Independence Day
- Fiction & Essays
- Sep 28
- 6 min read
Creative non-fiction
By Arch Ramesh
I tugged my green cargo jacket tighter with one hand, the other dragging my suitcase down Second Street. As I walked by unhoused people littered along the pavements like zombies, long forgotten by the circumstances that had gotten them there, I felt an unlikely kinship. I was at the end of my six-year marriage, a closure that was inevitable and abrupt. While emotional warfare lay behind and ahead of me, the herculean task on that July day in downtown San Francisco – a ghost town of shuttered storefronts – was transporting all my belongings from my three-bedroom apartment into a newly procured five-by-five storage unit. I had moved homes, cities, states, and countries more than a dozen times in my life, always certain that something better lay ahead than what I had left behind, but this time I walked away from all that made sense on paper to a faint outline shrouded in marijuana-scented fog.
The fourth of July; a day celebrated by millions of Americans with barbecues, fireworks, and retail sales. There is nothing more American than buying things you don’t need but have the right to own – with your own money or borrowed credit. For my immigrant parents who saved every bit of their hard-earned money so they could secure a future for their children, no American ethos was more antithetical. As a first-generation immigrant who has spent the better part of two decades wrestling with my hyphenated identity, nothing was a more rebellious assertion of my American-ness than frivolous shopping. But on that cold Independence Day in San Francisco, on my seventh trip armed with the tonnage of the life I was leaving, I felt weighed down by my choices in more ways than one. When we decided to separate, I was ready to rip off the proverbial band-aid. Prolonging the next phase felt cruel to everyone involved, and so I found myself sorting through all my belongings on that holiday weekend and hauling them into a storage unit. While the country was festooned in red, white, and blue, I sat encumbered by the sheer amount of life I had lived, and the things I had amassed in doing so. How did I have so much stuff?! I drowned in kaleidoscopic mounds of clothes, worn and unworn; stilettos I had long lost the will to teeter on; piles of belts, purses, earrings and more I could only call miscellaneous, because I had long forgotten what any of them meant to me. Independent from what? The question reeled through my head as I contemplated my baggage in all its forms, and how much of it I wanted to carry into a new beginning.
I was nineteen when I got my first job – as a retail associate at an Express clothing store making five-fifty an hour at a mall in North Carolina scented by Cinnabons and Japanese cherry blossom wafting out of Bath and Body Works. This was exactly three years after immigrating to America and exactly three weeks after getting my work authorization. To my parents, the idea of holding a minimum wage job while in college was a sign of their failure to provide; to me it was the ultimate coming-of-age. Up until that point in my life, I had a sneaking suspicion that access to better clothes and the classic-cool American style would lift me out of the unease I felt in my own skin. I had arrived in the homogenized suburbs of the American South just before the start of my junior year in high school, convinced from having watched many American teen movies that what I wore on the first day of school would make or break my destiny. I had no access to friends yet, but did have dial-up internet and department store catalogs that cluttered our mailbox like Welcome to America greeting cards. I’d sneak the booklets up to my room and pore over pages and pages of girls with sunny hair and pencil-thin legs. Low-rise bootcut jeans, camisole tops and denim shorts showed more than they covered. I knew there was no way that my Indian mother who had never flashed a knee in public in her life would allow me out of the house in such little clothing. But more to the point, I wasn’t sure my legs covered in scars from mosquito bites – mementos of damp monsoon evenings in India – were ready for prime time.
Three years after my first day in American high school (which I survived), when I was finally free to observe American girls in their natural habitat – malls – I documented with the perseverance and stealth of a wildlife photographer. I noticed how effortlessly mothers and daughters and gaggles of girls bonded over shopping; how brand names overrode personal style. A plain white camisole with the Abercrombie & Fitch label was worth owning, even though it bore no other mark of difference from the white camisoles at Dillards. I noticed how little anyone seemed to care about the money they spent, whether they had it or not. At that juncture, my family could have indulged me in shopping sprees and the latest trends, but the point was they never would. Not like the girls who swanned in and out of Victoria Secret and Juicy Couture stores in groups, trading the phrase that’s so cute like playing cards, while I wondered how pieces of clothing so quotidian could hold so much value.
It wasn’t long before the observer became a participant. After all, I couldn’t let all my newly procured knowledge go to waste. Pretty soon my paltry retail associate paycheck went toward the construction of my sartorial personality. Now that I was out of my mother’s keen watch and in a college dorm, I put my emancipation to good use. I attempted tube tops and miniskirts, and let my navel peek out from low-rise jeans. I watched enough episodes of “What Not to Wear” to convince myself that my sartorial rebirth was the key to my happiness. And my life was getting a makeover in more ways than one. Out of my shell, and at a large liberal public university, I was surrounded by more choices than ever. Majors were donned and discarded. Extra-curricular activities glimmered like bedazzled belts. Should I join a hip-hop dance team? Or perhaps the Bahai religion meetup, or maybe learn American Sign Language? Put simply, I was lost in the chaos of everything that was available to me, independent at last. It felt like I was on the verge of a life that had always felt out of reach for the girl with frizzy hair and legs tarnished by scars.
I can look back and trace the seams of how clothes have shaped my sense of self – as a woman, as an immigrant – through my life. Somehow, the very clothes that felt so elusive in those early immigrant years felt like one of the few ways I could control my destiny in a land of infinite choices. The girl at the fringes could turn heads in the right clothes and buy herself a sense of belonging. Yet, twenty-two years into this American life, with a blue passport, and a wardrobe full of my choices to show for it, on that Independence Day in San Francisco, I felt more trapped than liberated by all that I owned. At that stitch in my life, when I had to move on, I was surrounded by all that I had not let go of. I thought of all the times I had distracted myself from discomfort by scrolling through hundreds of thumbnails on my phone: Asos, Amazon, Anthropologie, Lulus, Nordstrom, Shein, Zara. When did those thumbnails become tethers?
When I was twenty, freedom meant buying anything I wanted, without considering if I needed it. At thirty-eight, I had to assess what I couldn’t live without in the life ahead. I had outgrown many pieces of clothing that I was still holding onto; had I outgrown my need to buy my self-worth? When I was taking stock of my life and all its folds and seams as I moved into my storage unit, I wondered what aches and scars were hidden under polyester, wool, and cotton. Had I learned to love myself over the years, or just the way people looked at the clothes I wore? Was retail therapy healing me, or was I still trapped in the mind of the sixteen-year-old desperate for the perfect don't let me be an immediate social reject on the first day of American high school outfit? At the precipice of the end of my marriage, I was laid bare in a way that no salacious satin skirt could hide. On that Independence Day, I started to shed the baggage I had been carrying around for far too long because underneath my perfectly staged outfits was a person more resilient than any worn-in denim.
As an immigrant with a hyphenated identity, Arch likes exploring questions about belonging, identity, and transience through stories. She’s been published in Jaggery Lit, Matador Network, Thrive Global and Culterate. Her essay Somewhere in Between was runners-up in The Preservation Foundation’s 2021 non-fiction contest.