Home Bound, with Complications

Coming back from Solentiname, I had this feeling of anxiousness when I got to San Carlos. It's  not a big town by any means, but people were paying enough attention to me that I felt jittery and out of place in a way that I don't usually feel to the same extent when I'm in San Miguelito. 

It's this feeling of being hyper visible, like being naked, but far more vulnerable somehow, as if everyone is trying to look into your mind and impugn intentions onto you. Or more realistically, in the case of dirty old man types, is actually imagining the contours of your naked curves. I thought that feeling would fade over time, but it doesn't. If anything I've become hypersensitive to it and over-reactive. I feel the staring eyes a little bit more each time, as if they were starting to carve marks into my skin.  

But when I finally got back to San Miguelito that night and found myself walking on the cobblestones and then on the dirt road up to my house, I had this moment of clarity, of lightness, as if all that had been lifted, and that now I could be invisible again, my skin against the cool of the night. It was beautiful.

And then I got home, put my bag down, and had an sad thought. or several. 

i've got no right to feel this sense of belonging.

this isn't my home. 

the feeling of home that i have here is an artificiality, a white priviledge of being accepted hasta cierto punto automatically because I have things that people want. Money. Education. English. White Skin. Colored Eyes. Cat woman. Because we are taught to be hospitable, aunque sea la Maldicion de la Malinche. 

and in my own country, so many people don't get to walk with that feeling of safety and security, even in their own damn country. They too get watched extra, questioned (silently or aloud), stopped and frisked, harrassed, attacked. For being brown, or black, or "illegal," or Muslim or Jewish or gay or trans or poor or somehow else incompatible with the ugly truths that underlie our bonito myths about melting pots and salads and tolerance. 

i only have to deal with this for a few more months before I slip back into the crowd and stop being of interest to prying eyes. I can stand it. But to live your whole life that way, so exposed to scouring eyes? Shit.