Shadows and Shade

The night is cool here right now, a welcome change after yet more scorching heat. The moon looks like a crisp piece of crystal in a darkening sky, the fresh air feels soothing and the light sweater I am wearing adds a touch of casual ease after the stress of finding the heat controlling everything from sleep to food to mood. I shiver with a certain delight, the sensation one I missed all the previous nights this month as the recent heat wrapped itself around every flower, every plant, every breath, every step. The stars sit encrusted in the velvet dark above me, and I welcome the silence of their sparkle. There are days like today, where it feels like I must always have lived here in the US, and that I am almost able to convince myself that I was born here, and the person who grew up in Roeselare, Belgium, is just someone I conjured up to amuse my mind. I remember an interview with an American survivor of a Japanese concentrationcamp during World War II. He was a prisoner in one of those death camps for 5 years, and he said there were times where he felt that the life he knew before his imprisonment was just something he'd imagined, it seemed so far removed from the reality he was in while in the camp. Of course, the comparison with my 40 years in the US are absurd, but the words of that soldier hit a nerve emotionally,because I remember them well and the sensation they provoked was one of identification with the impact of what he was conveying. It has been a rare occasion indeed, and remains one to this day, where I can speak freely of what it is like to live outside of your country and language and culture of birth for so very long. You develop a secondary vision, one that makes you view the world around you as were your eyes looking always through a kaleidoscope, where there are layers from all the worlds you have absorbed blended in with how you see things, layers that are invisible to the eyes of those around you, because you feel everything in Flemish and English, and everyone around you feels it only in English, and you are one layer removed form them, because there is no one around you that also has the Flemish perspective. My Peruvian friend Maricela has those double layers too, of Spanish and English, but all the years she has been in the US, she is surrounded by other Latin Americans and speaks more Spanish than she does English. The same with my Vietnamese friend Yvonne, who speaks Vietnamese constantly with her mother and sisters, each and every day in the beauty shop where they work together. My perspective is unique, and that can be very exhilarating and charming, but being away from any one who speaks my language all those years also makes for a sensation of being in a space where the intimate parts of my identity and being are invisible to an often dehumanizing degree. My art and my writing are a way to combat that, and my love for animals, who also often are without a voice as to their existence and emotional reality. There are days it feels like I am a shadow in the shade, irrelevant, here, but not seen. One thing about that condition of exclusion so to speak, is an almost pleasant sense of detachment, and a sharpened sense of intuition, that rarely fails me, especially when it comes to those in close proximity to me, either  physically, or emotionally. I often think of the character Russel Crowe plays in " Gladiator ", general Maximus, who through betrayal is reduced to being an exile and a slave and who overcomes his limitations through will and integrity. I have seen that movie half a dozen times, and each time I come across it, it sends chills through my heart because I know what it is like to have to reinvent yourself in a world not your own. It is fascinating at best, infuriating at worst, and most of the time, it feels like you are a monk without a monastery, because it takes so much faith to keep going and to keep hoping. It did not help that I lost what ever family I had, and that Michael too has no real connection to his small family. The best part of this exile has always been the interesting people I got to meet, and sometimes know, friends from all over the globe, who in time though, all went back to their country. Catherine went back to France, Driss went back to Morocco. Everyone went back home. Michael gave me a second home, and Nicholas made it a family with him, and for Michael too, this country is a strange place, since he is a stranger to his family as much as I became one to mine. We both are shadows in the shade. Nicholas is free of that, for the most part, but he is quite aware of my tragic family history and Michael's bizarre family story. Over the years , you develop a thick skin, one that accepts that you are an outsider, culturally, emotionally, and intellectually and philosophically. So, being an artist makes it all acceptable, even interesting some days. Heaven to me would be a place where I get to be around all my favorite friends, who would all live within a few hours distance, and we get to celebrate life together, on good days and bad, and laugh each in our own language, and in the language we have in common. In real time, those friends all live on the other sides of the planet, and I see them in my dreams, and I talk to them in my mind,  briefly and happily erasing the boundaries of space and time, like I do when I miss Catherine, or Driss, or my aunt Lieve in Oostende.