The loneliness

The loneliness of the stranger

The return of the returnee has little to do with the return of the erasmus, a pipiolo that leaves for a few months, to expenses paid and with a fixed return date. When you leave to work, it makes you a little older and with no certainties, no longer a return date, but a return to yourself. You go with twenty-seven and you return with thirty and a half, five years out in which the life of your people, surprise, has run its course without you. The friends will not have changed the stage but they have changed, they have a stable partner, less hair and less time, it costs a world to stay. We no longer talk about the futsal team or the party last Saturday, the BDE has engulfed the conversation, weddings, farewells and pregnancies, and I feel like Mick Jagger in eleven mass. It is not that expatriates do not get married or have children, but living outside feels less social pressure and tends to postpone certain dates to stretch the life of truhán. And it is not that the day-to-day of the immigrant stands out for stability, work or bureaucratic (roles), a desirable requirement for some of those steps.

It is also good to assume that the one who has changed the most is you, and not necessarily the better one, however traveled and cosmopolitan you may see yourself. You return with new habits and acquired prejudices, the same ones of spending years in another society, unless you lived in a greenhouse, surrounded only by Spaniards, who also exist.

When I moved to Russia as well as to Belgium, my Erasmus back in the Pleistocene, I made an investment in people. That is, just landed tried to get out as much as possible, even when the body asked me to make the croquette on the couch. He did not reject any social plan, in order to know new people, to expand the circle and to avoid the loneliness of the stranger. In Spain I do know people, but it is a mistake to assume that after so long your friends are waiting for you with open arms. The whatsapp groups and the two times a year that you alternated with them, when you visited during your years as an expatriate, do not mean more than that. You have to earn them again, invest, at least a little. Concentrating only on the labor landing and taking social readjustment for granted would be like selling the car to buy gasoline. After all, the Spanish labor market is still a bone, if it were not for our people here, why return?