Prism

I was doing the dishes.

It was one of the first days here in Maastricht and I was awkwardly standing in a kitchen that wasn’t mine, as always trying to express my love and my gratitude with some soap and a beat up sponge. Next to me, in front of an overflowing sink, there was an Australian guy that was judging my dish-washing skills.

We were having a conversation, I don’t remember what it was about, but one thing that I do remember is that I said I was curious. I was curious to see who these people we were meeting were gonna end up being, who was going to be my new best friend and who was just going to be an acquaintance. To me, all these new people, all these new faces, all these new handshakes, felt like a bunch of dust floating around and I was just waiting to see where it was going to settle.

But one thing I didn’t know back then, as I was looking for a towel in that towel-less kitchen was that there was one piece of dust that I had to pay more attention to, and that piece of dust was me.

The truth is that the person I am today is definitely not the person I was a month ago.

I remember the first time I was alone here in Maastricht. It was right after the haze of the first week and I was scared and nervous. I went to this really cool cafè, pulled out my laptop and ordered a chai latte that I ended up spilling. I tried to occupy myself by coding a couple lines. I was hoping that immersing myself into that world of colored letters and square parenthesis was going make me feel calmer, but the whole time it was like there was a big yellow triangle on the top of my head that kept flashing ‘Error error. That’s not what you’re supposed to do. You should be with someone, you shouldn’t be alone’. And then flash forward not even two weeks later to me laying under the Brighton stars completely alone, fiddling with a seashell, feeling happy. I have a record of the waves of that night and I can’t listen to it because it still makes my heart tremble.

And when I think back about this month there are so many snippets of myself in so many different situations that I struggle to believe they’re all starring the same person, but they are.

I am the girl getting pierced in London. I am the girl leaving the library at 10 pm feeling tired but accomplished. I am the girl waking up at 3 pm with the makeup of the night before still on. I am the girl eating waffles in Belgium. I am the girl that was called ‘Peachy’ at a random concert in Utrecht. I am the girl dropping her cacti vase on the floor and then waiting until the next morning to clean it up. I am the girl dressed as a unicorn with glitter on her face for Carnival. I am the girl preparing her last presentation using the wi-fi of five different Starbucks in five different cities. I am the girl rolling down a hill in Luxemburg.

I am a party animal. I have ants in my pants. I am a night owl. I am a busy bee. I am a bookworm. I am an early bird. Damn, I am the whole zoo.

I feel like a prism. I feel like every new experience I have is carving a new face into my surface. A new face that will bounce a primary colored square in a different direction when the sun will finally hit me. Right now I’m really scared and excited to see what’s gonna happen in the next three months and who I am going to become. How many faces am I going to have? Am I going to end up being round again, just a ball of glass letting the light slip right trough me? Or am I just gonna end up being a floating piece of diamond dust?

I guess only time will be able to tell.