I’m interrupting my normally scheduled programming of obnoxiously slamming you with Italy posts to live blog for a second.  

My roommate is running around the apartment, collecting last minute things here and there because she is moving home after being in Madrid for 3 years.  She was in Spain for an additional semester before that.  It’s the familiar hustle and bustle of grabbing one more sweater, or throwing out the food that will go bad before a long time away.  The things we all do before going home for a few weeks.  Only this time she is moving, well, permanently.  “It’s not me, it’s her” I keep telling myself, as I feel this strange anxiety, panic, pulsing through me as she keeps rolling suitcases to the door and occasionally popping in to ask if I want this or that.  Sure, I’ll take the rest of the peanut butter (American commodities, you know).  I guess I feel this anxiety because I’m essentially watching her dismantle a life that she has built here, and it’s something she is doing by choice.  Very few times (if ever?) in our lives, have we been on one path (at this point, in early and mid-twenties), a path where we have a house and friends and a supermarket and a routine, and then eventually we need to make this incredibly tough decision to uproot it.  To rip everything up that you’ve created, pack it all into suitcases, and whatever else doesn’t fit becomes a memory that you hope won’t fade.  College doesn’t count, although it’s similar.  After four years, you can’t stay there.  You finished your degree.  You graduated.  And all of those roots you created?  Well, they’re changing too.  Your friends are moving on and getting jobs.  Your house and room is being inhabited by other people.  Your professors move on, you’ve just become a name and a grade to them.  and YOU move on.  But the difference is that you didn’t decide to do it.  There is no ‘is this the right thing?’…’what if…?’, etc.  You have to do it.  But here, in Spain, in another country, we have to eventually make a decision to flip our worlds right-side-up…or upside-down, however you choose to look at it.  When you MOVE to the new country of choice- Spain, in this case, you’re not exactly flipping your world.  I was aware that it was a big choice, a big step, but it was a step of going into the unknown.

^At the airport, when my parents dropped me off in September of 2015.

It was EXCITING.  It was a step that could be reversed.  I am an American citizen.  I have a house and a family and a dog and friends and a neighborhood and a language (English) and all of my favorite places in my little hometown.  If I don’t like my life in Spain, I can come back.  Home is always there.  It’s scary moving to a new country, knowing no one, rolling two big bags behind you and hoping for the best.  But there is the comfort that, well if shit hits the fan, I can undo this.  You never think about the reverse.  The moment when you make the decision to move back home, to that house and that family and that dog and that neighborhood, that has been continuously humming along while you’ve been gone.  You realize that you are moving back to a place where EVERYTHING IS THE SAME, but the thing is- you’re (I’m) not the same.  So you, as a different person, are trying a find a way to fit.  It’s like taking a puzzle piece and putting it in the washing machine, and then trying to put it back into the puzzle.  It vaguely looks like it fits, but not really.  I guess if you really jam it in there, you’ll get it in.  That right there, is the scariest thing.  It’s something that keeps me awake some nights, or floods my head when I have too much time to think (or even when I don’t).  

When we (I) made the decision to come to Spain, it was a temporary decision.  One year.  Two years.  And now I face the decision of three years.  I see friends and friends of friends dropping like flies, as each one is slowly taking the plunge back.  It’s not easy for anyone, but with plans and dreams and ideas, it makes it easier.

^After my first day of teaching.

But then there are people like a friend of friend, who left (for good) a couple days ago and she was sobbing at the airport thinking “what the hell did I do?” as she faced the reality that she is going back to a place she has always known to teach (which is something she doesn’t really like), when she could stay in a place she LOVES and teach.  At least for one more year.  But all that stuff I mentioned about undoing your decision to go back to the US if shit hits the fan is a lot more difficult as the reverse.  What I said yesterday (when my friend and I were talking about this) is that: if you go home and decide, “I made a huge mistake.  I’m going back to Spain”., and then you come back, you may very well find that coming back here is like deciding that you aren’t ready to leave your university, so you hang out in the library and around campus at your ex-university, only to realize that what is left is a skeleton of your life.  Many of the people have moved on, you’re in a different house, you probably won’t have the same job, and essentially, you have become irrelevant.  I guess that’s why it’s so scary to take the step, at least for me.

^The day I went apartment hunting.

^I fell in love with this area, and ended up moving down the street from here.

These are things I never thought about before I came here.  How it would be so damn hard to leave an apartment that I have walked into and out of, probably a few thousand times.  How my cheesy landlord would tell us how wonderful we are.  How my (somewhat creepy) neighbor would wave to us, and eventually- it will be the last time.  How I will miss the terraces at the restaurants and the extremely late sunset (10:00?).  How you will have a bank and a gym and a walk you do some mornings.  You have a routine.  You can talk to people and say “well, in Spain….” because that’s where you LIVE.  That is home.

^When I moved into my room, which has been home for two years.

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At this point, about 20 minutes later, I can hear my roommate sweeping her room, sweeping the last bits of what has been her home into a dustpan, getting ready for the next 20-something expat to move in, excited for this new adventure, without any idea of the heartache that comes when you decide to go.  She is ending this chapter, with vague plans to come back and visit during Spring Break, but she will be a visitor in her old life.  This won’t be home, and I know that that is ok.  There are longer, more exciting chapters ahead, and the only way to begin them is to close this one.

—

I just helped her load 3 suitcases onto the elevator, gave her a good squeeze, and said “we’ll see each other in Philly”.  The elevator door closed, and so did the chapter- for her, and for me, as each of these little flies drop, they drop from my chapter as well.

^2016-2017 roommates