i am sitting on this plastic chair in my aunts kitchen in this village where my dad grew up and the mosquitoes are eating me alive but i dont even care bc im too busy looking at my own hands and wondering why they dont look like they belong here. i guess i thought coming back at seventy would finally make the pieces fit together or something but im just an old man in a linen shirt sweating through my clothes while my cousins talk about people who died forty years ago and i have to nod like i know who they mean. is that weird? to pretend you remember a ghost just so they dont realize how much of a stranger you are? maybe its just what happens when you spend your whole life trying to be two people at once and you end up being neither of them. earlier today i went to the market to buy some of those little sweets my mom used to describe and the lady behind the stall looked at me and immediately started speaking english before i even opened my mouth. i guess it’s the shoes or the way i stand or maybe just the look of a man who has never had to carry water on his back but it felt like a slap in the face. i tried to answer in the language i grew up hearing in my sleep but it came out clunky and heavy like i was chewing on rocks and she just smiled that pitying smile they give to tourists. do i look that obvious? do i have AMERICAN written across my forehead in invisible ink? i sort of wanted to scream at her that my grandfather built the well in this town but i just paid my money and walked away feeling like a thief. it makes me think about back home where i’ve lived for six decades and yet every time i walk into a grocery store there people still ask me where im REALLY from. like sixty years of paying taxes and raising kids and now being back in school for this damn degree isnt enough to buy me a seat at the table. im currently staring at a stack of textbooks for my seminar next week and the words just look like nonsense because im stuck between two worlds and i dont belong in either of them. maybe i never did. maybe the whole point of being the first born in a new place is just being a bridge that everyone walks on but nobody actually stays on. i guess i’m just a permanent resident of the middle of the atlantic ocean. my cousin bashir asked me why i never brought my kids here and i couldnt tell him the truth which is that i didnt want them to see me like this. i didnt want them to see their father looking like a lost toddler in his own skin. we were sitting on the porch drinking tea and he was talking about the soil and the ancestors and how the land remembers us but all i could think about was how much my knees hurt and how i wanted a burger from the place down the street from my apartment in chicago. is it bad that i miss the noise of a city that doesnt even want me? am i just a traitor to my own blood? i guess i felt more at home in the airport lounge than i do in the house where my father was born. ive been trying to write this paper for my anthropology class about cultural identity and i keep deleting everything because it feels too clean on the page. it doesn't capture the way the air smells like woodsmoke and jasmine and how that smell makes me want to cry and vomit at the same time. my professor keeps talking about the immigrant experience like it’s a math problem to be solved but he’s never sat in a room full of people who share his DNA but speak a language he only half-remembers. i guess i’m failing that class because i can’t make it make sense in a way that gets me an A. does anyone actually feel like they belong anywhere or are we all just pretending to have roots? i remember my dad used to say that one day we’d come back and everything would be right but he died in a hospital in the suburbs with the fluorescent lights buzzing over him and he never got to see me sitting here feeling like a fraud.