I’d spent a long time trying to feel like an American, like I belonged. Funny thing is, I felt more American in the cult than I ever did out of it. Back in the cult, being American was part of my identity. I had what the other kids told me was an American accent. I had an American passport. My grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins lived in America. My parents were American. And so, from the time we landed back in Texas when I was fifteen, desperate for any identity, I tried to be what I thought was American, the way I understood it, which was not at all.

I said the Pledge of Allegiance in school. I listened to country music. I ate junk food and drank more soda and milk than water. I smoked Marlboros. I tried to love football and pretend I found soccer painfully boring. I joined the military and took an oath to defend the Constitution. I actually read the Constitution. I hung an American flag on my wall. I bought a gun. I was like an inept spy pretending to be American based on movies I’d watched and books I’d read. None of it worked. I felt nothing. And I couldn’t understand what I was supposed to feel.

I didn’t feel American. In the Air Force, every morning I put on that uniform, I felt like I was playing dress-up. America was to me what it had always been: a place to visit family on the way to another country, where I still wouldn’t feel at home. I’d just been here a little longer than usual. And now I was watching this event, a shared experience, but I wasn’t a part of it at all.

* * *

—

   No one felt safe anymore. They kept saying that: “We’re not safe anymore.” Every time I heard it, it shook me again. There were people all around me who had felt safe. They’d felt safe so long, the loss of that perceived safety shocked them, traumatized them. They’d spent their lives feeling safe. They woke up and went to work and came home, and every step of the way, they’d felt safe. They’d felt safe enough to smile. Safe enough to demand smiles and positive thinking from others.

When everyone cheered because the president stood on the rubble and said they’d hear us, I didn’t know who “us” meant. The military? They’d just thrown me out. The country? I felt I had more in common with the Muslims praying in Dupont Circle than I did with the gay liberals surrounding me who were screaming for blood because for the first time in their lives, they felt fear.

I felt like I was trapped in some horror version of a high school pep rally, watching the football players flex and strut and shout about ripping those sandies’ throats out and wondering if school spirit was all that fucking different from the Holy Spirit.

I reacted to the universal feeling I didn’t feel in the same way I always reacted: I tried to disappear.

By the time we switched back to regular programing, once we grew numb to the sight of the Towers falling—and we did switch back because even a terrorist attack can’t damage our national religion of optimism at gunpoint—I’d crawled so deep inside my own head, I didn’t care that my landlord was a creep and my roommate was fucking a go-go boy a foot away.

* * *

—

   Those first nights, after we secured the room at Carl’s, I slept like I’d been awake for months. All I cared about was that we had a door and a roof, a bathroom. I wouldn’t come home and find my home and the last few things I owned towed to a lot where I could never afford to buy their freedom. I had a home. It was hard at first to focus on anything but that relief. But you can’t share a twin bed past the age of ten unless you’re related or fucking. Jay’s an aggressive cuddler. I’m an unrepentant snorer. There wasn’t even room to build a pillow wall between us. So after a few sleepless nights of his telling me to roll over and my trying to shove him just hard enough to get him away from me without throwing him onto the floor and slapping at his legs because I thought his hair was a mosquito, we headed to Walmart. The cheapest air mattress was $19.99. But in what we thought was a stroke of genius, we found a five-dollar inflatable pool raft in the clearance section of sporting goods. It’s probably a good thing we bought it. Anyone hoping to stay afloat in a pool would’ve drowned.

Since Jay usually got home from the bar first, I ended up on the raft. We’d listen to the Top 40 station with the relentlessly cheerful DJ who read off the weather report and traffic fatalities with the same upbeat giggling voice she used to gush about Britney Spears and Justin’s perfect romance and how they’d have the most adorable babies. When Jay fell asleep, I’d shut it off and listen to my raft deflate, unless he brought someone home, which was often.

   After the night Jay’s shockingly hairy ass landed on my face, I learned to sleep with my head to the door. It only took a couple weeks to start missing the solitude of living in my car. Not enough that I wanted to live in a car again, but enough that I started taking the long way home.

I’d walk down P Street, take a left at Dupont Circle, and head up to Church Street. I liked Church Street. There was a church, as there should be. Some ancient stone building that looked too old for this continent, with a little garden where I used to sit and work the crossword puzzle from a stolen paper, back before I had a room. One of those things homeless people can get away with until the slide engulfs them completely and they actually look homeless.

When I lived in my car and spent my days wandering around Dupont, I’d never parked on Church. If I’d found a spot, I’d have passed it. Seemed like the kind of road where neighbors rap on your window and tell you you can’t sleep here. Streets need to be a little wider to get away with sleeping—R Street was good, past 17th, where dive bars still outnumbered the fifteen-dollars-for-a-vodka-soda places. But Church Street was a quiet place to spend time when I didn’t want to walk anymore, when I couldn’t bear the sight of plates of barely touched food abandoned on a restaurant patio.