Moving forward
Friday, Oct. 04, 2019 - 10:10 pm.

I think we're settling down nicely. I'm currently writing this from a corner of my bed, while Andrew is all tucked in with our black cat stretched next to him, and our ginger cat fast asleep on my pillow. Fucking cats. We're all doing great, I think. Yesterday marked one month since we left the UK and arrived back in Chile. While we look back longingly and the future remains uncertain, we're carrying on.

Andrew and I are in different job positions, though we both count as research assistants, and each of us has better days than others, work-wise. We lose about two and a half hours of our day in commuting to and from the university. I always look at those apartment buildings across the street from campus, where we used to live before we left for the the UK, and I wish we lived there again. We still get annoying, pressing questions about what we're doing with our lives, like we have a say in that. We're just waiting for job openings to apply and hopefully escape our current precariousness.

And the stray dogs. Everywhere and so many, hungry and freezing and sick, although at least the weather is getting better and there's more interest around animal welfare. I still don't have the means to even think about helping with this, though.

Still, it's all good. Work hours suck our time more than we'd like to, but we're sort of reclaiming our evenings. We're trying to meet with friends here and there; in fact, this week I met with the one person whom I consider my best friend here, for once it was a friend of mine in my own right (and not primarily a friend of Andrew's). We make the time to cook decent meals, although we're in a lower socioeconomic range now, and the quality of food at hand (a supermarket for this small village) noticeably decreases. We have the essentials, though, and then some. I know it sounds corny, but we have each other. We're on the bus back home, traveling alongside the railroad tracks, and we hold hands and smile at each other, and I feel happy.

Heck, I've been drooling at night. Pardon my excitement, but it's a sign that I'm not clenching my teeth. I'm sleeping quite well.

I celebrate small victories at work, and this week I'll meet with someone from the local branch of the It Gets Better Project, to see what's going on regarding LGBT issues in the city, and how I can get involved, and whether my research fits in here. I'm trying to get back to making comics, and drawing, and writing. Besides my manuscript (which might take me a year to fix, I see now) and other personal stuff, a friend of a friend today left the door open for me to write for my university back in my home country.

All in all, I'm feeling grateful for what we have, and the future still is full of possibilities for us, personally and professionally. The one possibility at hand right now is having a relaxed weekend, and I intend to enjoy the shit out of it.

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