ASSUMING MYSELF AS AN ADULT. WHO IS GONNA PAY THE BILLS?

(Versión en español: https://laumenbel95.wixsite.com/mysite/post/asumirse-adulto-a-quién-pagará-las-cuentas)

Allow me to introduce the text you are about to read as the first excerpt from a story with dramatic and cartoonish touches about someone who moved to another country one day and with a thousand little voices in her head decided to tell the story with written words that if you read out loud it sounds like something. My name is Laura Méndez, a person with a Colombian passport, a body in the Netherlands, a heart here and there, and a belly in the world.

I decided to start the story at a time that was the present, but for now, December 26, 2022 is the near past, without being the beginning of the story outside of my home country, but talking about different times. This is the first part by pure chance, the second can come chronologically before the first and so on. Don't worry, the gossip seems so promising that it will lead you to understand, even a little, the location is difficult because the writer is also lost. See you there. Welcome!

**One note more before: I want to ask you for excuses, English speaker, if you may find some sentences or words weird or out of place, my feelings and thoughts are in Spanish**

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It could have been a different week, but it turned out to be so, we all wish we had done things differently at some point and then we woke up, we are almost 30, with an identity crisis and thinking that by then our parents already had two children, own car and own house.

That day I woke up like this, without knowing what to do with my life as always, enjoying the sun coming through the window and the shadows of the trees on the wall. It was a Monday, maybe a Friday, the days stopped having a name since the schedules don't mean anything in the routine. Candy (my cat) didn't come howling for food and on the other side of the door it didn't smell like eggs, chocolate and fresh orange juice. "I haven't been there for a year," I thought, and I still miss that routine that accompanied me in previous years. However, it was a different kind of feeling, I was missing everything knowing that I had not only changed my place, but also myself. That day, after the drama and romance of this story, I woke up thinking "who would pay my bills next month."

I grabbed the last breath I had left and with the victory of being able to get out of bed I put a banana on a plate with cereal and yogurt and replied: “I, I will pay the bills next month”. Here I once again take a dramatic pause for the sole reason of evoking an image in which I can be seen melting in the middle of the room, with crises of "I'm not capable" and a face like "FUCK, what did I do". The decision was clear, knowing that more than a decision it was a fact, an “it is what it is”.

Perhaps you know it because you have been in the same situation as me, perhaps you imagine it because you have seen movies, perhaps you think you know because you are one of those who knows everything or someone has told you, but let me explain with my words and feelings about what it means to move to another country:

To migrate is… It is to be woken up with a bucket of cold water, it is to lengthen the roots and miss even the soap to wash cloths. To migrate is not only going on a trip, visiting places that look like in the movies, changing the climate and food, learning about new cultures and speaking other languages, it is also colliding with all of the above, losing not only physical direction but a spiritual, professional and personal one, it is wondering all the time who am I?, it is infinitely questioning every little thing that I thought was normal and it turns out that now it is not, so what is normality?

To migrate is to learn to relate to each other and its surroundings again, it is to try to find the right words and avoid speaking because you couldn’t find them, it is to find yourself in the middle of everything and everyone without understanding anything, from the traffic signals to a casual conversation.

And with migrating came the assumption of adulthood, between buying bread, cooking more than pasta with tomato, finding a general practitioner and even paying the bills, that sheets are expensive, towels are not to mention, Netflix and Spotify are not payed for themselves and who finances me the sweets. That day, regardless of whether it was Monday or Friday, I consciously emancipated myself from the sponsorships that my parents assumed almost by obligation and I took the reins of my home, a mobile home that I had begun, without knowing it, to build since before embarking on a trip with no return.

I remembered that morning, that when I just moved, even with how empowered and determined I thought I felt, I was not able to get a part-time job because of my status as a non-European Union student, my permit did not allow me to work more than 16 hours and to be able to access a job we had to go through a process that a lot of employers I talked to weren't willing to go through. Months later, after having given up on that side, I signed a student contract with the Dutch government, by the time that contract ended my permit and path as a student were also about to finish. I woke up that day with that annoying adult question “who will pay the bills next month?” I got up then and I decided to sell my soul to a logistics warehouse in shifts from 5pm to 2am with the desire to meet the basic objective and continue.

T

his is where the story begins, at the doors of a warehouse that is in charge of unloading and loading trucks full of thousands of daily shipments. It is here where the protagonist of the story lifts boxes full of up to 30 kg of thoughts and shit from some Internet user possessed by consumption, for 8 hours, 3 or 4 days a week.

At this point in the story, I assume, but above all I hope that you, the reader, find yourself attracted and curious about what happened to that adult soul, that does not assume herself as such, and want to know how the story continues. I, in my capacity as the narrator performing the story, allow myself to leave three points of suspense and continue telling this tragicomic story, which deserves time and digestion, in some future letters.

So far the first part of a series of 3 or 4 (perhaps more or less) micro-stories of the story of an adult who, like any adult, refuses to be one.