Free writing

Just dumping thoughts now, nothing serious.

First, I will be 33 this year, can’t believe I made it this far. If someone were to ask me what happened after Berlin in 2007 I wouldn’t be able to give them a precise answer.

Many things happened and I don’t remember most of them. What happened before Berlin I remember it more much best better, what? It seems the reason we live and travel is not to be happy or to help others. We live to travel until we forget all the places we’ve been to and all the people we’ve met. We travel until all the experiences and people get mixed up in our heads and we have trouble even knowing where we wake up in the morning. Lived so many lives that when we wake up every day we have trouble remembering who and where we are and what is it that we are still getting up in the morning for. What is this thing we call life?

Second, I have probably sabotaged every single meaningful relationship I’ve ever had. Friends, girlfriends, family, all of them equally. I ruined them all, didn’t leave one relationship unharmed. Why? I’m still trying to figure it out, a possible reason is that I am too selfish and just don’t care about anyone but myself. It would sound better if I wrote I destroyed them because I was afraid of getting hurt, and not letting others get close to me was my way of protecting myself. That does sound good and everyone can relate to it that but it’s also a lie. The truth is that I have been dead inside for years and there’s no way another person could hurt my feelings even if they wanted to because I have no feelings and no interest in other human  beings or whatever they may do or say or feel because I can barely manage to live with myself every day with the huge burden of being here now and the existential weight of being alive and conscious. Just too conscious of myself and everything around me that it’s hard to live with it.

Third, my grandpa recently died and I don’t know how to feel about it. That was one of the reasons I came to Argentina because I knew he would die and I wanted to see him before. Then I realized I had changed a lot in those 10 years since I had seen him last but he hadn’t changed a bit. He was still the same, so were everyone else I met after such a long time. And the reasons we weren’t able to get along so well this time were the same reasons we weren’t able to get along so well 10 years ago.

Now he died and I have lots of unanswered questions. Some of them were asked but never got a reply. Some I didn’t have the chance to ask and some are better left unasked.

He doesn’t exist anymore so there’s really not much I can ask him now but it sure does help writing about him. He was a very peculiar person, to say the least. Not a typical grandfather.

He had a dark side I had the chance to witness it a few times. I guess we all have one, but most of us try to hide it somehow. My dark side is masked somewhere in between unedited short stories, unpublished blog posts, empty wine bottles, unsent emails, and Korean pop songs. His dark side though, was all over the place, in his backyard, in the kitchen, in the living room, there was no hiding from it and only those who were very close to him were able to see it. It would withdraw at times just to come out when it couldn’t hide itself anymore. Like a spider that lives in a hole and comes out only when it’s hungry, to catch it’s prey and then take it back to her lair.

Talking about some topics with him was like putting your hand down the spider’s hole, you know you are probably gonna get bitten but sometimes you do it anyway because you haven’t seen the spider in a while and you want to know if it’s still there. The topics we were not able to talk about were endless and the ones we were able to talk about were limited to: money, work, plans for the future, money, social relationships, money, politics, and society.

I’m not sure if I miss him but I am sure I would have liked our relationship to have been better and that we had both work harder to get through our differences. I guess for me it was just too obvious he preferred his other grandchildren and I was probably jealous or bitter about it. I felt like a bastard child there and went all Jon Snow trying to find my way in a world as far from him as I could.

Fourth, about life and work in El Calafate, I’ve managed to stay at the same job for over 4 months now, hating it every day and taking life one day at a time, like an alcoholic. Just doing what I have to do to get me through the day.

The job is tedious, guests are annoying. Colleagues are ok though. But working for the minimum wage feels a bit like volunteering. Like woofing, you get just enough to get yourself fed and housed. It will get you through the day but there are no chances here to save money in case you want to travel or move abroad.

Nature is nice though, and most of the times I  get to enjoy life and by enjoying life I mean staying at home writing, reading, and thinking. Sometimes I think a book and a dog is all I need, some others I think I should start traveling again soon. Once you’ve traveled it becomes clear you won’t be able to stay in the same place for long anymore. So we will probably find ourselves hitting the road again within the next couple of months. Not because we want to just because that’s the way it has to be.

I could say that I have been crushed by the Argentinian economy, my salary being 4 times less than in Australia but with the same living costs or the salary being the same on as in China but the living costs being 4 times higher here. And thinking about last year, traveling in Argentina may have been one of the worst mistakes I’ve made in my life. And come to think about it again, my whole life is just one big mistake and this was just another chapter of the book.

Good thing is that I learned my lesson and my dog seems happy about traveling together. I’m not quite sure she actually knows we are in a different country now. Of course, she doesn’t know about countries but I wonder if she knows we are a good 20.000 km away from where she grew up. I wonder if she misses the other cities we’ve lived in before, or if she remembers all the people she’s met before, and an ocean away from here. I often find comfort in thinking her thoughts are just as messy as mine. Or that we are here together now and that’s all that matters to her, and all that should matter for me as well.

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