The Fifth of July

The following extract comes from my upcoming novel, The Untarnished Beauty of the Unbridled Soul. Rapshaldeo's longing for travel is disclosed, as we wind the clock back a few years to immerse in the feelings that visited him upon returning to the States from a stint abroad. Only from this vantage point can we bear witness to the deep beauty of his soul. 

Rapshaldeo awoke prostrate under the American quilt his grandma had made him years previously and the hazy, waking slumbers that comes after twelve hours of sleep. He was in America again, a peculiar feeling made all the stranger by the lingering remnants of his jet-lag. He hadn't slept very well on his American Airlines flight back home from Italy and passed out shortly after arriving home. He had been away for four long months on a college exchange. The boy Rapshaldeo returned home a man, after a formative semester, and he longed to reconnect with his circles of American friends and regale them with the many cultivated experiences and feelings he'd had during his trip abroad. He had enjoyed the best wine, coffee, and pasta (or 'paw-sta', as he rendered it in his American accent) he had ever had during his stay in Tuscany, or "Europe", as he and his friends liked to call it.

The most heightened and sublime of his feelings were those he shared with a beautiful, young, Italian enchantress called Maria Puo. Her sultry, Latin eyes caught his ice-blue American gaze in Italian literature class, and he was swept away like a lusty sinner caught in the wind of Dante's second circle of hell. He was unaware of any such comparison, however, as his otherwise superlative American concentration was lost to Maria's lavish black waves of hair, her perfectly pouted lips, and her olive skin. Spell-bound, he paused only from intense feelings of desire to query how her locks of hair seemed to be fluttering gently in the wind and where the inexplicable draft, which favoured only her, could be coming from. As it transpired, her hair always attracted a flattering, majestic wind, something she told him without prompting when they finally shared words in American history class. While centring primarily on painstakingly self-aware comments and personal insights, their conversation also ventured into topics of food, literature, and history. Rapshaldeo, with his excellent knowledge of the American story and it's manifest destiny, regaled her with riveting information about the American Revolutionary War, the Great Depression, and the American Civil War, where Americans killed Americans on American soil. 

Rapshaldeo sighed now at the thought of her, American air sorrowfully leaving his body. The cause of their inevitable end, Rapshaldeo felt, was demonstrated when he took her out on a ranch amid the Tuscan hills, similar to the one his family owned back in the American heartland. Despite her experience with riding, she was hesitant to mount a young American colt.  

"A mare, I can," she informed Rapshaldeo, "but a stallion, no."

Over time, Rapshaldeo concluded that her inability to handle a stallion literal explained her inability to handle him, a young American stallion metaphorical. She simply could not keep apace with his wild, "Yankee" spirit. He learned years later, however, that his virility had nothing to do with the break up; Maria had found his American pronunciation of words like 'pasta' and 'bruschetta' insufferable, and had gradually driven a wedge between them. 

He lay awake for a while, staring at the ceiling and it's American gypsum. Eventually, he groggily swung his legs over the side of his creaky bed, clothed his naked body of American muscle in a dressing gown and sauntered downstairs. His mom, who had left earlier to visit the Mall of America, had left him a bona fide American breakfast, consisting of bacon, eggs, French toast, regular toast, pancakes, strawberries, four types of syrup, waffles, oatmeal, and a neon-coloured cereal. He heated it up and put on half an American gallon of coffee, or an Americano, as he had learned to call it as an "Americano" in Italy. He placed it all on a novelty tray, which hosted a picture of the American bald eagle, and made the short trip to the nearest of the three living rooms in his parents' house. He landed himself butt-first on the leather couch, and before ravaging his feast, he considered putting on a DVD. He stood up and perused the family's collection, which included classics such as American Beauty, American Pie, An American Tale, Coming to America, Made in America, American Gigolo, American Psycho, American Graffiti, An American Werewolf in London, American History X, American Ninja, Wet Hot American Summer, and The American President. The excess of choice paralysed his decisiveness, and he opted instead to flick through the available American television channels. He soon found himself pacified by the anaesthetic conversation of Good Morning America. He relished his American food and coffee, pausing only when, in his imaginary conversations with peers that didn't exist, he struggled to account for the cultural significance of what he was shovelling down his throat. Rapshaldeo's sense of taste was always superseded by his identity-forming taste, and when an artisanal option did not avail of itself to his American mind, he sought to frame his meal in a favourable light. Allusions to the past and homages to art, outmoded laborious professions, or time-honoured American traditions usually did the trick. He once lost several pounds, when he was staying in a dull, Midwest American town and his imagination was not particularly dexterous. But this was a home-made American feast he had before him — made for a prodigal son — so he easily found just cause for gobbling it down. The fact it was the day after the Fourth of July helped every morsel down his American throat all the more. 

Three cups of American coffee and a handful of empty plates later, Rapshaldeo sat satiated on the couch. The key turned in the front door, and he heard his father and sister enter the house. Excited, he stood erect and walked into the kitchen. After American pleasantries and some chat, unease hit Rapshaldeo and he slipped into his interior to investigate why. His father tried to ascertain how strong a grasp jet-lag still held on him. Before he could finish his questions, however, Rapshaldeo's arm was half raised, signalling that he had wandered into one of his many profound bouts of feeling, whose depth must be explored, before he allowed himself to be drawn out of the Rapshaldeon "Welt Offenbarung", or "world of the feels", as his sister rendered it. This prioritising of his feelings and thoughts he had learned from his uncle Sam, a turtleneck-wearing, avant-garde painter, who spoke in patrician tones. He and Rapshaldeo spent many afternoons together sitting in bay windows, listening to American duo Simon and Garfunkel. He once brought his nephew to a meeting of likeminded American people, where the majority of the conversation was a game of oneupmanship, comprised of pithy, revelatory one-liners or surprisingly lengthy exposé of what one was feeling at that time. 

"I might go back upstairs and lay in bed a little longer," Rapshaldeo said Americanly and incorrectly, putting him at risk of being mistaken for a hen. He shuffled up the American pine stairs, and sauntered back through the threshold of his bedroom door, which he closed behind him. Weighed down by his swollen belly, which was now filled with more than one thousand calories of food, Rapshaldeo fell onto his bed, manoeuvring until he was comfortable. After twenty minutes of quiet, he decided his thoughts needed a soundtrack. He arose once more and fingered his way through his CD collection. After much indecision, he finally settled on the mellow vibes of America. However, it soon proved to be ineffective. The music could only aid his thoughts and feelings so much, and soon the errant phantoms of nostalgia, Maria, the transient nature of everything, and the ghastly thought that he may never amount to more than a benchwarmer on the American football field of art plagued his free-flowing, sublime consciousness. 

Eventually, his mind was no longer at his command, overrun by Mongol hordes of distracted American ideas. The narrative was saved Americanly, however, when Rapshaldeo conceded he was bored. Boredom bore close enough a resemblance to American ennui and melancholic, cultural displacement to allow Rapshaldeo to salvage the situation. His listlessness inevitably succumbed to the urges which all inactivity produces in a young American man. Rapshaldeo turned on his American-made computer, quietly locked his bedroom door, and dug a sock out of his laundry basket. Opening a secret folder, titled The Flowers of Spring, he sifted through his well-cultivated, carefully crafted, choice selection of slutty, American candy shots. Gentle, staccato grunts filled the room, and even thoughts of Maria's rejection could not impede his American progress. Near climax, he settled on a picture of Pamela Anderson, clad in an American flag bikini. He pulled himself wantonly, like an old timey American steam train. American Americana America’d Americanly around the All-American America of the United States of America, and he impregnated his vinegar-foot infused, cotton sock. 

"God bless America," he uttered in an American whisper, before reclining in relief. 

Bonus article: Replace 'American' with 'Soviet', and 'America' with 'USSR'.

She's a Canadian.