Oh, England, My England
As the ball went streaking past Robinson, I didn’t even have to see it ripple the net. I felt it in my gut. I couldn’t grieve it. This wasn’t my game. I was just some American guy sitting in my in-laws’ living room watching the scene on a fuzzy TV. These weren’t my tears to shed, so I let John Terry shed them for me. I couldn’t lie dumbstruck in the grass on the field, so I let Gary Neville lay on the pitch for me. Attachment breeds suffering, but I don’t want to let this moment go. I want the hurt. I want to bear this weight of unfulfilled potential. Let it be mine just for this moment. Let me have this terrible sting of connection. “It’s not attachment,” I lie to myself, “It’s interdependence.”
As the announcers kept talking about the next game my avatars wouldn’t be playing, I couldn’t turn away. As the camera fixed on my brethren in pubs half a world away, I felt the depth of our collective presence and the temporary despair. This isn’t the way the story goes. Won’t someone just shut off the images and leave us disconnected in private grief with no pornographic images of shirtless and celebrating Portuguese to remind us of what we lost. The images kept us all focused on this terrible moment. A stadium full of silent Englishmen stunned from fevered singing to pale silence. David Beckham consoling a despondent John Terry. The carpet in my in-laws’ living room. The England shirt on my chest. The tears that aren’t mine for the country that isn’t mine either.
Attachment breeds suffering, but in this moment, this is all I’ve got. I’ll never be fit enough to be wearing the boots and the shirt. I fear in the moment that I’ll never see London again. I fear that I’ll never belong to this country that I so love. I fear that all my dreams crumbled in that terrible silent moment when that ball hit the back of the net.
England matters to me. The government doesn’t matter to me. The buildings don’t matter to me. The land on which all of that is built matters to me. I feel keenly that this is where my people came from, and I want to do just what bigots have been telling American minorities to do for hundreds of years. I want to go back where I came from. This defies logic. I know that I’m an American by birth, but these men represented my home in a way that the boys in red, white, and blue never did and never could.
But even that is a convenient lie. I’m not English. I’m Scottish. I’m Irish. I’m other things that I insist on ignoring.
For a moment, I was more than just my own five senses and experiences. For a moment, I was David Beckham on the sidelines watching something I couldn’t even influence. For a moment, I was Sven, consistently taking a safe conservative approach instead of reaching for my dream. For a moment, I was Frank Lampard, struggling to make just one of my opportunities actually work for a change. For a moment, I was Wayne Rooney, failing to control my temper. For a moment, I was John Terry, mourning for lost dreams.
Attachment breeds suffering, my inner buddha nature continued to assert, and I could feel it all starting to slip away.