Wasp

She always wanted to live in England. The inevitability of it was fated the day she was born. A child of two worlds, - for she could never claim full allegiance to either parents' soil -  she traipsed through life in a sort of limbo; a constant yearning of wanting to be claimed by one country or the other, a desirous wish that never came true.

She envied those that claimed full bloodline to kin and country. They had a history she lacked. They felt kinship to their kind, they understood their kind, and their kind understood them in turn.  Something she could never claim because of her watered-down birthright.

Her father's family looked at her as an anomaly, like some exotic family pet they didn't quite know how to handle and feared that it may bite. She was just a slight hue darker than them but bore the piercing ebony eyes and wild, curly hair of her mother. And in a family tree that bloomed a fair share of ginger-haired English and Scottish lasses, she felt at times she marred their genealogical perfection. She found the beastly bunch cold and distant, disinterested in acknowledging her diluted blood as their own.

As for her mother's people, they were the antithesis of her father's kin. A gregarious bunch, she flourished in the warm embrace of their love. However, despite their unconditional acceptance of her, she was the one that felt like an anomaly amongst them. Absent of the requisite round buttocks and wide hips that men in her mother's culture found womanly and sexually attractive, she knew her lean, stick figure would never make their hearts jump with desire. And in the cacophonous environment in which they lived, her quiet disposition only made her seem even more strange. Because of the deadly sting she inherited of her mother's temperament and the genealogy of her father's roots, they nicknamed her Wasp, a name that followed her wherever she went. And as much as her heart wanted to claim their country as her own - for it was well deserved - the sad truth was that her heart had belonged to her patriarchal lineage from the moment she was born. She knew her father's kin were not representative of their kind and so they never were able to extinguish the glowing ember of love she felt for her father's country. As far back as she could remember, she held an unappeasable attraction to the land that gave birth to the best literary writers the world had ever known, the most loved musicians, and thespians that spoke in her father's language and accent, the well-enunciated language she missed so much. England and its history coursed through her blood, in the reservedness of her character, her quiet, non-dramatic way of speaking, her dry humor, her sometimes arrogance.

And for years she dreamed of moving across the pond, not to find her father's kin, but to live there among her other half, embraced by the love others would so willingly give, to live in the cold, dank days that could certainly stir her soul to birth stories and write. With both her parents now gone and being an only child, she no longer wished to live in the States, and bought a one-way ticket and boarded a plane to Heathrow.

And now, driving to the cottage that she had rented, driving precisely in the type of cold, dank weather that always comforted her, Wasp knew she had finally found her place in the world, and was finally home.

December 28, 2012