The first thing I saw when I got off the plane was a startup ad. “NO TWO CLOUDS ARE THE SAME”, it boldly proclaimed. I knew that the airplane had certainly arrived at its correct destination, but I felt more than ever that I had not. Tech ads plastered every column and billboard, and I recalled an excerpt from T.S. Eliot’s “The Journey of the Magi”.
“We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.”
I have lived in the Silicon Valley my entire life. To this very day I feel strange when I look outside and do not see Mission Peak, Mount Diablo, or the Sierra Nevadas. The world seemed to begin and end within these mountains.
For the majority of my life I had been seeking desperately to find my place within this land of earthquakes, technological solutionism, and short buildings. I had been convinced, by my stubborn attachment to this place and by others, that it was me that was odd, that I was condemned to one of two choices: compromise myself or wander through this landscape of people who don’t know how to walk like an atom drifting amongst molecules.
Last spring, a classmate in my creative writing class had once mentioned that she’d gone to Cuba for the first time. She was shocked at how much she had struggled to fit in, despite considering herself a Cuban her entire life. I’d talked about this to one of my closest friends at the time, someone who’d traveled all over the world and came from the other side of the world but seemed inevitably to return to two particular cities in the US.
“How can you be from somewhere you’ve never been?” I’d asked her, a few weeks before her student’s visa expired.
“You can,” she’d said, a wistful smile on her face.
Almost a year later I begin to understand what she’d meant. New York City is not perfect, and I do not feel completely at home here. There is too much capitalism, too many people, too few vegetables. Yet the events of the previous week have opened me up to the possibility that there is a world beyond these mountains, a home to which I’ve never been.
(Originally written 3/26)
