On July 1, my cousin got married.

After 9 months outside the US of A, I was returning for 5 days.

In late March I bit the bullet and bought the ticket from Guatemala to Jersey. Planning this visit meant I sealed a certain fate: I would return with 1 year and 5 months of service left. Needless to say, I went back and forth on the decision a lot. When I arrived to site in December I thought I wouldn’t be able to go home that early and withstand the return, emotionally. But when I bought the ticket, I looked all that in the face and accepted it. It would be hard, but the visit would also be wonderful.
With near-eternal layovers in Miami and Houston, I could pocket the visit. What’s more I strategically bookended my trip out of the country with medical appointments so that Peace Corps would pay for my hotel stay near the city (working the system for the sake of my wallet). But these were medical appointments I actually needed (if Peace Corps Washington is reading this..).

As soon as I clicked “purchase ticket” I anticipated the hard return to site during the 3 month countdown to my visit. Weddings don’t make me anxious, I love cake and I love my family (sorry it’s in that order because I really love cake) and I love NYC, but the inevitable return to my pueblito… that concerned me more than I could verbalize.

Months before, I went to Chichicastenango to buy (what I think) is a beautifully painted and glazed serving platter and small dish to bring them. I felt so old school showing up to the wedding with my gift. Most guests traveled to this wedding and mailed their gifts. But I was coming from out of the country and this could not be mailed, there is no national post system working.. It had to be curried by yours truly.

But like my present, everything was planned and considered months in advance: I was going to my country. I asked my parents to bring me all my mail, dig up specific articles of clothing I missed and from my sister I asked for half and half packets and a gift bag for my present. This was my one shot to get it right.

I left the hotel at 3:50am, got to the airport at 4:35, went through customs and took off at 7am. After a 5-hour layover in Miami, I landed in La Guardia at 8pm. My sweet papa met me at the airport because I don’t have a US phone plan..

Miami: a place I’ve never been though I grew up four hours from the world famous destination. After 9 months, I walked off the exit ramp and immediately blended in with all the white people. I became just another body. I swiftly pass the food options with my reusable ROSS bag on one shoulder (for my return goodies) and my heavy and getting ever-heavier backpack on both shoulders.

I spotted an airport sushi restaurant and surreptitiously approached the posted menu, not wanting to make a commitment. The prices were surprisingly reasonable and I walked in feeling like tumbleweed, everyone else more professional or less whitewashed by travel than I. I wasted no time: “This is my first time in the country in 9 months!” I blurted out to Gaby my lucky waitress: “Oh welcome back, and how are you liking it?” she responded evenly. “I like it there but I’m happy to be home. I’ve never been gone this long!” Then I called family to ensure that I lived, using the wifi sin Estadounidense phone plan.

Then the waitress chitchat segued to ordering and I spared no expense: a dragon roll, chili-spiced edamame and a glass of Pinot Grigio. Vacation, baby! And was I going to take a picture of the food? You bet your sweet wasabe. Even though I have been paid in quetzales the last nine months, I felt confident with the amount of dollars left in my account and/or emergency money help from my dad. I pulled out my travel doodle book, approvecharing each minute on US soil. But I kept getting interrupted by my thoughts, noticing all the people around me, my paisanos, who I was looking at with different eyes..

I scanned the restaurant with what I can only describe as a “woke” brain. Yes I looked with my brain as my eyes had audible realizations because sights come in as loud as lightning when you’re hovering above yourself watching the people around you. Just me and my journal then me and edamame then me and wine and sushi, people-watching with a fine-toothed comb and painting biographic portraits of the life and times of the person next to me. But mostly, just happy to be sitting eating sushi.

The sushi arrived and considered each bite like I was seeing an old friend after 10 years. And then I just took in the cast of characters around me with my loud brain.There’s a group of black people, a group of Asians at a wide table, an Asian man eating alone to my left, a blonde lady just ahead who may speak Spanish and may not. A party of two young people, one who appears to be Pacific Islander, bitching about their order to the waitress. “No, I don’t want nigiri with the rice, I want it without the rice.” And they started joking to each other as they said “Check!” which confused the waitress who thought they actually wanted the check. I wanted to bitch slap them but that’s not my style so I threw a lot of shade at them with my eyebrows. Eat your damn nigiri with or without the rice. I thought: I’ve never seen anyone be rude to a waiter in Guatemala, except maybe tourists. I don’t deserve Guatemalans, really I don’t.

And then the Asian man to my left asks for a spoon. And for me this is ripe with racial tension. Was he only given chopsticks because he is an Asian man in a Japanese restaurant? She apologizes profusely and brings over the spoon. It is soup after all. And I consider the next group: do those black people speak English? Do those white people speak English? I cannot assume anything about anyone’s story and suddenly everyone’s identity has become a big empty space. Suddenly I can’t fill in the gaps of assumption, “Oh Waitress Gaby must speak Spanish because she is tan and lives in Miami.” “The Asian man must not live here because there aren’t a ton of Asians in Florida..” I capture my thoughts like rogue bubbles and wrestle them to reason because all this time I’ve just been coloring in the lines of who they are with blanket generalizations. That is until I got covered with a blanket generalization, then I realized. And I’m not going to do that, not as I sit in this restaurant and eat my sushi and don’t know for sure anything about anyone else. This thought process is enlightening and tireless and exhausting.

You know what it was like to use a dyson heat-sensor hand dryer? Magnificent. But also so ridiculous. This is why people in Guatemala imagine the US to be so luxurious, because heat-sensor hand dryers are just that. Certainly they are in Guatemala City, but not in the campo. My hands bathed in a warm heat, I got lost in the feeling until I heard two girls ebulliently expressing how cool it is to be able to throw their toilet paper in the toilet again! After 9 months in Guatemala versus what could only have been 10 days given their bright green matching t-shirts which I’m sure they got after their benevolent mission building a house and converting people, I wanted to crush their jaws. And then I reminded myself that I was one of those girls after I went to a mission trip in Guatemala in 2005 and 2006. I probably annoyed a long-term volunteer or an ex-pat without realizing it by exclaiming the same thing in the airport bathroom. Those girls are gonna go home and tell their parents how rural it was to throw toilet paper in the trash can and to sleep on air mattresses in houses without A/C. How archaic! What slings and arrows they suffered for the greater good! Blech.

And after that, the mental grinds and gears of interacting with my own country began to turn with oily precision as this short visit spun like a top, the lights and sounds of the US conjoined at a colorful yet comfortable pace for my visit.

And the first thing I noticed, you might ask? Plastic surgery.
I was expecting to be surprised by how shiny the floors were in Starbucks. I was expecting to be bowled over by how easy it is to communicate without thinking. I was expecting to be shocked by the heat (The Western Highlands of Guatemala are quite temperate). And I did notice these things but I’d imagined them so many times that I was expecting them.

But what I didn’t prepare myself for, not once, was artificial enhancements on bodies. AND BOY ARE THEY EVERYWHERE. I’m not sure if it’s a Miami thing (actually, I have an inkling that that has something to do with it) but the wedding had it’s fair share of work on bodies, too, and that was in another corner of the country.

When you live in the campo, people can’t afford plastic surgery ni orthodontic surgery ni surgery, period, unless it’s serious. And braces are a form of artificial enhancement seeing as having straight teeth is not a health requirement… which never occurred to me before, not with any serious contemplation. I was lucky enough to get braces in high school. And of course, I was told how expensive it was, but I was still able to get them with a discount to my family because our orthodontist went to the church where my dad works. Like crooked teeth, I digress.

But in the campo the possibility of fake boobs and face lifts and teeth whitening trays (victim, I admit) are as foreign as I am in this country (which is really foreign).

And that’s how my brain tossed and turned as I ate my sushi on my first visit to Miami, like a foreigner in my own country except I was as normal as I’ll ever be.