Aliens and Visitors but not Alien Visiters in over whelmed...?

All that was old is new. I have been feeling some sort of time shift. It is a little like traveling back in time but also being here and now. It feels weird.

It is a combination of many little things. Some of them tiny. But when you put them all together my sense of time and space continuum goes a little askew.

It started about a two months ago with an FB message from a friend from University. This was not unusual. We have a funny bantery relationship on the faceplace and I usually see him about once a year. He and his wife live in Poland and travel extensively, if he has the option to have a layover here he always takes it and spends one night at our place. I love them both immensely and I find his visits a little emotionally draining. Over the course of the 20 or so hours I spend with them or him I lay bare my soul and all the things happening in my brain and have a sounding board for ideas and someone who can fully understand the words I am speaking. And then he leaves. And I feel a million times lonelier and and discontent with the shallowness of the relationships I have with the people that I live surrounded by. What I am saying in a very long way is that he was here and left yesterday.

I then got a very casual message on the fucking faceplace from my friend the truthsayer. I have known her since I was 17 years old. She was one of my closet friends when I was in University. Perhaps on a level that was more like sister than friend actually. She was the catalyst that caused the chain of events that eventually led to my divorce. After I moved to NYC she got married and moved to San Francisco. Having been a regular presence at our house in Ottawa, she was actually rather good friends with Tim, my ex-husband. A few years after our respective moves her and her husband came to visit Tim and I in New York. She was there for a day before she point blank looked me in the eye and told me to get divorced. I love that about her. Girl does not beat around the bush.

That was also the last time I saw her. Because you know, life happens. She had kids. I was busy working on my career and such. We called each a few times. But you know, other than facebook we had no contact. Now we have contact. Seems she has moved to Dallas. She is coming to visit me, with her kids, in two weeks. I am very fucking nervous about this.

Lets travel back in time a little again. Around the time I met my trusty thruthsayer my personal truth was a little split. I am brown and by brown I mean of Indian decent. Buuuuuuuut I moved a lot when I was a kid. Like every few years. And we always lived in places with large expat communities, and I went to school with a lot of kids that grew up the same way I did. I was going to write that I didn’t know I was not white until I went to University but I realize that statement is not entirely true. I feel I have stumbled upon something that is a little difficult to explain. I knew that my family was muslim. But my nuclear family was always pretty nuclear. Due to some rift my Dad had with his parent’s, when I was less than a year old, he changed our last names and moved to Luxembourg.

My Dad’s family is straight up brown. Like memorizing the Koran and only watching bollywood channels brown. We did not see them very often and when we did it was fairly dramatic and there was always a lot of keeping secrets and lying about things. At some point when I was maybe like six years old we moved back to England for a year or two. At first we lived close to my grandparents and everything my little wee brain had figured out about the world suddenly changed. And I had to go to islamic school after school school and I was not buying it. Not. At. All. I did not like it, i did not want to do it. There were all these rules and I was not going to follow them. But I also by this time had learned that you don’t have to because you can do whatever you want and just lie about it. Mercifully this period did not last very long and after my mother tried to kill herself we moved very far far away and back into the expat bubble that did not include islamic school. What I am saying is that when you are always foreign in every place in the world that you have ever been you don’t really form any real allegiances to any one culture, religion or country.

When I moved to Canada I sort of had to pick a side. Canada is not a melting pot. It is a mosaic, as they like to call it. To put this in the simplest way possible, the white folk hung out with the white folk and the brown people with the brown. With very little over lap in my experience of it. I had never been in this sort of predicament before. In my universe everyone had been sort of the same. University is the first place that I met people that had all lived in the same place for extensive periods of time and had friends that they had know for long periods of time and were part of a community. The truthsayer and her sister were part of a much bigger thing. They all wore Indian outfits, and only dated brown guys and watched Indian movies, and prayed and went to Bhangra parties. And because I looked like them they expected me to do the same. And just that.

I liked all of that stuff but I also like reading Spinoza and going to bars and dating white boys and you stuff that wasn’t brown. And I most certainly was not going to have an arranged marriage and pump out babies and did not want to practice dance routines in the basement. It was a strange time for me. Eventually the brown gang kicked me out and called me an oreo. The Truthsayer and I stayed friends though. She is one of the most well rounded and emotionally intelligent people I have ever met.

I am not really sure why I am scared of her upcoming visit. Maybe it is because I haven’t dealt with my teenaged rejection and am worried she will think I am too white. You would be fairly surprised how often that actually STILL happens. Including with my own fucking family. Mostly I am fine with it and have concluded it is not my fault that people can be so narrow minded.

I just realized that I do have my own tribe. My tribe is expats. My other friend from University who visited also moved a lot when he was growing up. My enduring group of friends from that time were all gypsys and we all sort of bonded over that.

Huh, who know?

Also X Files.

And here we end another session of I came here to say something, started talking about something else, forgot what I was going to do and now am exhausted and have bored and confused the shit out of the one person who is still reading this.

Ciao then.