Svensk Folk i USA

Svensk Folk, originally uploaded by skitbraviking.

For more years than memory allows me to record, I have come to feel a fissure within me. It's a crack with branches like a river, growing and dividing me into many parts and different places, but like all rivers, it has a central vein. It is the divide between the place I have grown up (Chicago, IL) and the place, that's in my heart and has always made me feel different (Sweden, more specifically Stockholm) and made me feel seperate from the US. Like a convict on Alcatraz, I have been captive to one culture and isolated from the country that surrounds me. I have always made the swim to visit but never felt like it was better than my captivity.

This would all be melodramatic blabber if I didn't feel spikes of memory now and again that reminded me of this difference and shake me from my own ignorant comfort. Perhaps all first generation Americans go through this. All I know is that the discomfirt it brings and the unsettling of me that coincides with these cracks within make me feel like an alien in a country which seems to even make aliens feel less alien.

As I was thinking this through I put on "Dear Chicago" by Ryan Adams and felt in my heart something like a feeling of home, even if it's a sad feeling. Someday I hope to feel settled somewhere, somehow. Until then, I am on the search for that place.