Dutch stories in English – Part III

Continuing from Dutch stories in English (part II) …

¨OMG, part II was written in July 2017… Now it is May 2019, so almost two years passed. Let’s try to catch up a bit with the story. Dutch stories in English is back! ¨ – EDIT: I am catching this up now, February 2020 (re-edit: March 2020, one day this will be published), so now we are close to 3 YEARS from that Part II post, and about a year from the day when I wrote the introduction of this Part III. I have been reading now my old posts of that series and, keeping aside the horrible grammar mistakes that I had by then, I have to say that there is a whole of me that felt again like those days from 2015 that I explained. The shock that we lived when moving to the Netherlands to study kind of popped again in me now, tonight. The intensity of the last years of our lives here made me feel like this again. I feel I got back to the memories of each and every single of the nights I lived from that 24th of August 2015 until yesterday night (re-edit: and today). This flashback of 55 months, or 1650 days, that lasted for the last 10 minutes is bringing me back and forward still now. Every once in a while, when I go back to my writings, published and no published, I remember about the time I was writing them. The day, the instant of that day, the amount of time it took me to write them and, most of the times, to the memories and experiences that are in them explained. I kind of use this as a personal and discontinuous diary of facts that happened at a certain point in my life. Impossible it is, not to let a tiny tear fall down. It is so emotional to remember situations, people, their faces, activities and places that we shared that I have to make this Part III happen. It needs to be written now and forever. Let’s continue, from where we left it in May 2019, or on July 2017… Or whenever, who cares. Let’s go!

Let me speed up the lasts months of 2015. We were in October-November, end of the first quartile. Something nice about this time is that we have holidays! Well… Not really huge holidays… Neither everybody had them at the same time. Depending on when you finish your exams of that quartile, you can have more, or less, free days until you start the next quartile. Sometimes you can have 7 days of holidays and others only 3. Let’s say that I had X days of holidays (not because I don’t want to tell you, but because I don’t really remember – EDIT 2020: I think I had 5 days, Wednesday to Sunday or so). And what happens when you have holidays during your studies? Yes, you travel around! I just realized that the trip I did at that time was my only second time abroad with friends (this is just a note, a “for your information, FYI” sentence, because it sounded crazier in my mind than what it really is; “Oh wow! Travel abroad with friends, without your parents! And that was the second time of your life only?! Crazy” – EDIT 2020: OMG, why did I write this way some years ago? I feel like a 2 y.o kid. But I will leave it here, for the fun of it and because I love it and because I want it to be here and because you deserve to read my writing evolution and, and and… etc). We went to Prague guys. Prague!! Doesn’t it sound amazing? And it was! Not really because of Prague itself, because I didn’t like it as much as I expected it to be (too high expectations… you can hate me already, haters come to me!), but because I think it was a kind of a friendship consolidation for some of us. There we slept together in a shared bunkbed room, we walked the city together, we got drunk together (in Twente we also did, but now we can add one more place to the “places-where-I-got-drunk-with-my-friend” list), we danced together, we met new people together, we discovered the free-tours together (or I did, because before Amsterdam and Prague I had no idea about this free-but-pay-what-you-feel-like tours), etc… The trip was organized by the ESN, so some of the activities were already programmed, but the cool part of it was that we were quite free to do whatever we liked. We went to a flea market on the surroundings of Prague, we walked to “not so known” parks of the city, we crossed the river through other bridges and not only the traditional Charles Bridge (what we also did, together with a mass of tourists, but only once), we saw the Prague’s astronomical clock give the hours (a must-do there, it is extremely nice), we became friends with our tour guide (best I have ever had, and I did a lot more after it!) and, most importantly, we ate some amazing Czech goulash! Food is also a MUST in any new place you go to.

November was a nice month. To be honest, I think I remember those weeks of November in Prague and the next ones in Enschede until the Christmas holidays as some of my happiest. Anything that I was doing I had always someone next to me up to do it with me. Playing some games, cooking, studying, cycling, loving, laughing, partying (well, nobody do party alone, right?)… Etc. Some nice times spent, mostly, at the campus of the University and at the city centre of Enschede. These days helped us to make of this little Dutch city our HOME, in all aspects of the meaning that such a big word has. The Oude Markt square, with its typical Dutch terraces and bars/pubs (which are the same in every single Dutch city), the Saturday food market, the ITC hotel area and the Stadsweide in front of it (where lots of students from the university used to live), the Tankstation, the Hengelostraat between the campus and the centre… and in summary, every single corner and street of that city that we had to cycle to and from. Parties, meeting ups, pre-drinks, birthdays, international dinners, music evenings… It all happened during these days, and the months after it, even though I still didn’t know about them. I had no idea about what would be living in three months from that moment. Not even that! What am I saying, I had not realized that Christmas was about to come, it was just around the corner of the calendar. We lived the moment I think. During these months we lived like we would always be doing the same things, with the same people, at these typical places I am remembering now.

Oh yes! There is something else happening on these days. I almost forgot! I was starting to think to move to a new house by then. That was the only future plan I had in mind, and there is a HUGE and good reason behind it. I was in a house surrounded by 18-year-olds… and yeah… let’s say that they were OKAY, but not my type of ¨roomies-to-live-with¨ during a long period of time. Luckily (or I thought I was lucky because I didn’t realize that a lot of friends were about to finish their Erasmus) a friend was leaving in 2-3 months, so I decided to apply for her room. As it was still part of the campus, it was managed by the university rental agency. Some ¨nice people¨ that suck the money of students and, above all, press you to accept a +500 euro rooms (nowadays some of the new rooms are +650 euros) within a day otherwise, and these are textual words from them: “you will find yourself in Enschede without a ceiling because the renting business is crazy here. Up to you. You will be moved to the end of the waiting list if you don’t accept”. So nice, aren’t they? Anyway, let’s continue.

After the routine we built in Enschede, Christmas arrived, and with it, the holidays!! Fewer study hours and work. That was nice. All those days back home were very cool. I missed my family and friends. I could not believe how important they were even though my mind had been for some months outside. I was living abroad now, not knowing for how long, but in my mind I was still thinking about friends back home ¨what are X and X doing these days? Is the group X meeting without me? Are they doing the same plans we used to do? Any new couple formed?¨ I wanted to know!

I could meet with all of them, it was so nice… Friends and family. My parents, the main support and love I have ever, and will always, had. And also, not only people, but Christmas back home means one thing: food, very good food. Especially for Christmas eve, when my mum cooks (and when she cooks, the world stops for an entire day, she is the best cook I know), and for Christmas day, when all the family gets together. This is the biggest celebration of the year for us, where we all should and have to be there. Because of that, the Christmas day of 2015 became later the most special one of all and forever.

However, after the intense weeks lived before, it started to feel weird to be back home. Home then felt like my own place still but from a distant position. It is like a storage room that you once booked in the south of the city but you never went there after the first time because you didn’t really know what you had in there. So that is kind of it I would say. You have it there, it seems like it will always be, but it is not yours anymore, not completely. Slowly, it will become the home of your parents, where you grew up and from where you left once, to be back as a grown-up adult, as many times as possible (which are never enough). Your room became this renting storage place that has less priority for you now. Probably in the future, it will become something else. After that, the days after Christmas day came to me as kind of added to these holidays. Unnecessary maybe, as my mind was already in Enschede. The rest after the 25th of December was just added value to the valuable time I spent there. Added time for you and the people you want to have around you. I stayed home until the 3rd of January.

Fatidic January. It is always a hard month of the year. It is cold (for half the Earth), normally darker, nostalgic of the Christmas days and long. It gets sometimes too long. In Spanish, we have an expression for it, literally: ¨January’s slope¨ (la cuesta de Enero). It is more referred to money spent after Christmas, but who cares, it means it is hard… It was January 2016, some days after my birthday, when I finally realized that the future had arrived. The time we had never thought on, finally came. We were living the moment and it was the moment who made us live. The family around me had to go back home, some of it, an important part of it for me. Little pieces of my memories, so my brain, were leaving and I started to feel alone in the middle of the huge group that remained in Enschede. Most of us stayed way longer, but each person has a huge weight on me, a weight I didn’t want to lose. I was sad for a long time, without the mood to meet new people, letting the days go on and off just as naturally as the sun does. Alone with dozens of brothers and sisters that kept on laughing as they did before, but with the same jokes as before. Nothing new was coming up on these days, which made it harder even. On a new vicious loop of unhappiness that seemed to be infinite. I missed the period of August 2015 – January 2016. I wanted it back and I was not able to look forward. I was not able yet to see that a new semester had started, with new activities and people. I was not able to understand that we were all one single piece of memory but spread around the globe. I was not able at that moment to go out with the face of the newcomer that arrived in August, eager to live the moment just as it had done some days ago. I say that I ¨was¨ because one day it all changed. One day my brain stopped to lock my heart from behaving normally and I grew up, a bit more, to a more mature position. More adult? Maybe yes. I grew up to the acceptance of time and to the fact that people come and go, they stick around for a while and later they come loose. But the ones that were there on these days would be still a part of you forever, they are still now in March 2020. They are part of my own personality, as we change when certain special people stop by during their path to share it with you. You change, they change, and then we all learn that we are different, a bit bigger inside I would say. That’s why for me, the most valuable pieces of life, most of all, is friendship and people. By far it is. I think it is an easy choice for me, but it’s my choice, I finally understood that. One day I moved forward to see that, in reality, my personality from these days of 2016 already was full enough of these people. It had then assimilated them and it was now ready to open a new area of it for more.

I will tell you why and when, but not now though, one day I will…

To be continued…