Big Dreams

Chapter 3: Moments

Since I couldn't leave the country immediately, I did something that needed to be done right away: I focused on college. I still remember the despair we felt while studying, the anxiety that it was waiting to know the grades, and the anguish when I failed, although knowing that I had passed was a relief beyond comparison.

The first semester ended and the second one started during the second lockdown since the beginning of the pandemic and luckily, I just needed to go to one appeal exam. Because of that, I had one free week before the start of the next semester in which I could watch Netflix, read, write, rest, and get mentally prepared to continue the studies.

Indeed, that's what I did plus discussions with my grandma as usual. I also made a video call with my two best friends, Danilo (Dan) and Gulliver (Gulli) who were more like my brothers, on Gulli's birthday. I had known them for a long time; I met Dan in the fifth grade, in the seventh we both met Gulli and never parted again even though we were in different classes or universities because it's the kind of bond that doesn't go away easily.

I used to say they were more my family than my mother since she had abandoned me, or at least that's the word I thought described what she did. This was a difficult topic for me because I felt that the person who should've loved me the most and always been there for me has never been, so I gained trust issues by believing in her every time she told me she would change despite never doing so. She lived in Luxembourg with her two sons, one daughter, a boyfriend, and a life that I was never part of and she never acted like she wanted me to do or like she really cared for me, so, just before I turned 19 I decided once and for all that I didn't want anything to do with her and stopped talking to her.

I think the fact that I grew up without my mother made me realize that family means something more than a blood bond, it means taking care, loving, helping, and the most important of all: being present. Dan and Gulli had always been there for me, when I was at my worst and when I spent the best moments of my life, so why shouldn't I call them family?

Even though there was a pandemic that prevented us from being together and with an even more difficult second semester, I found time to talk to them at least a little bit every week to see how they were; Dan was the best at his college, as he had always been, but Gulli was thinking about dropping out and just start working or taking a short course in something he liked and I supported the second idea because I knew college wasn't for everybody and there were other ways to achieve good things.

The numbers of Covid-19 started getting really better at the beginning of the summer as I was entering my exam time and me, Trina and a friend of hers used to stay at college studying together and got desperate again to pass at everything.

Trina was always talking badly about a group of our year

- "All social, always making noise and smoking, I bet they don't pass almost anything", she said and I agreed because they were very annoying, although there were new members that we had never seen before and one of them heard us complain once and asked the others to go somewhere else. I didn't know if he was expecting a thank you or something, because he looked at us for a while and smiled, but I thought we didn't have to thank someone for doing the right thing.

Our last exam was on June 28th and I know that because my best friend's birthday was on the 26th and I couldn't be with her. Her name was Marta, I had known her since the beginning of high school and she was the person with the purest heart that I had ever met, she just couldn't see anyone badly, plus she was the most adventurous person I knew.

I guess I liked groups of three people since I had Dan and Gulli and then I had Marta and Francisca whose real name was Maria Francisca but she didn't like her first name so if anyone called her that she would be really mad. She was a force of nature, had a good heart but also head in place so me and her used to tell Marta she needed to change a little, since she was very sentimental and sometimes didn't really think things through. On the first weekend of July, Marta went to spend the weekend at my house and we did a Harry Potter marathon, ate pizza, talked for hours, and barely slept. It was an amazing way to start the summer although I still had two appeal exams to do.