Travel Plans
Dear Journal,
Summer is coming closer and I really want to travel out of this place to somewhere else, alone, for a vacation or something. I really want to get out there and discover new places and people by myself. I want to go to Boston, Massachusetts. In fact, I want to visit most, if not all the states in New England. But I don’t know if I have enough money to do that yet. I don’t have a car so I hope they have public transportation services. Also, I don’t know where to stay yet. I’m scared a motel will be too cheap or unsafe. Ah! I’ll go to the fire department and ask for help from them. Firefighters are my cheat code for getting lost or confused in a new place in America. They’re a mix of law enforcers and medical personnel, just perfect!
Thinking about it, I cannot wait for summer to come. I think my roommates and I are silently done with one another. We all just want to go our separate ways or get a place to ourselves. I am tired of living with so many girls too. I have lived in a room with at least 50 girls for 6 whole years of my life and I am over it. I might be able to deal with living with one or two girls at the maximum. 3 is completely a crowd now. I don’t want the drama it brings and the space invasion. I also feel betrayed by them because I was an object of discussion between all three of them last semester and I don’t think that trust is ever coming back. When I asked them why they didn’t come to me personally if they had an issue, they claimed they were discussing a way to bring up the problems to me.
I found out about it when one of them yelled at me one morning when I was on the phone with my brother for being too loud. I confronted her for talking to me that way and somehow found out they all had been having meetings without me, about me. If you thought I was loud, why not tell me?
Then this semester, I realized that they thought I was the one being messy. Ha! Me. Living in a place with all the machines to do the work for me for the first time and I’d choose to be messy? But they never conversed that part with me either. I never really thought much about these things before now but I might be starting to watch out but assertiveness is something I need to learn.
I spoke to a friend recently about some of my experiences living with them and she pointed out that they might be trying to single me out and push me to the side.
Why? Maybe because I am different and not the international student they expected. Or everyone is trying to assert dominance when we should be individuals sharing a living space?
Then there’s Alex, I still worry about his constant pressure on me to save money. He’s trying to look out for me but, he says things like “How much do you have saved? "And what have you been doing with your money? You’ll be sent back to your country this summer.” So, naturally, I drifted away from him. My friends forbade me from telling him details about my life, just like my family did tell me many months ago. Alex is the guy who helped me come to America, he was my insider on this end of the world. He told me about my present school and helped convince my mom to sell our house.
Of course, I saw him as a guardian when I first came here. But less and less as the days went by. However, I consider his parents pseudo-grandparents, I call them Nana and Pop-Pop. His fiancée is still a friend that I only fill in with not-too-serious information about my life. Basically what she wants to hear.
I want to go away from here. I want to move to someplace where people have bigger dreams and nobody knows me. I’m thinking of San Jose after graduating and New England for my explorations. Heh, I left my family and moved to a new country; somehow, other people think they could control my experience.
