I used to mock the U.S. all the time. Especially out here.
It was easy. The hypocrisy. The posturing. The endless war machine with a flag stitched over it. Nobody wants to hear it in polite company, but I always said what I meant. I never thought I was sentimental about it.
Turns out I was wrong.
Because now, months into whatever this is — whatever quiet authoritarianism has settled in and made itself at home — I feel like someone I loved died. And no one around me seems to notice.
It’s not dramatic. There were no missiles. No tanks in the street. Just an election, then a slide. Judges jailed. Deportations ramped up. Silence turned weapon. Law became suggestion. Power became the only rule.
And still, I keep hearing the same bar chatter. The same smiles. The same shrugging comment about "those liberal judges." The quiet cheers for strength over principle. It hits different now. Used to be just noise. Now it feels like betrayal.
I already got the tattoo covered. The part that said USA — blacked out. Not rage. Just clarity. A quiet statement: you don’t get to live on my skin anymore.
And still — it aches.
I thought I didn’t care. Thought I was past that kind of patriotic grief. But it turns out, I was holding on to some idea. Some faint belief that, for all its rot, the place might still flinch when things crossed a line.
But the line’s long gone. And everyone’s acting like they never saw it in the first place.
This is what exile feels like. Not just distance from land — but from memory. From shared meaning. From the sense that someone, somewhere, would know what you meant when you said: “This isn’t normal. This isn’t okay.”
And the worst part? The pressure in your chest doesn’t fade. It deepens. Like grieving a death that no one else acknowledges. Like waking up every day in the aftermath of a bomb only you heard.
I wonder sometimes if this is what it felt like for expats from Germany in the 1930s — sitting in cafés abroad, hearing the wrong kind of pride in voices too far gone to see the cost.
I’m not looking for pity. And I’m not trying to sound like some tragic figure pacing in the ruins.
I’m just saying: the collapse isn’t coming. It came. Quietly. While the lights stayed on and the flags kept waving.
And I felt it break something in me that I didn’t know was still intact.
Maybe that’s worth writing down.