“Personally, I am too vindictively American, too full of hate for the hateful aspects of this country, and too possessed by the things I love here to be too long away.” -Ralph Ellison

I knew I was back in the US of A tonight when I switched back and forth between two channels on my blessed cable television, finding “Showgirls”, that paean to feminine beauty and grace on one, and a documentary on the usage of the hijab in Egypt on the other. Cable is a never-ending cavalcade of ironic horrors, and oh, how I have missed it.

I have been back now for about a week and a half, roaming the streets like a sleepwalker, barely remembering how to drive, subsisting on carrots and walking everywhere. It is too overwhelming, too confusing. There are so many shiny lights, so many loud noises, so much English! I had not realized how accustomed I had become to being perpetually confused and ignored. I have to remember to make snide comments under my breath, and stop cursing at or around small children. Apparently the phrase “shit show” is not something people want their little Beckys and Tristans to start repeating.

I have missed many things while I’ve been gone. Ice, for instance. Big, heaping, obscene cups of ice, preferably filled with free tap water, or, wonder of wonders, free refills of soda. I know it sounds ridiculously parochial, and I’m embarrassed to admit it, but in the last week of my trip I had a straight up fantastic evening at the Hard Rock Cafe in Lisbon. Now, I think it is pretty clear that the HRC is not the kind of joint I would frequent this side of the Pond. But after countless meals of olives and cured pork fat, after endless days of feeling perpetually dehydrated, after wandering through a desert of tile and palm trees, what I really needed was some shitty rock ‘n’ roll and walls covered in B-List tchotchkes. I needed a plate of nachos the size of my torso and a Diet Coke I could take a bath in. I needed waiters who not only spoke English but pretended to give two shits about whatever stupid thing we requested. I needed commercial Americana, and the Hard Rock Cafe delivered it in a giant, Walmart-ian payload. It made me want to weep into the comforting polyester folds of an mass-produced American flag.

While perhaps not the proudest moment of my trip, the feeling of homesickness I succumbed to is one with which any traveler of great distances is familiar. When I was a counselor at Seeds of Peace International Camp, I had a camper, a boy about 11 years old, from Afghanistan. Needless to say it was the first time he had been away from home, ever, and he was remarkably homesick. When we had some of the local Afghan immigrants host the campers for a meal, I saw this little boy literally take a running dive into a big pile of freshly baked traditional Afghan bread. His happiness was infectious, the food made him come alive in a way no repelling wall or water-skiing expedition had. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a human being that happy, before or since. This, without the tragedy of being from a war-torn and basically destroyed country, was the joy I felt as I gulped my fifth soda of the evening.

So yes, I did miss America. I missed its laughter, its loudness, or rather the particular way in which it is loud. I missed its infinite size, and I missed my midwestern bubble of personal space. I think I had to go away to remember why I choose to stay, which isn’t a half-bad reason to travel. I wanted to be reminded that I have a choice, and I choose to be here. In May I left this country disgusted and fed up, sick to death of the people we had chosen as leaders, and frankly sick to death of the people doing the choosing. I was ready to talk to the ultimate strangers, people with whom I didn’t even share a common vocabulary. I wanted to hear what they had to say, to be an American listener, rather than a dictator. I think deep down, I was looking for someone to make me defend my country, to force me to stand up and say that I was proud of her, despite our current moment of darkness. I wanted to prove myself wrong about the United States.

No one ever took a swing at me, of course, either verbally or physically. People aren’t as hateful of us as we might imagine. I ended up having to do my own convincing, to create my own reasons to stay. At certain points, yes, the idea of never-ending ice water was enough, but mostly it was something different, and far less tangible. I realized that I will ultimately never be anything else than an American, because I believe firstly in the idea of this country. I think the idea of this country is better than the idea of any other country. It may sound arrogant, but I think that the things this nation stands for, not our commercialism, not our oppression or colonialism, but the things we put on paper at our founding, I still think those ideas beat any others that have come maybe before, but definitely after. I have respect for the other governments and legal systems I observed, I believe that those things work for those countries and for this particular moment in their time. But when a French teacher tells me that in order to protect a woman’s fundamental rights, she cannot be allowed to express herself by wearing a hijab in public, I object. When a British judge tells me that citizens don’t have a right to walk the streets unwatched, I object. There were moments when, I kid you not, I longed for the Bill of Rights.

But the moment when I really knew that no matter how much I love to travel I would never be a happy expat came on the Fourth of July. I was in Prexian, France, a town of about 400 people. I had talked some of my fellow hostelers at Sidsmums into buying some sparklers, and as night fell, we all began to light them up. Two Americans, three Brits, two Quebecois, one Kiwi, and one Irish family of 5 danced and laughed and lit things on fire. At the end of the day, America is a celebration, and the whole world should be invited. I just prefer to be the host.

All photos are by Spencer Selvidge