VIII – The Rest Of Our Lives

Oh, America, now is as good a time as any, isn't it?

Your history has been fast-paced and bloody, almost too caustic to be recorded; you appeared out of nowhere one day, birthed by our invasion, cultivated by your curiosity in what we had to offer you. When you chose me, I thought then that I would have years to shape you into perfection, that your entry into the world and the form which you took when doing so would be designed by me. When you were premature, ugly, not as I'd have liked, I thought to myself that it did not matter. Surely, surely, you were not for this world. You were not strong enough to survive in it – too rash, too naïve, too fragile. Never once did I think you would outlive me. For all those years, I was waiting for you to die.

And yet you did not.

(We can die, of course. You spent years resenting me for my decline – hating me for slowly dying. You know that we can die.)

We left the bike beyond the field – a field like the one that stretched endlessly, an ocean of greenery untouched by greed, across the breadth of your lands when first we arrived. Every now and then it's nice to be surprised that you and I still have areas unblemished like this. When I made love to you on this bed of your choosing as much as mine, I was making love to originality – your blue-sky-eyes and summer-grass-skin and soaring-eagle-wings, your mouth that mimics me and hands that build as I have and feet that tread my path. I took off your glasses that help you to better see the world, tucked your war-battered dog-tags beneath your collar, slipped my hands beneath your old flight jacket to touch your skin. Your accomplishments are admirable but I do not love you for them, nor do I merit you by them. I will sing your name but not your praises. Here, we are not on the world stage. This is Virginia, James Town, Plymouth Rock, Massachusetts, New England. Old and new – new and old. You and I and nothing else.

I stroke your hair absently as I look up at the sky. You fell asleep with your head in my lap some time ago, your wings stretched out in the sun on the grass behind us. You used to do this years ago, when you were a child – fall asleep in my arms, against my chest. There will be no disturbing you, and who am I to wake you? You're tired, aren't you, America?

Of course you're tired.

The sky. The clear, empty sky – high, cloudless, a deeper, purer blue than is paintable. I remember how you made them yours, first as you flew away from me and then as you returned. I remember how you broke through the heavens to pursue the moon. It is fitting that you have wings – that you are the anomaly to have been born with them. There is no stopping you.

Oh, America, forgive me. I did not know what I wanted for you or from you. I was young then, too, in those days when you were small enough to fit into my arms. I cared for you the only way I knew how – I apologise that it was the European way. Perhaps we did not invent war, but it has shaped each of us. The carnage of each of those world wars – the one ones that made the both of us as we are now – began with Europe. Perhaps it is not strange that it was you who changed wars, however – you who mastered them, you who rewrote how they would henceforth be won. I myself took you down beneath the apple trees in the autumn, the dry leaves crackling beneath our feet, and taught you how to load a musket, how to fire and how to make a direct hit. I never should have put the thing in your hands but I wasn't to know then, was I? When at sunset you followed me home three steps behind, jumping in the footprints I left in the dust of the path, how was I to know that one day your own would eclipse them? Should I have foreseen you then in that orange light – should I have stopped and drawn your child self close to my side as your present self passed us, 1940s flight jacket and 1950s Cold War and 2000s iPhone out of place on a 1730s dirt road?

Would you have turned back to me and smiled, looked at me through the glasses I wouldn't have known you would later need; would you have made me some other promise that I wouldn't have believed until you forced me to?

I hope you have never resented that I forced my hegemony upon you. With first my language and now my position in the world as it was one hundred years ago – we do not share the same blood and yet I created you. I predicted that you would be hated because I myself had been hated. All they will do is watch and wait for you to fuck up; and when you do they will shake their heads and say they saw it coming.

And yet you are not only hated. Are there not those who see you as a beacon of hope, a shining light in the darkness, who risk everything to come to you? Haven't you that dream in which every man will make his own way in life? America, all who would have you will take you – they will tear you apart in the end, I am sure, but you are too kind to shirk that sort of reputation. Are you not the Land of the Free? Don't you laugh and call yourself the melting-pot? Aren't you happy to have us write upon your skin in every language that we know, tattoo you with every culture that we own?

America the Beautiful. I will not sing your praises but they will.

There is a breeze now. I remember the first time I felt it – you in my grasp, trustful enough to fall asleep. I thought then that these lands of yours would give you trouble, would cause you pain, but that wasn't true at all, was it? It was not your earth and your grass and your sky, not your mountains grand and your prairies and your seas, but rather us – me. Haven't I been awful to you? Of course, you have more than repaid the favour at times, but that is because you and I always share in kind. Enemies or allies, I will ever answer thee.

Even if you should never have trusted me.

I wonder where we go from here. I'm tired too, you know. If we could just lie here, you and I, forever in this field asleep beneath your sky, that would be alright with me. Let the tanks sink in the mud of No Man's Land with the musket I knocked out of your hand and the bombs that ruined Japan and the film from the cameras which captured the brutality of our favourite past-time. Let it all be swallowed up by this moment instead – this which could eclipse the rest of all time the way your footprints covered mine as you overtook me.

If I had never been as I was, would you be as you are?

You shift and sigh in your sleep, curling up closer against my side. What are you dreaming about now? What is your dream, America – is it the same thing as what everyone else calls "the American Dream"?

Is it for the end of time? Is it the same as mine?

Oh, America, America, this has been a day to die for.

As has your history – I can hold it in my arms no longer.

SO... that's that.

Thankyou for bearing with me, haha. I didn't intend for it to get so long but I kept getting ideas for scenes and stuff, so...

Um, at this point I really don't have much else to say except that I am sad to be leaving the United States tomorrow. =( I had a lot of fun here... But, well, I made lots of new friends here and I'll always have my darling Narroch, so I'm sure I'll be back!

Posting Stateside for the last time,

RobinRocks xXx

To Narroch, my "America": TOLD YOU IT WAS ON THERE FOR NO REASON WHATSOEVER. Okay, okay, I'll get out of your country already... XD

To jesusofsuburbia2o2o: Did you get them all? =)