The flight from London to Charlotte is nine hours long. Nine hours is a long time in an economy seat, especially when the person in front of you decides to recline her seat. But that’s nothing compared to the travels of the man sitting next to me. Ben (name changed) was flying from Afghanistan, via Kuwait, Dubai, and London, to Charlotte. What he was doing in Afghanistan I don’t know; he works with our armed forces, but he didn’t say more and I didn’t ask. (He probably couldn’t tell me if I did.) But he did tell me that he had only been home in the States for two weeks in the last two years. And that he has a thirteen-year-old daughter here.
Those of us who have been away for the one semester think we’ll have it rough coming back to our friends and family, for whom life has gone on without us. We have to readjust to driving on the right side of the road; to smiling at people on sidewalks (to saying “sidewalks” instead of “pavements”), and not cycling everywhere. Our friends’ lives have gone on, some have graduated, some have made new friends, and others have just changed. We see things differently, our opinions have changed, and we’ve made new friends. But it’s not anything like what people like Ben experience.
Ben is a quiet guy, but not antisocial. During the flight we talked about travelling, foreign currency, being away, coming home, and the differences between Here and There. This man has been everywhere across the Near and Middle East. Pulling out his billfold, he showed me currency from Taliban Afghanistan, current Afghanistan, old Iraq, new Iraq, Kuwait, United Arab Emirates, and five or ten other random countries. He is something of an amateur collector now; he brings back foreign monies for his daughter.
He talks to me about how different life is in Afghanistan. He’s going to have to reacclimatize to a place of rules. Even things like speed limits and stop signs. We comment on how we take such things for granted. Most Americans can’t even conceive of living without these structures. They are taken as having a real existence. Put an average person in Afghanistan, where the rule of law is not to be counted on, where life is lived much more by the seat of one’s pants, and they’d freeze out of inability to cope. Ben has lived there for at least two years, probably more. If those of us who have lived away for three months think it’s disconcerting coming back to America, Ben must be completely disoriented.
Most relationships are built on day-to-day interactions. Even good friends have little to speak of when they don’t have shared experiences. Coming back, most of us who have been away will have to rebuild relationships, try to fit in with our old friends and find new ones. But we’ve only been away three months, and most of us have FaceBook to keep us connected. Ben has only seen his daughter once in the last two years. The hard thing, for him, is that she doesn’t know anything different, while he knows how much is lost. I can’t imagine how difficult it must be to be around her, without having the shared experience that is the basis of relationships. He’s going back to someone who probably barely knows him, who he barely knows.
We, Ben and myself and many others who are coming back from living in distant lands, are, to different degrees, strangers at home. Even as welcomed as we might be, and if we have jobs or school to reintegrate us into society, and no matter how long we’ve lived in the States before, coming back we are something of outsiders. Some might describe it as being a citizen of the world. Perhaps that is true for a few. For others, it is simply being other, different, again. From being strangers abroad, we become strangers at home.
