#threeweeks - english version (of "a tre settimane dal mondo")

You do not know me, I do not know you, yet I feel the desire to write to you, here, and to write to myself.
I am in Erasmus, the most beautiful experience I ever experienced so far. Choose it.
Living in your own microcosm is comfortable, you get used even to your own imperfections, to your own life, you get used to complaining too. Torments and beauty but always in the small cosmos you have built through all of these years: house, family, friends, and enemies. We always create new bonds, but we get to an age where, though young, it is so difficult to break away from what seems almost stable. Calling "home" a place makes us feel safe and secure. I am learning that "home" is not a place, but it is your person who finds a genuine complicity in a place, in people and things, a match with them, a correspondence that welcomes you as you are without the needing to strive to do nothing and be nothing but yourself. Then going away on a trip or holiday seems exciting, but going away for so many months seems almost crazy because it does not just mean to rebuild new relationships, but first of all starting from yourself. Before leaving I asked many times to myself if coming here and dealing with myself was really what I wanted to do. Escape? Get away from what? Looking for what? I was so scared to find myself in a way that would not mirror me anymore, but here I am at home and I have never been so much myself as I am now. I'm experiencing something completely new and special. I realize I'm exactly where I should be and with whom I want to be, although I find myself surrounded by people who were perfectly unknown a month ago. Now we are here, a thousand stories that intertwine at this precise point of life. I know I'll be back, but for me, this is not a life bracket, but a life with the capital L, full, lived, as I wanted. I can say I've been here for just three weeks and I miss nothing. It seems almost bad to say but that's right. I love my friends and family, but I do not miss them in the sense that I've always thought about missing a person. I feel comfortable here, I feel good. I wake up happy in the last three weeks, I go to bed happy and with the desire the next day to do, to see and to know a lot of new things. This new world that frightened me three weeks ago it is now not only fascinating but extremely necessary for me. Here, it seems to me to live in a parallel world where what I do has no impact on "my first life", I feel I can do everything. Obviously, that is not the case. But learning to live in this way is the best thing to do, this is the conquest, step by step, of my independence and freedom I have always aspired to. I'm here with these strangers who now I can call friends and there is no other place I want to be.

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