Au revoir, Belgique.

How do you say goodbye to something you hate? To something that only brought sorrow, pain, tears and disappointment in your life? To something with a beautiful mask, but rotten inside?

Well, how I am supposed to say goodbye to Belgium? To this half-beautiful country, which took five years of youth and hope and gave me nothing? Besides shades of people, half smiles, friendships that lasted 24 hours and loves that lasted even less… I always said that Belgium was like an addiction. You don’t actually enjoy it except for a couple of minutes and, after that, you feel shame. But, when you don’t have it, you miss it. A bit fucked up, right?

But let’s analyse it for a bit. What’s to love? As a Romanian, I didn’t come to Belgium because I was in love with the country; I came because I had hopes for a better life that my own country couldn’t offer…  After the first six months, you get tired of all the chocolate, beer, Belgian fries and cheap drugs; and then you start to see the people. Depressed, cold, shallow, jealous, racist, dirty, disrespectful and selfish. You start to notice the way they look at you. Because it’s written on your face that you don’t belong with them.  Once you leave your country, you become a perpetual stranger. Even stranger in your own country… Nothing will even be so familiar  like your hometown during your childhood or your family for Christmas or your high school friends...

But you try to adapt, you try to fight, to ignore that bad and appreciate the good. You work, you pay taxes and you go out in the attempt to socialize, to connect, to build friendships. You dance, you smile to a guy, you get drunk, you party and you stay up until 5 am hoping that you would find true love. And then the next day comes, when you feel like crap, because you got too old for this shit, your head hurts and you promise to yourself that you will never do that again. You take off the make-up from last night, you drink your coffee and you remember the guy with whom you flirted last night… and you find yourself waiting for his message, even though, on a second thought, you know he was not the guy for you. But you’re a 26 –year-old woman and you’ve lived this story a thousand times before. He won’t call, because let’s be honest, you cannot find love in a club, you feel bad because you forgot to remove your make-up, you’ve spent more than a day’s work money, your feet hurt because of the high heels you thought were going to make you look more attractive, and, most importantly, you feel like you’ve wasted another good night of sleep because of nothing. Because you cannot have fun in clubs like when you were younger, you cannot enjoy dancing like before…but you keep putting yourself through that situation hoping that you might bring back that careless feeling. And, with some few exceptions, going out clubbing or for a drink have become for you the only thing you do to have ‘fun’.

When you don’t have ‘fun’, you work. When you get home you watch a movie and you sleep. If you are lucky enough to have friends, you might go out for a chat. And then you start over. I know, it might sound like what most adults do nowadays, but let me remind you of some factors that make this ritual even more complicated. When you live in a foreign country, when your work is a crappy bartender job that pays five euros per hour, when your so-called-friends don’t talk to you anymore, when you still live with your parents, when you became so pessimistic that even when happy you start panicking, when you realize that nothing good happened for the last five years, and, if it did, you were soon reminded that nothing good ever comes for free.

So I am saying goodbye. To the way Belgium changed me. To the way Belgium made me see the world, the people and myself. To the things I loved and I hated. To everyone I knew and I cared about. To the people I cried for and to those that show me how mean and ugly humans can be inside. To my life for the last five years. To the young full-of-hope girl that once came to Belgium and now became this ghost of past memories.

But I also want to mention the good things that happened. I managed to test my strength, my patience and my endurance. I managed to lose myself and to build myself up again. I managed to meet beautiful people during my Master’s and in the bars I worked. People I care about and whom I am very grateful I got to know. People that showed me there is still hope out there for the lonely and unconventional ones. People that made me laugh when I couldn’t find the power to get out of bed in the morning. People that, even though they were episodic presences in my life, had a huge impact on the person I am today.

Of course I am sad. Belgium and I had a love-hate relationship. Even though everything bad that could have happen did happen and even though I am only pieces from my old self, I am proud of myself. Because I know I did everything I could and only I know how hard it was. I am still alive and still have left in me the strength to start over again. But not in Belgium. 

Change is not easy at all. Moving is almost every time a pain in the ass. But, what I know for sure is that it cannot get worse than this. It’s only up for me starting now!

À plus!