Living Nowhere

When I used to live in New Jersey, I had the uncanny feeling that I was living “nowhere.”

A Jamaican living in the US who lived in Miami/Ft. Lauderdale, Atlanta, New York or Hartford was understood by other Jamaicans to be living in a city in which there were many other Jamaicans. Because there were other Jamaicans, there was some understanding of what living there might be like, gained mostly from second-hand accounts.

However, everywhere else in America occurs to a Jamaican as “the bush.”


New Jersey, even when I lived there, occurred to me as just another bush state and could only be described as being “close to New York” to other Jamaicans.

So, for a while… I lived nowhere.

Strangely enough, the longer I lived there, the colder it felt, until I could not leave the house without wearing long-johns underneath my pants.

When I left to live in Miami, I was relieved, because it also had started to feel more and more foreign. Perhaps it was the snowstorm that hit just a few months before I moved that dumped 26 inches one night on the state. I knew then that I was done.

Now that I am home, I no longer feel as if I have to defend myself against severe cold, and I feel relaxed.

I am back to living somewhere.