I can’t change the rules

I stopped spitting for a second. In the toilet, the whole dinner from the night before, or what was left of it. I had eaten an excessive amount of fast food and snacks and I was paying the price. Severe food poisoning. I flushed the toilet and kept vomiting. As I “sat” there, on my knees, with my head inside the toilet, I looked back. How did it all come to this? I didn’t really care about my physical condition. Yes, my stomach ached like hell. Yes, the acid I kept vomiting, that was coming deep from my ill guts, was making my throat burn. But those were minor problems. My soul was broken. It had been cracking for the past two months. And it was in that moment right there when I realized it. It was too much, it had finally broken again, after almost two years of sanity.

Something that I wasn’t really guilty of had happened and I almost got kicked out of the residence hall I was living in. I saw myself in the streets, with no money to go anywhere else. I had been missing my friends for a long time, struggling to really find new people to have as a group. Because there were no new people. I knew everybody, and everybody new me, or at least what other people had told them about me. My girlfriend had also left me a month before, and I was numb to it until that moment. I felt mad that I was not the main guy for her anymore. As if I had to be the best thing for everybody.

All of this crawled into my head and made it spin from the inside out. All of this was slowly killing me. It was killing that person that six months earlier had stepped a foot in this university with no fears at all, the person who saw opportunity everywhere. I was in love with myself and with how I knew I was going to make every minute of my presence in Bulgaria golden. I knew I was so open that literally everything could happen in that new, fresh start. If I was curious about something and thought I could do it, I did it. If I saw someone that seemed interesting, I just walked up to them and established a conversation. That was how I had found the older brother that I never had (or that I actually have, but that was never there for me). That’s how I had allowed myself to fall in love and actually make it work, at least for a while, unlike any other time when I had fallen in love before.

But all of that had disappeared six months later. I now hated myself and almost everybody around me. I even wondered if the fact that I had been so well with myself for the past year had made me softer.

I spent the three next days in bed. Doing nothing, thinking about everything. I was miserable, but I didn’t want to judge myself for that. I was vulnerable, and I knew I needed to be it. I needed to understand the situation.

Five days after the bathroom scene, I was in a nine-passenger van crossing the Bulgarian border into North Macedonia. In the van, six Albanians were talking in their mother tongue. I had downloaded Myke Towers’s latest album, so I decided to play it on my headphones. As the cold, grey, dead landscape of Macedonia spread through the distance, the latino summer vibes music made a weird contrast. It made me go somewhere else. He soon started singing about love. About falling in love and about falling out of it. About not being able to get that girl out of his mind, obsessed, feeling sick. And about not caring about her anymore, when he finally managed to erase her out of his temple.

Near the border with Albania, we changed onto an older van. I was too slow in moving my things from one van to another, so I had to sit right next to the driver, in between him and another person. Every time he went into fifth gear the lever hit my left leg. The driver was a thin, tall Albanian with short black hair, brown skin and a clean shave. I started wondering about what kind of person he might be. He didn’t talk. He just drove while he blasted old Albanian hits. He seemed like a simple man, one of those who look like they are happy with their unbothered life.

As we went up into the mountains, I looked down a hill and I saw quite a big Roma settlement. I had been working on a big project related to that minority for months now, and it wasn’t going anywhere. It made me think about how much effort I had put into my work and about how I wasn’t going to change anything. I couldn’t stop thinking if my effort was worth anything. Those ideas led to a chain of thought were I just blamed myself for sacrificing a lot of things in my personal life just to keep up the work. How I had been doing that for the past year and I didn’t care at all because they only people that mattered to me were my friends and my parents, and they were all proud of me back then. But distance had made things different a year later. I wasn’t taking care of them. I wasn’t checking in on them. I was too focused on myself. And new people had come into my life. But, still the same, I also wasn’t taking care of them.

I wondered if I would end up alone. Successful but alone or, even worse, broke and alone. The future terrified me. It still does. I am not a privileged person who can allow himself to fail. But, “what is failing?,” I thought. Maybe failure meant being alone. So back again to those thoughts.

The Cáfasan border crossing was high up on a mountain. We had to wait for around 20 minutes to cross into Albania. Behind me, the Albanians seemed happy. They were going back home. I wasn’t. I was escaping reality. Or trying to. When we crossed the border, a huge lake expanded way under us on the left side of the road. That was Macedonia. On the right side, I could see Albania spreading out under a clear sky sunset. It was the first time I had seen the sun for weeks.

We went down a very narrow road full of vents, until we left the mountains behind. It was already nighttime when we drove through Albania, but for some reason everything seemed more colorful, more vivid. It was warmer than where we were coming from and the people seemed warmer too. When we finally reached Tirana (the capital) it was around 10PM. We had been travelling for almost 11 hours, but I felt energized. It was a Friday night and I wanted to explore the city.

I changed my clothes (didn’t even bother to take a shower) and left the hostel I was staying in. I met my friend Xhonny and his girlfriend and we all went out for dinner. They took me to one of Tirana’s best restaurants. It’s funny how my money made me belong to the higher class in Albania while in Spain I rarely could afford any whims.

I spent a week eating and dinning in those kinds of restaurants. The food was amazing. It was different enough to feel refreshing, but the flavors and ingredients were Mediterranean, so it felt like home in a way.

I had no internet on my phone in Albania. By connecting through gestures with people who didn’t understand me, I felt like I reconnected with myself. When communication was reduced to the very basics, I felt that only the important things were being “said”.

I went on a day trip to Dürres, a small city by the coast where a very destructive earthquake had taken place three months before I stepped a foot on it. But even that city felt colorful and full of life. I hadn’t eaten fish for months. And, as I sat looking out into the sea while enjoying the best tuna I’ve had in years, I wondered (again). How could I finally feel happy in a place where such a tragedy had happened not that long ago? I thought about perspectives and about how small things affect our subconscious. I couldn’t stop thinking about one of the verses in the album that I had been constantly listening to during the trip: “¿Cómo puede ser que vivamos tanto siendo tan jóvenes?” How is it possible to be so young and to have lived through so much?

I had escaped a place that I now hated. And it’s weird how it works for places. How you can hate them and love them at the same time. Because they revolve memories that make you sad and that’s what causes the hate. But those are usually good memories. It’s just hard to let them go.

Thinking about that trip to Albania makes me reflect about how “easy” it can sometimes be to change your mental equilibrium. I am trapped here now again, in Bulgaria, but I know I will eventually be able to leave. I will get back to the cycle of only seeing opportunity in everything. But it won’t be here. I will move onto new things. Until they destroy me, and I have to move onto other new things again.

This is a game that I decided to play. And it has its own rules. In order to be able to experience all the amazing things that the game has to offer, you have to be willing to let go of them when the game finishes. So, it’s your call: to play or not to play. I decided to play to the fullest.

But I can’t change the rules.