Where am I?

I missed 9/11. I don't mean to say that I didn't watch the planes hit the tower, because I did, or that I didn't hold my breath along with the rest of the world to find out what, if anything would happen next, because I did. But I did all this from a pub in Dublin, having been in the city for four days, having just found an apartment, having walked literally miles to do it (the bus system being incomprehensible, initially).

I don't mean to say that I don't remember 9/11 as a catalyzing moment in history. All I mean to say is that I don't remember it as an American. I remember it as an American abroad, and that is a very different thing. There are pieces that are easier - I couldn't, for example, see the smoke from the Pentagon like my classmates. But the TV broadcast we watched didn't zoom away from the people who jumped out of the towers. The people who stood next to me and held my hand weren't Americans, and the people who gave me their phones to use weren't, either.

And so, when I landed back in the US, home for Christmas, and in Boston (the same airport I'd left from four months earlier) the first thing greeting passengers in the Arrivals hall was a wall-sized American flag and two soldiers with automatic weapons, I didn't know where I was anymore. I missed those first few months, the ones where America shifted so profoundly. I came back to my own country as someone apart, and I wonder, sometimes, whether that will ever change.

I look at world policy from an uncomfortable vantage point - as if I'm floating somewhere over the Atlantic, not a part of Europe, not fully a part of the US. The more I travel, the less I seem to be able to put down political roots anywhere, and the less I want to.