LAX

(It's late and I'm tired, so you guys will be getting the first chapter of a twenty-page autobiography I had to write for a class. This is probably the best part of the whole thing, so don't expect too many other reprints.)

(I've recently found out a lot of this is hogwash, and I apologize.)

The blinking lights of commercial airplanes make their way across the night sky as I place my greasy, four-year-old hand on the window pane of the LAX airport. I can't help but watch them; the lights are too attractive, and seeing them travel in fits and starts – they flow visibly for a second, disappear and teleport the next – I begin to think about the people on-board. Who would want to be heading out into the sky so late? Where are they all going? What are they doing that's so important they have to miss out on the regular sleep cycle to fly in an airplane?

I've just landed, and I already feel like going to bed. My family's in the midst of getting ready to leave; there are several adult conversations going on, none of which I can begin to understand. The only thing I know is that they involve my family and another family, and that we would be living with this other family for a while. I don't know them, so I'm inclined to separate myself from the unknown. So, for the time being, I'm busying myself with the lives of the hundreds of passengers that I'll never know.

I say I'm busying myself, which makes it sound like I have a choice. But really, I'm using the corner space I'm given because the rest of airport is scary to me. Thousands of people move across at all kinds of speeds, and my mother has already warned me that if I get lost, she won't go looking for me. She figures someone will find me and adopt me, and I'll have to live with them instead. Did I want that? No, I told her. First, because I knew that if I said yes, I would like to live with another family, there would dire repercussions. And second, I didn't know any of the families well enough to really want to live with them. I didn't even understand what they were saying.

And since my brothers are off with my dad somewhere, and my sister is holding my mom's hand, I'm the odd one out. My Mickey Mouse plush doll with a vinyl head I against the world. Against the LAX, anyway.

But even as I look around the airport (having abandoned my wonderment at the airplanes outside), the biggest monument to American culture I'd ever seen that wasn't on a T.V. screen, I can't help but be fascinated with everything on display. Bright signs are selling food I want in a language I can't read, loud announcements of what planes are coming and going blare over the loudest speakers I've ever heard, and the most horribly enticing smells compel me to disobey my standing orders. I've only been in America for about an hour, and I can already tell that we're going to get along.

Soon enough we leave the airport and head for the other family's house. I'm still in awe of all the signs, all the wonders that America has already shown me. My mother tells me to fall asleep, but I've already slept enough on the plane, I tell her. I want to see everything. There's so much new information to process in all the commercialism being presented, that I'm eager to dig into this new culture, to tear it apart for information. I don't care why I'm here. Everything around me excites me so much that even my hunger is watching all of the lights.

It won't be until much later that I realize the gravity of what's happening right now: I'm escaping a middle-class culture in a nation that's just now recovering from one of its biggest economic crises in years, and heading into middle-class culture in a nation full of opportunity, of growth. Legally, I shouldn't even be here; my family took the names of the other family to get here. We'd sort out the whole “citizenship” thing later. For now, I just want to look all the new things outside my window. All the opportunity ahead of me.