Title: What You Could
Title: What You Could
Author: Hannah R. Orlove
Fandom: House, MD
Pairing: None
Rating: G
Notes: Thanks to phinnia and emblem for beta-reading. Title comes from “Imitation of Life” by R.E.M. Written for prompt 53: Kutner (secretly?) visits India.
Seven weeks isn’t enough to see it all. And neither would seventeen or seventy weeks, really, but you’re not going to look back on any of this. It’s the bottom of the world, more or less, and it’s the last chance you’ve got for a summer vacation, and you’re going to seize and throttle it until it begs you for mercy. There’s no way you’re going to beg from it, nosirreebob. Not with how much time it took to plan this, or how much you put into it, and how you won’t be able to afford much of anything cool for at least eight months after you get back home.
Sometimes you wonder how well you blend in here. It’s not like you’re from here, nowhere near close - but if you sit quietly waiting for the bus with your backpack in the hotel, dressed in the hippest American threads, you look like just about anyone else on the street. Then, of course, someone rides past on a bike darting in and out of the traffic or you make the mistake of looking up at something that catches your eye or you open your mouth and your flat American accent falls out and there’s nothing you can do but smile like the tourist you suddenly are.
The weirdest part is that you always know you’re a tourist, and you’re always making sure you’re carrying yourself like you aren’t one. There are times when there’s nothing you could do, short of jump in the Doc’s DeLorean and give yourself a couple of decades of immersion, to fit into everything that’s hustling and bustling around you now. It’s moving and grooving to a very different beat than what you grew up with; even the Lonely Planet can only take you so far, about until you sit down in a restaurant and don’t know what you’re supposed to order. What you have on your iPod doesn’t even match up with what it ought to have out here.
And sometimes, like when you’re at the bus stop or just walking around one afternoon when you don’t want to do much of anything or laughing at just the right time with everyone else in the movie theater, it doesn’t feel so alien or foreign. It’s not anything you’re familiar with around you, but it’s all very, very close, and more than a little recognizable to what you’re used to.
And yeah, okay, it is nice - okay, it’s great when everyone else does look like you and you aren’t the odd one out and you know nobody’s going to be asking you any questions based on how much melanin you’ve got. Like that somehow makes you exotic, like you didn’t grow up eating hot dogs slathered with relish or celebrating fireworks the first week in July. This is your first Fourth outside of the States, and you feel like you ought to do something for it, and that’s such a weird feeling you don’t know how to categorize you throw up your hands and get your first Indian drink on. It’s not as hard as you thought it’d be, really. You’re still not sure how much you should tip, but that’s never anything new, even when you’re dealing with converted currency and an exchange rate.
It’s the bottom of the world, more or less. You’re about as interested in the Taj Mahal and literal sacred cows and other big attractions as anyone else who’s never been to this country is; what you’d rather do is see the rats at Karni Mata and swim in the filthy rivers and ride with your head out the window with nobody yelling at you to get it back inside the train or van or whatever. You’re not doing the usual tourist things, and even if you did, there’d probably be a way to shut up and move with the crowd and you could blend in. It’s what you did last week at the temple, and you know there wouldn’t be any tourist getting down on his knees to pray to gods most Americans don’t know the names of, and even though you mumble your way through most of the service, it all made you feel washed-out inside, but in a good way. Like someone scrubbed out your pericardium and put it back around your heart.
You can’t catch up with everyone else around here, not with how they move: you could run and run all day long and you’d stay in the same place. And you don’t even feel much like Alice, which might make it a bit more fun if that was the case, but it’s not. You’re just lost, or confused, or too amazed to care about being lost and confused, which is pretty awesome when you forget yourself enough to do that. Three days is the best so far. And even after something happens to trip you up out of it, you’re still going to ride the high all the way until tomorrow morning. There’s so much to see that even when you’re stumbling over yourself or someone else to get there to see it, it’s okay to be a tourist. People here know how to treat tourists, give them some space and allowances you wouldn’t get if you knew the words you’re supposed to use.
Still, it might go better if you knew what the words were supposed to be. Or maybe it’d go better if you knew what the words meant.
Author: Hannah R. Orlove
Fandom: House, MD
Pairing: None
Rating: G
Notes: Thanks to phinnia and emblem for beta-reading. Title comes from “Imitation of Life” by R.E.M. Written for prompt 53: Kutner (secretly?) visits India.
Seven weeks isn’t enough to see it all. And neither would seventeen or seventy weeks, really, but you’re not going to look back on any of this. It’s the bottom of the world, more or less, and it’s the last chance you’ve got for a summer vacation, and you’re going to seize and throttle it until it begs you for mercy. There’s no way you’re going to beg from it, nosirreebob. Not with how much time it took to plan this, or how much you put into it, and how you won’t be able to afford much of anything cool for at least eight months after you get back home.
Sometimes you wonder how well you blend in here. It’s not like you’re from here, nowhere near close - but if you sit quietly waiting for the bus with your backpack in the hotel, dressed in the hippest American threads, you look like just about anyone else on the street. Then, of course, someone rides past on a bike darting in and out of the traffic or you make the mistake of looking up at something that catches your eye or you open your mouth and your flat American accent falls out and there’s nothing you can do but smile like the tourist you suddenly are.
The weirdest part is that you always know you’re a tourist, and you’re always making sure you’re carrying yourself like you aren’t one. There are times when there’s nothing you could do, short of jump in the Doc’s DeLorean and give yourself a couple of decades of immersion, to fit into everything that’s hustling and bustling around you now. It’s moving and grooving to a very different beat than what you grew up with; even the Lonely Planet can only take you so far, about until you sit down in a restaurant and don’t know what you’re supposed to order. What you have on your iPod doesn’t even match up with what it ought to have out here.
And sometimes, like when you’re at the bus stop or just walking around one afternoon when you don’t want to do much of anything or laughing at just the right time with everyone else in the movie theater, it doesn’t feel so alien or foreign. It’s not anything you’re familiar with around you, but it’s all very, very close, and more than a little recognizable to what you’re used to.
And yeah, okay, it is nice - okay, it’s great when everyone else does look like you and you aren’t the odd one out and you know nobody’s going to be asking you any questions based on how much melanin you’ve got. Like that somehow makes you exotic, like you didn’t grow up eating hot dogs slathered with relish or celebrating fireworks the first week in July. This is your first Fourth outside of the States, and you feel like you ought to do something for it, and that’s such a weird feeling you don’t know how to categorize you throw up your hands and get your first Indian drink on. It’s not as hard as you thought it’d be, really. You’re still not sure how much you should tip, but that’s never anything new, even when you’re dealing with converted currency and an exchange rate.
It’s the bottom of the world, more or less. You’re about as interested in the Taj Mahal and literal sacred cows and other big attractions as anyone else who’s never been to this country is; what you’d rather do is see the rats at Karni Mata and swim in the filthy rivers and ride with your head out the window with nobody yelling at you to get it back inside the train or van or whatever. You’re not doing the usual tourist things, and even if you did, there’d probably be a way to shut up and move with the crowd and you could blend in. It’s what you did last week at the temple, and you know there wouldn’t be any tourist getting down on his knees to pray to gods most Americans don’t know the names of, and even though you mumble your way through most of the service, it all made you feel washed-out inside, but in a good way. Like someone scrubbed out your pericardium and put it back around your heart.
You can’t catch up with everyone else around here, not with how they move: you could run and run all day long and you’d stay in the same place. And you don’t even feel much like Alice, which might make it a bit more fun if that was the case, but it’s not. You’re just lost, or confused, or too amazed to care about being lost and confused, which is pretty awesome when you forget yourself enough to do that. Three days is the best so far. And even after something happens to trip you up out of it, you’re still going to ride the high all the way until tomorrow morning. There’s so much to see that even when you’re stumbling over yourself or someone else to get there to see it, it’s okay to be a tourist. People here know how to treat tourists, give them some space and allowances you wouldn’t get if you knew the words you’re supposed to use.
Still, it might go better if you knew what the words were supposed to be. Or maybe it’d go better if you knew what the words meant.