Moving Alone

I have a festering dissatisfaction with my American college environment, a dissatisfaction shared by my Ethiopian friend Semeret, sensed by many of my international peers, and which I am now attempting to articulate.

It is not a resurgence or continuation of my perceived intellectual superiority over all mortals, which, to the undoubted relief of those close to me, has been somewhat tempered. It is more a swelling of gratitude towards my parents for raising me in Jamaica, the wrapping paper on a gift whose content is an acute awareness of the falsities of American life.

There is no easy way to convey the desperate feeling of isolation, everpresent but of fluid intensity, that follows me as I move through this homogeneous space. I had the misconception when I moved here, bolstered by a barrage of orientational messages, that a period of receding discomfort and acclimatisation would transition to an existence different from my Jamaican life in the details but identical in spirit. Like a British TV sitcom redone on a US network.

My depression results from the realization that this period is, in fact, interminable. There will never come a point when a lifetime of vacuous affluence and suburban indistinguishability removes my sense of self and purpose. There will never come a point when a willing and pervasive collective deception removes the line of deception itself, when I will mask the misery of my life with a plastic sheen of effervescence and then tragically forget it is a mask. I can feel the four walls of quiet acquiescence, of robotic conformity, of habitual fakery, of ignorant ignorance, closing in, and I want to scream out.

You have a lot of time to think when you're transferring your material life across campus, each box and backpack heavier than the last, adding to the burdening knowledge that there is no one to help and no one to care, the rhythm of your labored breathing ornamented only by the careless melodies of dozens of students loading their late-model SUVs alongside their older brothers, girlfriends, fathers and best friends.