I get bored often, and oftentimes, when I get bored, I imagine unhinging my jaw.
The process is silent, painless and strangely seems to both look and feel completely natural in my head. Nothing appears out of the ordinary, except maybe my ears — I imagine them to be larger than they actually are — but that’s beside the point.
Once my mouth is open, all the way open, I don’t admire the cherry-red uvula hanging in the back, nor count the herringbone-patterned ridges lining the roof. Instead, I begin putting things inside, always starting with my watch.
I own a regular-sized watch, one that would easily fit into any regular-sized mouth. After swallowing it, I will likely move on to my pen, then someone else’s pen and after that someone else’s water bottle; I unfortunately do not have my own. With each object being larger than the last, it isn’t long before the scale breaks and I fully enter the territory of unreality. My mouth grows big enough to fit the door to the room I’m in, the large oak tree I can see from my window and even a school bus making its final stop of the day before heading back home to campus.
Each time I progress further and further down this rabbit hole, encountering larger and stranger objects, I always end up realizing that there is a hard limit to my imagination. It doesn’t manifest itself when I conjure up the edge of the infinitely expanding universe or a bottle of ibuprofen filled with freakishly accurate clones of myself instead of pills — I can swallow both in one gulp without a second thought. Yet when I imagine America, all 50 of its united states, I can never manage to fit it into my mouth.
Despite having lived in this country for just six years, I have been tangled up between stars and stripes for as long as I can remember. Each day, and every part of it, has always had a streak of red, a dash of white or a blotch of blue hidden somewhere within it, starting first thing in the morning.
Some of my earliest memories begin with the news, not by choice, but because my parents would watch it while I got ready for school. As I drank the remainder of the chocolate-cereal-stained milk in my red bowl, I would catch the weather forecast. More often than not, I wouldn’t find out whether it would be raining today at home, in Dhaka, Bangladesh, but instead whether it would be sunny in St. Louis, Missouri, or snowing in Anchorage, Alaska — two places I hadn’t and still haven’t been to, and yet I knew their respective temperatures for the simple reason that they were cities in America.
Then, after coming back from school, I took a nap most afternoons. To coax myself to sleep, I wouldn’t count sheep or chickens, or rack my brain to remember how many gulps it took me to finish the cup of warm milk I just had after lunch. Instead, I would imagine being Spider-Man, growing a couple of feet taller, probably a hundred pounds heavier, never ever forgetting to give myself six-pack abs so I could feel at home in the classic red-and-blue suit.
However, every time I pictured slinging webs and backflipping off the edge of a building, I would run into a problem. In my head, I couldn’t see myself being Spider-Man in Bangladesh — not because I thought radioactive insects somehow lost all their physiology-altering powers in South Asia, but because I knew absolutely nothing about the city I was living in.
I knew that New York City had five boroughs and the Empire State Building had 102 floors. I could tell you that the Brooklyn Bridge stood 38 meters above the water and that there was a giant barosaurus skeleton in the lobby of the American Museum of Natural History. So instead of the narrow streets of Dhaka, I dreamed I was swinging from building to building all around the Big Apple.
But then I grew older. First, old enough to watch “Star Wars: The Clone Wars,” the 11:30 p.m. program on Cartoon Network, and then old enough to understand that America was not encompassed within the heroism of John McClane in the first “Die Hard” film. Instead, in my adolescent psyche, America began playing a role that was more akin to the shark from “Jaws.”
However, after spending six years here, I can confidently say that all of my assumptions about this country have been flipped on their head again — sort of.
I have learned that America does not deserve the Statue of Liberty, nor the opening montage of “Rocky III,” but neither is it worthy of its notoriety after the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is a nation just like any other, not a bastion of evil in the world nor by any means a state to be idealized.
In my head today, America exists in flux. I have one of her elbows leaned on a base of benevolence and the other on a foundation of cruelty because if she were to fall into the gaping hole that lies in between, she would no longer be larger than life, and the world would consequently feel small and empty without her filling it up.
Maybe one day I’ll be able to imagine her behind the walls of my teeth — Maine may protrude harshly against my cheek, and Texas will likely be bigger than I expect. But for the time being, when I get bored, as I always do, I see my mouth grow immeasurably large, larger than anything and everything we can think of, and yet infinitesimally small when compared to the idea of America.
And that’s perfectly fine with me. I would no longer be me and America would no longer be America if she could fit into my mouth.