Monsoon Season

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I'm sitting here in a coffee shop a hundred feet from my hotel, which coincidentally has some of the best espresso in the whole city, according to someone who likely didn't understand the entirety of what I was asking them.

The girls working here are sisters. They laugh and talk and reminisce with each other in what I assume is Czech. They talk just like every pair of siblings I've ever known but I don't know these words and I lament that no matter how many I learn, beyond the necessities of please, and thank you, and do you speak english, I will never see in the same way they see. I've never been so aware of how much cultural context is assumed to be understood when you speak to someone. Conversations are not just conversations. They are an assumption of remembered and collective history that is a part of your social genetics. They are things that they could probably never describe to me even if we did speak the same language. Things that have no names and cannot even be represented outside of having witnessed them.

The girl working here, the younger one, the one I've shared a few words with, meets my eyes and smiles and I don't know what it means. In this country, people don't smile at you if they don't know you. Is she doing it because she knows that's not the case where I am from? Does she like me? Does she dislike me?

Then I find out that she's not even from Česko, Czechia, the Czech Republic. She's from Ukraine. And so everything I think I know about the Czech people has to be reconsidered, coming from a person who learned it and saw it through the lens of immigration.

I don't love this feeling of being an outsider, of not belonging, but neither do I hate it. In truth I feel much the same as I always have. Watching things from a slightly removed perspective; not unaffected by it, but still unfamiliar. It makes me think of all the ways I don't belong at home, of all the ways I don't understand people who have the same language and cultural context and history as me. I know this girl is 23. I know she moved her from Ukraine 20 years ago. I know the other girl who works here is her sister, unless she misspoke. It's amazing that I know more about her despite all our differences than every single person who's ever served me coffee back home, combined. I can't help but wonder if that means I'm more suited for life here. That I understand something about this place that I can't describe. Or if it is just some chance encounter, that this girl is friendly and talkative and in all probability just wants to practice her anglický on me.

The sky has been grey and thick with clouds all day and it is this that makes me think of home. In Arizona, it's monsoon season. Or at least it should be. I know it's been dry this year, so far. It's funny that it's this that makes me think of the desert I come from. Not the heat, but the thing that is an abnormality there, but that is my favorite thing about it. I love the monsoons and the warm night rains and the low rumbling thunder that makes it sound as if the world is being reformed or the mountains continue to grow, when they are under cover of darkness and out of sight of us. But I know that even home is just some vague idea. That when I'm there I don't feel this completion that I'm lacking now, however many hundreds of miles I am from it. Home is just that feeling you get sometimes, sitting in a coffee shop and looking out the window at the rain clouds moving faster than you think they should and thinking of the place that you know something about, something for which it is not known. Home is only known when you are not in it.