I was looking for something short, descriptive, and evocative. Aliēnus, the Latin root of alien, seemed to meet all three criteria. The word describes both my embodied experience of life as well as my legal status for most of my adulthood and evokes peculiarity, incongruity, even madness. But after sitting on it for a while, it also seemed a bit pretentious.
My grandmother once referred to me as a gypsy. My mother recently said the same, but was searching for a less pejorative synonym, for which I suggested nomad. Etymologically, the word refers to wandering shepherds (who usually had circumscribed routes) but has come more generally to refer to people of no fixed abode, which since I was 17 years old describes me quite well.
#
No comments:
Post a Comment