid reality i fear i would allow it to become. and it's the largest reason (the other dissentions are rooted in practicality) why i haven't done it.
about a year ago i spoke with b for the first time since he left. i didn't recognise his voice at all. there was no sense of anything. i felt a vile emptiness, as if part of my life had never fucking mattered, had never existed at all- one should, at the very least, be able to remember, be able to relive some sort of sensation towards someone one was married to, in love with, believed in, slept beside every night- but there were, and are, only vague and dismissive anecdotes.
"you sound so american" he said. the scorn in his voice was palpable.
"i am american" i replied. and so are you, you pretentious west texan fuck, i thought. but i didn;t say it. and it still annoys me: that he said it and i didn;t, that i still had the ability to let this stranger make me react.
there comes a point when you have to stop running and revel in what you are and what you have. this is only just becoming blatant to me; i am learning to stop snorting contemptuously at such cliched treacle.
no edit.