After a While

I was in NY a couple of weeks ago and there I met with some of my friends from my Erasmus two years ago. Yeah, we kept in touch, even if we didn’t know if we were ever going to see each other, we tried to keep our tracks just for the good of it, with the hope that in some point we were going to be in the same continent again.

Meeting your Erasmus people, out of the Erasmus environment, can be a bit tricky. We have all these expectations and memories of them, that were born in a completely different setting; as we all know, in the Erasmus, people can be different from what they usually are, some will argue that in the Erasmus people are more honest, more open, more themselves, and maybe it is like this, but the true is that honest or not, in normal life we have a way, we have habits that in the Erasmus are obsolete, and that’s why meeting your Erasmus friends can mean knowing someone new. This is totally normal, even regular friends –anyone- change with time, and people from different cultures, different languages, with only some shared memories, can found a bit hard to reconnect after two years of absence. After a while, you meet your Erasmus friends without the Erasmus filter. You get to know how they make choices… are they reckless, are they conscious? Because in the Erasmus we didn’t have to make other choice than where to travel to, or where to party. You get to know if they like family vacations, or if they like to read and study. You get to know them more.

The fact that your Erasmus friends may be a bit different from what they were in the Erasmus doesn’t mean you love them less. You just have to adjust, you have to be aware that they are not –we are not- the party animal, the free souls, we were two years ago. No, as everybody, we had to grow up, finish –eventually- the career, work, make money, meet that special person. So, when I met my friends in NY, I realized that once again we all were far away from our families, in different cities, living by ourselves… but this time our priorities and plans had changed. We made the same jokes, talked about the same topics, but we were different, and the saddest thing is that we all realized that the Erasmus became a set of stories; what we all think was the best time in our lives, had become a parenthesis, a bunch of memories. We were painfully aware of what this meant: did we already live the best of our lives? Were we going to live something like that again? Was it really time to get over it?

We all thought about these questions, and even asked some of them out loud. But we were there, we were together, and the only thing that mattered was to hold on a little piece of that precious time we lived together: remember, laugh and cry over things only them can understand, with memories that you share just with them. Talk about people and tell stories that no one else would get. Your Erasmus friends certainly share a piece of your life, and what makes it unique, what makes it –them- irreplaceable is that you share that only with them, and they share that only with you. You know how when something bad –or very big- happens people get closer or they fall apart? Erasmus is something like that, is something big, that makes people get closer, more than years and years of shared life would do. It is sad to make those questions that were flying above our heads, and it is impossible not think about them when you meet with your Erasmus friends after a while, but it is also nice and calming to know that other are feeling the same nostalgia that you feel, and that they remember with the same frequency, and that they keep laughing of the same jokes, no matter how many time you tell that same story.

Meeting with them made me remember a lot, a laugh, and cry a bit also, but most importantly, it made me get to know them again and realizing all these new little things about my Erasmus friends made me think about all my relationships, and the differences between them.

What brings friends together? People you met when you were five years olds, in the school or in your neighborhood… the ones from college and the one from life, from any specific place. How do you compare your life-long friends, the ones that have been with you all the time, in every moment… how do you compare them with these new friends you made in your Erasmus, those you only shared a few months with? You can’t, you don’t compare them, normal people don’t think about that –I don’t know why I do it- what matters is that you love them the same. In my time in Krakow, I never stopped remembering my friends from Venezuela, but I did talked with them less frequently. When I came back home, I realized how little I knew about their lives in that years I wasn’t there, and I felt a bit ashamed of myself. How did I allow myself to not text them? To not asking about them. Of course, I excused myself thinking that I was taking advantage of my new friends, because unlike the old ones, these I didn’t know when I was going to see them again. I had to enjoy the little time I had, right? And you always hear that stupid thing that “real friends don’t need to talk every day… bla, bla, bla” But hey, true friends do need to know that even if you are far away, even if you are meeting new people, you still remember them, you still care. It is true that true friendships are the same even after a long period of absent, but people are not. People change. That is what this post is about. Just like the Erasmus Friends can be different people when you meet them again, and you don; t care because you love them the same, your old Friends are also haivng a life while you are living la vida in your Erasmus. They are also having problems, they are also having affairs, having experiences! And I kind of forgot that, or maybe I just didn’t care. What I did used to do in Krakow was talking a lot about them, mention my old friends in my stories, and I realized that distance is a pretty good thermometer to put to a relationship: how much do you remember someone? Even if you don’t text them, how many time do you think about them? Talking about my old friends I also realized that I didn’t have a lot of things in common with them, to the point I was surprised we could be friends. Remembering them, talking about them, I got to understand myself a bit better. In Krakow I thought for the first time that childhood is a crazy time to make friends, because as a child you don’t judge, you just share and love, and if you learn to love someone when you are a kid, you are going to keep that person even if they change as we do in the different stages of life. Friends you make in your childhood are the one your uncles and aunts ask about, the ones that are in many family pictures, the ones that visit your family even when you are not at home. They may have become completely different people that when they were kids, but they still love you with that love. Not judging, not demanding. How could I spend so long time apart from those Friends that burned every stage with me, that saw every color in my hair, and stayed with me in every crisis, every broken heart. They know everything about you, the good and the evil, and they are ok with it. Maybe you don’t share many opinions, or you don’t like the same things anymore, but it’s just the same. So are these the only friends that you should keep? Are these your “real” friends?

Well, I think about my Erasmus friends, the ones I made in months, even weeks. Let’s remember In Erasmus you can fall truly in love within a couple of days, so it is not so stange that you get to love people that didn’t see you in tour worst, didn’t meet you when you were a weirdo –because now you are so cool-, people that didn’t help out in any teenager crisis, or boyfriend crisis, or college crisis… or any kind of crisis, they just weren’t there. All considered, it is not so weird that you get to call friends to that people that don’t know my family –my family… that is like half of me- and it is not unbelievable that you care about people that never saw my room, my sacred bookshelf, that don’t understand my culture and that didn’t know about my country until they met me, that don’t know how frustrating and beautiful is to live in Venezuela. It is not strange because even if they don’t know a lot of things about me, they love me without the need of knowing. Do you know how big is that? It’s deciding that you are going to love, and to care about someone despite many things, no matter what could come from an unknown past. They don’t know if you were the high school weirdo, or the bully, or the clown, or the ignored, or the smart… they don’t know and it is so nice to get the chance to be someone new. They decide they want to be your friends now, they liked the person you are now. That’s why I started this long post talking about how scare it is to meet your Erasmus friends, because they liked one person, and they may not like the new, the one you are after a while without meeting. Our friendship is not based just in some memories, but in those tea afternoons, in those movie nights, in those early morning talks, in those deep, deep conversations about everything and anything, our friendship is based in those secrets you wanted to shared, in those little stupid thing you wanted them to know about your life back home. Not because they were there to witness it, but because you want them to be a part of it. That Erasmus friendship is a friendship because you wanted it to be, it is not circumstantial, it is a choice. It’s a choice that means that you accepted the differences, you took them in, and you made then a vital part of the relationship. These new friends were hard work, because it wasn’t just playing in the park, no… getting to love someone you don’t share a common space, a history with is hard. You have to look for it, work for it. My Erasmus friends suffered with my the Parliament elections, they were shocked and sad with the news coming from Venezuela, they asked me if they couldn’t do anything, if they couldn’t help from their first world privilege sit, they were interested in a country they had never seen, they had never cared about before, without having any interest there other than me, what I told them. That’s something. Despite the short time, we developed the empathy needed to understand a personal background we didn’t know. We developed the interest needed to reconstruct that background from the scratch, from little references. We developed the curiosity needed to ask the right questions: about people you don’t know, about places you’ve never seen, about a culture you may not care about, but that you know is important to your friend, questions that would give you an idea of that life you wouldn’t get to know. We developed the attention needed to give meaning to the answers and place them in this puzzle that a person’s life is, a life that is very far away. So you start imagine about how their parents are, how are their friends back home, how is their relationship with their siblings, how is that boyfriend or girlfriend you’ve heard so much about, what about the future plans, the past mistakes… it is a lot of information, and you don’t have time to see if you got the puzzle right, like normal friends can in a life time period. You don’t have time, so you put more effort into it that you would in any other- “normal” friendship: you ask more, you listen more, you observe more… and maybe that’s why these friendships grow even stronger than some friendships back home, because you tried harder… and at the end, we developed the tolerance needed to accept that maybe that person you just met is not the person in your head, maybe when you get to see them in their real lives… is gonna be different. That’s why is scary to meet them again. What if you disappoint them? But that’s not going to happen, because in the moment they decided to try, to ask… they also decided to accept –in most cases, of course- They come to peace, with the fact that they will not know everything, they are not going to be a part of your daily routine… and that sacrifice, I believe, is what make this friendships so strong.

So, meeting my Errasmus Friends in NY was a kind of test. Do we still like each other? Are we the same people? Is it going to be like in Krakow? We knew it had been a while since… and when you realized that no, it’s not the same… well, there can be one akward second before you decide –decide- that you don’t care. If you got to love them in a few months, you can get to care about this new person in the time you have… no matter how short. You realize that you already did it once, getting to know an unknown person in few months, so you can do it again. Why do they have to be the person in your head? They’re not! So what? Just get to know them again.

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