I've never been to America
And most likely I never will
Oh, say, can you see? No, actually I can’t
It’s recently dawned on me that I’m reaching my fifties and I’ve never been to America. I’ve got so many friends there, so many people I haven’t seen in a long time, people I love and miss so much, and I’ve never paid them a visit. And more importantly — because this is a dog-eat-dog-world: most of my readers are in America.1 And not just regular readers, but readers who might be able to decode me better than the British folk who surround me. I mean specifically that in America I could embrace a legible identity, get lumped together with other Latin Americans, and perhaps stop feeling in identitarian limbo, like I feel here in the UK, where no one truly understands what I am, except that I’m not from here. And yet I’ve never been to America. There are so many cheap flights and I’ve never been there. You get the idea.
I swear to…