Bottomless cup of coffee.

“What is it that made them so American?” my friend asked on the phone.

“Well,” I hesitated, “I don’t know…they played volleyball shirtless on the beach?  They had this cheery, earnest quality spiked by a pip sort of sarcasm?  Their clothes?  The way the intonation of their sentences always so definitively went down at the end unless they said “WhAT?”  The magazines they read?  Their gadgets?  Their solid confidence and the way, even though they came as a group, they all completely and instinctually did their own things and split off and came together at random times in a way a group in other places, like China or Mexico, never would?  Their banter?”

I went on and on, one quality of observed Americanness emerging after another , like divers rising to the surface of a lake.  Eventually, I satisfied him and we moved on to other topics.

But the topic nagged me later.  The qualities I’d identified didn’t sit right; not because they felt false, but because they skirted the essence of something else, a deeper and separate point.  It wasn’t until I started thinking about Pittsburgh, and about what I will feel like walking to class in an American city and sitting in an American coffee shop with no plane ticket elsewhere, no foreign address, that I realized what the explanation was.  The friends of friends who’d come to the wedding weren’t American in any outstanding or obnoxious way, and the issue wasn’t so much that I felt isolated from them but rather that their Americanness was so complete, so divorced from the otherness that has for the past six years been the yin to my American yang, their Americanness was as solid as the Mexicanness you’ll find over a round of micheladas at El Rey de Oro, without a sliver of reflective outsiderness, of marvel, of distance, of conflict, without the spark of the recognition of absurdity.

And then what I was seeing wasn’t their Americanness but my Americanness in an entirely new context – that of the American who lives in the U.S, within U.S culture, without quite realizing it, without pondering it, just being within it and moving on to think about and do other things, culture and place a given in a way they can never quite be overseas.  That of the American who belongs without the shivering awareness of belonging or not belonging, the blanket of inclusion muffling the fear and exhilaration, the sharp sensory alertness of foreignness.

It was terrifying.  I hadn’t understood until then that my Americanness has become a bizarre, somewhat precious quality, has become something I reflect on in the same way I might reflect on the British tendency to be painstakingly polite or the French need to make overly conclusive statements.  I’ve been able to observe my Americanness from the outside in for the past six years, picking apart the characteristics that make it distinct, the tendencies and convictions, the attitudes and biases.  All that attention to it as an identity set apart, discrete from its surroundings and particular in its context and influences and background, has made it more personal, more special.  My Americanness: a love for giant supermarkets and wilderness.  A way of speaking (“DUDE!”).  Self-righteousness.  Sarcasm and a biting sense of humor.  Earnestness.

All of this has become part of my identity, a part I consider American in a way I probably never would have had I spent the last six years in the U.S., and which is set apart from other parts of my identity which I can only define as not American, as pulling against the inclinations of Americanness. Maybe this happens to many people who go abroad, expats and exiles and immigrants; they become so cognizant of their own distant culture and their relationship to it (real or imagined) that they come to both identify with it and separate themselves from it in ways they never would have at home.

The quality of Americanness has also become an important part of the way I relate to other people – my friendships with Americans here are centered around the unspoken recognition of our mutual tendencies to get into raging debates about Tiger Woods or reminisce about camp dinners of Mac n’ Cheese or even just say “Yeah…” in a drawn-out way or “Oh my GOD” or “WOW.”

These are rare and valued things overseas, and for as much as the wet-behind-the-ears study abroad student or the hippie gone native in beads and Thai fisherman pants may extol the virtues of friendships with only the locals (the travel term I’ve come to loathe most recently) I can say now that friendships with people from one’s own culture can be lifeboats in a sea of alienation, as long as they don’t become lifeboats drifting forever on waves of bitching and resentment.  Not only do they let you temporarily escape constant, calculated and active immersion in another culture and  the sometimes blasting loneliness and isolation that come with it, but they also give your own identity and your own culture another dimension.  A third dimension.  Americanness becomes a limited and exclusive secret, a remote shared past, and you and your compatriots both fervently and secretly possess it and review it in the way two old friends meeting up in a bar in L.A might both unspeakingly and openly share the stories of their childhoods in a tiny Wisconsin town.

But in the U.S., Americanness will not be this anymore.  Not exclusive, not precious or rare, not strange, and not nearly as examinable from the outside, even if I can still rear back from it for a long hard look.   I will move to Pittsburgh in the fall and at first everything will have that mesmerizing sheen of travel, and I’ll be drawn to the details of café culture and the layout of streets and football games and people running in beanies and leggings by the river and it will all be a big marvelous puzzle of details to revel in, and then, soon enough, I’ll be stopping by for bagels at some busy shop in the morning and talking about the latest HBO series and reading a magazine over coffee somewhere and I’ll be another American, in the United States, back within “my” culture and with no other me, no foreign me, no outsiderness; all of those things I once pondered and was fond of as peculiar, singular qualities just part of the slipstream of everyday interactions and everyday life in the USA.

So the question that gnaws at me is: Will my perspective become dulled by routine and belonging, by speaking the language, by not having the protective layer of foreignness to make everything interesting, everything challenging and rewarding, everything worthy of concentration?

Or, as I hope, have I become so much of a traveler that this, too, will be travel, three years in a land that has already over the past six years become foreign, taking notes at tailgate parties for Steelers games and exploring malls and old factories with the hunger and the tireless, probing, ecstatic way of seeing of the traveler?

Perhaps, and this was the ultimate comfort I found stewing over my friend’s question in the days after our conversation, writing will become travel – writing requires the same constant state of awareness, the same relentless pushing beyond assumptions and givens and facile conclusions, beyond the neat narratives etched on the surface, and writing which is determined and passionate and committed enough can make anything, ice cream in the afternoon or a coon hound in the forest or a late morning nap or even the creeping influence of routine and belonging in one’s home country, interesting.

Writing will have to become travel, and will have to turn into the telescope and the distance through which I observe my own culture.  This is what I tell myself.

What makes them so American? My friend asked.  They take it for granted.  They are American and they don’t think about how, don’t think about it as something that gives you that primal feeling of belonging or utterly isolates you, don’t look at in awe as a new Mom might look at a fuzzy infant that barely, but somehow, resembles her.

I’m scared of checking my own personal Americanness at the border, having it become something else, which it inevitably will.  But perhaps I should take this fear as the most promising sign that three years in the U.S will be a travel experience, because nothing characterizes the start of a new journey more than fear, the kind that’s all wobbly and inextricably mixed with excitement.

I hope I can still notice the rolling hills of southeastern Ohio and the rough-edged bundles of hay in the fields in three years, I can still reel with an expat’s affection over a plate of eggs and bottomless cups of coffee, can still see the U.S the way I see Mexico – as a place, one I love, one that drives me mad, one I’m both a part of and separate from.