Nombre: Jill Anderson Pais: Estados Unidos Idioma de la narración: inglés
I grew up in Texas and it took me four different moves to get to Mexico City. I always felt like I was heading south, but I had to move north in order to get back down. Leaving home for me is exhilarating. That is the best word for it. I am, perhaps, all too ready to leave home. Like many of my peers, in 1997 I left my childhood home in Houston, Texas, thrilled to be moving as far away as possible–off to college in Vermont. But I counted on always being able to come home, so it surprised me when my childhood home no longer felt like home. I suppose I feel like that home really walked out on me. The dining room table that I loved to sit around over meals, and late at night to eat a solitary bowl of ice cream, has been sold. An elderly couple and their ailing mother live in our house on 3658 Chapel Square, where all four of us grew up. When my parents, on the verge of divorce, and my youngest sister moved out of that house, our dog ate some rat poison dislodged from the shelf during the move. She died. The streets and stores and trees and wilderness areas have changed and I return to my parents’ houses to find almost everything I remember buried under pavement and new, indistinguishable strip malls. I don’t know yet if I keep leaving home in search of that first one, or if I am urged forward in the hopes of finding a new one, or if I am learning to carry home wrapped around my shoulders like my rebozo heavy with a child. I moved to Mexico, finally, after going to college in Middlebury, Vermont, living in New York City for nine months, and then going to graduate school for five years in Austin, Texas. I had traveled and visited many different parts of Mexico when I decided to move to Mexico City in 2006. Making the transition was a scheme to get out of the smallish world of the graduate student scene, a dream-fulfilled to live and struggle beyond the border of the United States, and a challenge to myself to leave it all behind and find out what parts of my self surfaced and what parts sunk in such new and different waters. Looking back, I see a pattern: intense years of education in an idyllic, safe place, followed by my willful launch into the unknown adventures of a mega-city. Looking back, I can also see the ever-present 172