"And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer."
- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
i.
It started that day, when you were found in a field. It was confusing to be fought over by those two blond men, but you chose the warm arms of the one with bushy eyebrows over the nice smelling food of the creepy one with long hair. He didn't want to be called big brother – the mere suggestion of it positively terrified him – but England sounded all right to you.
His scones were tasty but his tea burned, and had too little sugar in it to boot. England was pleasant, but scary when he was trying to curse someone. Actually, it was even scarier when he summoned up Russia by accident. You'd never understood his love of horror movies, but watched them anyway to prove you were brave. It was alright if he let you curl up beside him afterward, and never seemed to mind when you wet the bed.
You swore you were going to be a hero when you grew up, and he patted your head and promised you certainly would.
Then you actually grew up.
ii.
You sailed across the sea to put as much distance between yourself and him. England is not your homeland - the fact becoming increasingly apparent to you as the war wore on; as the broad green plains were stained over with the blood of his men and yours. The distinction between nationalities, loyalties lost in a decaying mass of faceless, decaying men.
They call you a hero of war, a pioneer. Nothing could be further from the truth. You'd won because you weren't the one who threw down his rifle and cried because he couldn't shoot his little brother, after all. You had no right to revel in that non-victory, no right to stand over England and gloat over how small he seemed to you now.
You paint red stripes along the length of your flag to remind yourself how long it took you to get here, how much bloodshed. In the corner, a patch of blue sky, and you add stars to it each time you expand your boundaries and form new states, reminding yourself how much you've grown, how much bigger the sky looks without the shadow of Great Britain blocking it out. The sky is now yours, and you color your future in blue, red and white.
iii.
Place your flag beside his and you see that your starlight is borrowed, your colors his. You remember little beyond the day he picked you up in the field and you chose whose footsteps you would follow. He is your history, your culture and your language. He gave you things, memories that you keep locked away in a dusty storage room that is painful to visit even now.
This freedom is the last gift he could give, the last thing you could take; an unspoken you've grown up from him to you. You kick up the dust with your big boots, pack up and move on. You leave behind an ocean of remembrance that spans across the north Atlantic. He was everything. It's time to build something for yourself now.
fin
"So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." – F Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby.