As a legal alien in a foreign country, the biggest continuing problem of mine was loneliness. I have for varying reasons failed to make lasting friends or more intimate acquaintances during my time here. Of course I know people, people know me, once in a while we get together, speak about non-offending things and go our homes. I also had single-serving friends as Tyler names them - met in a dinner, cocktail, conference, party, but never saw them again. Back in the home country I had/have the best of friends; I laughed, cried, danced, drunk, ate, drunk, talked and talked with them. They are absolutely great and I'm grateful that they are my friends. Anyway, so coming from that to the current situation was like suddenly losing the ground under your feet. But today I realised that maybe I'm actually not alone in my loneliness.
Today I learnt that the husband of a couple I'm friends with has been cheating on his wife and the wife opens this secret, crying over the phone, to a person she has only been knowing for 3 years, who is now in another country. What's extraordinary about this? This couple has been living in London for 20 years. How alone and desperate you must be that you don't have a single person in the city you live in to discuss such an important issue with? I felt genuinely sorry for her - but not pity, I think showing pity is a very patronizing behaviour. I felt sorry because she is a sweet, intelligent, hard-working woman and doesn't deserve this (who does?).
Anyways then I realised that I know some other awkward examples. There are these two guys who are my time-to-time friends. They share a very nice house together. They both have been living in London for 7-8 years. Both is very bright, well-educated and nice guys. I'm not sure of all the details but I believe one of them made a bogus marriage to stay in this country and the other's marriage became a bogus one after the wife moved back to the home country after 6 months. OK both of them still have friends and they go out and have a good time but it seems there is a core in them suffering from the same lonely feeling. (Maybe I'm just trying to console myself*sigh*)
It's like you never stop being an alien. You change your skin, change your hair, your clothes, your voice but you can't change inside. You read the same books, you listen to same songs, watch the same things, laugh at the same jokes, feel bad about the same things as the people around you. But maybe these 'people around', the locals, doesn't want you to forget you're an alien by constantly referring to the country you came from in their conversations with you; sometimes subtly sometimes bluntly. Maybe they fear that if the aliens stop being alien, they'll feel alienated in their own country. So they try to keep you uneasy; even the most well meaning, most friendly of them.
Or maybe I am just a social cripple, lacking both the skills and the drive to meet people.
As an author says: "Who is the real stranger-the person who lives in a country but knows he/she belongs to another or the person who is not only a stranger in his/her own country but also who doesn't have another place to belong?"
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