My catlike ways

I always told myself that I shouldn’t get attached, that I wouldn’t get attached to anything and anyone because everything is perishable and everyone leaves in the end. Or maybe it is I who leave for fear of being left. For now it doesn’t matter. What matters is that the best way to test my perseverance was to leave everything and everyone for a while, to see whether, despite my general intolerance and narrow-mindedness and pigheadedness, I can go on with my life without all the things and all the people I had promised myself not to get attached to. And here I am, in Murcia, Spain.

The beginning was easy, contrary to the fact that beginnings are usually hard. This beginning was intangible: some paperwork, booking a plane and opening a monetary account. Then it got harder; packing, farewells and finally the reality of sitting on a plane to a place I had never been to. This was no longer on paper, this was palpable and it hurt like hell. Not the fact that I was leaving but rather the awareness that I can’t just get on a train and return like I used to when things were going bad. This lack of possibility is suffocating for me.

It seems that I suck at the no-strings-attached business. Come to think  of it, I am like a cat, I walk my own ways  and I like my space but I like to have a place to come back to. Selfish of me, I know, but don’t get me wrong, I don’t take advantage of people, no. I am there for them, to a certain extent, and I don’t expect them to be there for me, I’ve learnt it the hard way that it’s better not to expect. The people who surround me and the people I’d like to call my friends but am too cautious to do so are there for the time being and I cherish the moments spent with them, knowing that they are ephemeral and at some point in the future these people will be gone. I don’t regret it when they are gone. I like to think that their leaving is like an expiry date and  that this is how it is supposed to be, I stay, they leave. No strings attached.

When I got off the plane, the August heat was like a slap in the face and yet, finding a bus and getting on it was so easy. I felt accomplishment. “Ok, I am here, in another country, another city and I’m doing great.” Only later I felt like a cat who was taken all its familiar ways away and given new ones, a whole labyrinth of new ways, to be honest, and who wasn’t given a map or a list of spots. “This is where you are going to eat, and this is where you are going to study and this is where you will go to do shopping.” No. This was all new. It still is and I don’t like it. I’d rather go back home, to my old ways, instead of being here, putting myself to the test, doing something just for the sake of its contradiction with the way I am. Deep down, however, I am looking forward to my reaction to those contradictions, to the challenge they offer.

Five months, this is how long I am supposed to be here. Now I am counting the days left because of the pain and the loneliness and the fact that all the magnificence and complicatedness of Murcia are alien to me, including the language to some extent (but language is a different story) and definitely including the culture and the mentality of the Spanish. I don’t think I will ever understand that.

First of all it is hot but I can manage hot. The winter will be worse most probably because it’s cold and humid and they don’t have central heating or any heating for that matter. I will worry about the winter when it comes. Now, what drives me crazy is their daily schedule. The Spanish, or the Murcianos work from 10 to 2 and then from 5 till 9 p.m. At midday they eat and sleep and in the evenings they go and meet their amigos, which lasts until 2 or 3 a.m. This I will never understand. All day wasted, chaotic. When I teach people English, my day is even more chaotic with little breaks between the classes but I hate it and I can’t get used to it, no matter what. I like when things are in order, when there is no need to multitask, one thing ends and another begins and so on, you’ve probably got the gist. Ms Order should be my second name, or Ms Withdrawn or Ms Control Freak.

I don’t like surprises, I don’t like not knowing things, I don’t like getting lost in this maze of streets and alleys and squares, every one of them looking the same. I get lost even with a map but at least I’ve learnt to ask the way and not give a shit about the fact that by asking the way I depend on other people and that my Spanish lacks some grammar.