September has been the most bittersweet month of the year since five years ago.
No matter how much I bore people with telling, showing, and doing so, I never get tired of repeating it. I could recycle all the memories thousand times over and over again.
It wasn’t merely about moving to one of the most exciting cities in the world. What I truly admired from us five years ago was courage.
We bravely moved without knowing where to stay, thinking renting a house in London would be as easy as renting in Basura: viewed once, deal, paid. It’s hard to believe that I was so naive, thinking that I just had to make a list of properties and then call the agent once we got there to make appointments, only to find none of those agents returned the calls.
We restarted the search from the beginning and only had a week to find permanent rent. Managed to get two viewing appointments, one of which was clearly a no, which left us with the only option we should take.
The opposite of all searching had been done in an unfamiliar area. The process took many sessions of “what?”, “How?”!!, “Really?! ” for days until the agent safely handed the key to our hand on September 12.
We emptied almost all of our savings just to pay the deposit and first month’s rent.We even borrowed money from my brother’s friend who was doing his Phd in England to pay for it first because we couldn’t open a bank account without a permanent address.
We lived the first month without any salaries other than the cash I had in my wallet, yet we still bravely made a trip and spent half of it calling the bank and the hospital about the salary we hadn’t received cause we couldn’t survive longer days without it.
I thought living recklessly could only belong to the 20s, yet,we did it in the middle of our 30s in a stranger land far away from friends and family.
But then, I always trust Allah highly, confidently and completely. There was no way he made us survived all the pre-departure mess for months only to let us failed miserably in reality.
I often record hard days more than the good ones, privately.It’s just like a library of experiences,feelings, that might be useful for the future.
Whenever I need some insight in the present about how courageous I can be,I always back to September in 2019.
PS : This writing came up suddenly after another session of flowing tears rewatching Notting Hill. Not sure it was the PMS talking or I just miss London badly.
PS2: If there is another chance to move there once again in the future, will I take it? Then, my answer will be a big, bold no. That was the adventure of a lifetime once and done. Unless, Allah made that the only option.
A Penny for My Pensieve 