Homesick and Miserable in Spain

Kanina, nakita ko yung dalawa kong lumang USB drives.  May mga lamang pictures, emails, at mga sinulat kong satsat tungkol sa mga bagay bagay.  Napangiti ako nung mabasa ko ang isa.  Sinulat ko nung bagong dating pa lang ako sa Spain, email ko yata ito sa isa kong kaibigan na nasa Manila.  English pa, pasensya na.  Heto, basahin nyo:

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12 January 2007

Today is a terrible day.

I am sick, both physically and emotionally. I feel like throwing up and I think I´m homesick, for the first time.

I woke up at 6am today with a low-level drumming headache but I had to get up and go to work until 12 noon.  I´ve been here in Spain for almost a month and have been working for almost two weeks.  I am living alone in a rented room.  I have to work 5 days a week, 8 hours a day, sometimes even longer. And today is supposed to be another ordinary day.  

By the time that my work was over, I was hungry (I have not eaten anything), sleepy, and tired. So I went straight home, dropped by Mcdo to buy lunch. Oh, how I miss rice! Here I can find rice only once in a blue moon: Mcdo doesn´t have it, Kfc doesn´t have it! What they serve is papatas fritas. Damn patatas! So I got myself a quarter pounder. Damn, how I hate burgers! No Filipino anywhere in the world should be made to suffer the agony of eating burger!!!  We are rice eaters.  In Manila I only ate the meat and throw away the rest, and that's what I did with this quarter pounder. Ate my "lunch" in my room, sipped the Pepsi that goes with it. Slept.

I woke up in the evening feeling hungry (again) and now having a terrible headache. So I took some medicines with arabic label which I bought way back in Dubai, washed it down with leftover Pepsi, and then went out to look for a place to eat. I found something like 7-11 (actually it´s VIPS), looked at the menu and there again, darn patatas! I bought beef with patatas, ate the beef, cursed the patatas, and began feeling really miserable, so I ordered a glass of cerveza. Then I had excruciating heartburn and acidic tummy!

I got really, really miserable!  I am more pathetic than Peter Parker when he is not Spiderman!  How do you say pathetic in frigging Spanish??!

I remembered my life there in Manila where I could always call a friend, anywhere, and just babble about my heartburn and acidity and how stupid and hard-headed  I am to be drinking beer on empty tummy knowing fully well that I´d get heartburn and hyper-acidity. How I used to love eating alone, not because I didn´t had any friends, but just wanted to be left alone, how I treasured those peaceful moments when i could just be myself incognito. Here, I am incognito, alone, and genuinely lonely. I have wonderful and kind workmates but I can´t bother them every time I ache or feel sad and miserable.

I looked at my phone and scanned the names to look for someone whom I could talk to, and found no one. For the first time, I had no one.

I´ve always thought of myself as self-reliant and free. I go where I want to go and do what I want to do, and most of the time, I have always survived well. I have travelled before and have been away from my family and friends, but not this long and not this lonely. And I realize how I miss my family, my friends. And how I now learn and accept with infallible wisdom what I have always been denying to myself: that I am strong because of my loved ones.  Because of their support for me and of the good things that I want to do for them which fuel me to move forward.

I have always worn the mask of strength and independence, but I, too, have always believed that the softest hearts do hide in the hardest shells. It's now more than ever that I admit how perfectly true this is.

After dinner,  I walked to starbucks, got my cappuccino (as always), lit a stick of cigarette, then sipped and smoked, alone. It is terrible to be drinking coffee alone at starbucks, it's unbearable to do it when I´m already feeling miserable to begin with, don't you think? Then it dawned unto me, I'll just go home and call my mother and share all of this to her. Then I started to feel better. Time to go home.