Identity Found

One of the enduring images from all the WWII movies I watched growing up was people being asked for their travelling papers. It seemed so foreign to have to stop and present paper documentation of who you are. Of course, I lived in Colorado, where you can spend a good chunk of the day driving and still be in the same state.

I started to get it when I went to Central America during a break from college. First, I had to get a passport. Then I actually got off a plane in Guatemala City, Guatemala. The noise and confusion and absence of English that I asked a couple of folks in my travelling group, "Is this the bus to Cartegena?"

Later, in San Jose, Costa Rica, I saw a sign downtown. Arrows pointed down two streets with names like "Panama" and "Nicaragua". I realized with a start that those were directions to other countries. Suddenly, having something on had that would assure people in many different countries that I am safe seemed very practical.

It's many years later, enough that my passport has not only expired but I'm out of the grace period to renew by mail, and in a few weeks I'll be on a short cruise in the Caribbean. So I've had to dig up those documenting papers. I'm feeling a strange sense of disorientation as I realize that my passport, my birth certificate, my driver's license are, in a sense, more "real" than me. These things which are products of human hands, and transitional, are the only ways official agencies have to make a space for *me*. But how can those things be me?

I have similar sense of vertigo when I look at pictures of myself. I know a hundred people, but the person in that picture isn't someone I know. I haven't spent the same kind of time looking at that face. In fact, I've rarely seen that face in motion. Like a celebrity, it's a face I know I should know something about, but it's always still, and usually smiling, and a pale imitation of those celebrity images. (I know, it's the make-up, the artists, the lighting and not the face. This is a statement describing disorientation, not self-loathing.)

So, in a month that has involved being mistaken for other people because of my name, I'm now holding papers that are the evidence that I am me.