The Escapee

I was thinking today, while I read Angela’s Ashes, about the human urge to flee. To escape. Take flight. Abandon what is difficult for that often dreamt of perfect life in that other place, far from here. Frank spoke of how if he were in America, he could tell his father, “I love you.” But in Ireland men only say that of their country or their pint (or something along those lines). The book returns again and again to America as the land of possibilities, while the structure of the book itself creates an irony that is inescapable: Frank’s family started in America looking for opportunity and returned to Ireland when they couldn’t make ends meet—so the reader has the harsh evidence that America isn’t a magical fix-all in its very first pages. Frank says that he wants “to be in America with you and all that music, where no one has bad teeth, people leave food on their plates, every family has a lavatory, and everyone lives happily ever after.” Clearly this is false, but what leaves the reader with hope when Frank returns to America at the conclusion is that he has work-ethic; he’s tasted poverty, lived off of it; he’s seen his loved ones experience chronic suffering; and he is not his alcoholic, good-for-nothing father who couldn’t make use of America’s opportunities.

One of the things I miss most about home when I’m gone is having a car. To me, a vehicle is the American equivalent of freedom, to be able to go where you want, when you want. To possess the ability to escape, take flight, abandon an irreparably bad life, and chase that perfect dream. Not that my life was bad or that I wanted to escape...it's just having the ability to do so if you wish that is so liberating. While growing up in Kansas, I took the even-keeled, steady rhythm of life to be complacent rather than reassuring, a tad boring even. I listened to kids in school repeat their worn-out mantra that they longed to go to California or New York City where life wasn’t boring and where people were interesting. They asked, "Who actually wants to live in Kansas?". After going away to school, I appreciate Kansas more than I ever could have when it was the only home I knew.

Right now I feel a bit untethered, disconnected. Yes, Kansas is still my home. But it is strange that increasingly I spend the most time with my close friends via skype rather than in person. That I don’t know where I will live in three years. That after going to college, one of the biggest, hyped-up dreams of escaping imaginable, I realize that we always paint an unattainable picture of perfection in our dreams of getting away and starting “fresh.” Fresh is actually scary. Making friends is easier than it sounds. The familiar is irrefutably comforting, even if it is in varying degrees. Every city has its pitfalls, its poverty, its unhappy, its humdrum, its inadequacies, its similarities with where you hail from.

I was thinking of escaping today perhaps because this is a long summer for me, and picking up on that annoying persistent theme that infuses all my blog entries, I am nervous about leaving and starting fresh overseas, so ridiculously far from home. I love this lyric of Snow Patrol’s: “I find a map and draw a straight line. Over rivers, farms, and state lines. The distance from A to where you’d be. It’s only finger lengths that I see.” But realistically, the little skip-hop across the pond becomes impossibly wide and far-fetched when logistics are taken into consideration.

I get told by people that I speak the language, so what am I nervous about? I read that one of the biggest dangers in studying abroad in another English-speaking country is underestimating the culture shock. I don’t know how to sum them up, I suppose, all these thoughts swirling about in my mind. I think it's just that I live in a country that the world perceives as a dream land at times (when they’re not criticizing us): the land of opportunities. I am grown up enough to realize that it isn’t the idealized place one is escaping to but the person who is escaping, the escapee, that determines the success of the escape. I know that England won’t be drastically different from Kansas or DC, but it will be different enough. I know that I will face the same challenges I found at Georgetown in Oxford but completely different ones that will challenge me anew too.

I am a little too cynical to believe in a perfect place, a perfect life to escape to, that simply lies waiting for me. But all that I know of Oxford thus far, which isn’t much, is an idealized dream of a mysterious, alluring, sophisticated, exciting university in a far-off land. I’m a little nervous for the dream and the reality to confront one another, and I hope that reality can take it easy on my dream, not squashing it too cruelly, completely, or quickly. I’m hoping the dream puts up a fight, takes root, comes to even a small level of realization. And while cynical, I have enough romantic in me to believe it will.