Sometimes, as America falls asleep at night, he remembers times from Before. From before he was a country, a colony, even before he was any sort of physical being at all.
He remembers when he was the land.
His land. He still is, of course (they all are), but he remembers when he was everything.
When he was younger (young, younger than he is even now), and still a colony, he would be praised on 'how much bigger he's getting'.
Which was odd, of course, because he remembers being much bigger. Bigger than he is now, and he is big.
(When he was big, he could be in two places at once. He would drift down the Pacific coast, sometimes, while wandering the forests of the northeast.) He is not so much a physical creature as a sort of spirit, when he remembers. This was before everything: Columbus, Eriksson, Cortez, even his Natives.
Before, he was his rolling fields of the Midwest, the desert of Arizona, the hills of Appalachia, the buffalo, deer, snakes-
he was himself, and everything, yet nothing at all.
When his first people came, he became smaller, more solid. Still, he was not yet himself. There were dozens of tiny hims, all over, sharing one mindset.
(Killing them killed parts of himself, and it hurt every time.
Even now there is a woman in Oregon, and she is the last member of her nation, and when she dies he culture and language will die, too.
Sometimes, America wonders if this is what Brazil must feel like.)
He was formed (by himself or something; perhaps his mother, if he ever had one at all) out of the Earth itself. Stone from the Rockies became his bones, the red dirt of the Carolinas became his flesh, water out of the Mississippi became blood.
He is every bit his country and land as the chunk of earth itself.
If he tries hard enough, he can remember everything.
(He fears losing these memories. He has them written down, of course, but it's different, reading and remembering. He doesn't want to be like Canada with his lapses in memories, or England, who tried and cannot remember, or Germany, who will not.)
He doesn't share his memories, because maybe he shouldn't have them.
But maybe, maybe, they are what makes him America.
A/N: I got bored in the library, and instead of studying like I should have been, I wrote this instead. This lit class is going to kill me. (Because it makes me want to write everything I shouldn't be, but nothing I need to.)
Also, that woman in Oregon doesn't really exist, maybe. (I didn't really have time to research this fully, sorry.) Though, there are a lot of very nearly extinct languages out there, all over everywhere.