Midnight at a 7-Eleven
Midnight. After 14 days locked in a hotel room (mandatory quarantine, I hadn't gotten my vaccines yet), the door could finally open. I had imagined that moment a thousand times. Freedom!! New city, new life.
I stepped out and the street was empty. Cold, dark, nobody around. The pandemic was waiting outside the same way it had been waiting inside. I went to a McDonald's: closed. I ended up at a 7-Eleven, bought some junk food and walked back to my room. That was it. My big opening night in Canada was a little bag of convenience store junk and one thought: tomorrow I'll be really free!
This Sunday, that was five years ago.
It was supposed to happen earlier... the plan was to arrive in early 2020, but the pandemic postponed everything. Months went by without knowing what tomorrow would bring. When the visa finally came through, my grandmother gave me the plane ticket as a gift. It was her last gift. I arrived here thinking about her and about the plans I had (I didn't even know yet if I wanted to stay).
The João who got off that plane was 20 and thought he knew EVERYTHING. As a teenager you think you're good at everything, right? haha. Canada showed me, calmly and without mercy, that I wasn't. That life is not as easy as you imagine. That I had sooo much growing to do.
And growing is how these five years went by. Working, making mistakes, getting things right, building things from scratch. It's like My Way, by Frank Sinatra: I've been through it all, but I did it my way. And I don't know, I think the biggest change didn't happen to my address, it happened in my head: today I try to always be a student. To listen more than I talk. To learn from people who know more than me, which is almost everyone at something.
What I always say is this: growing has a price, and nobody shows you the amount before you pay. Mine was distance. Watching my family get older through video calls. Watching friends give up and go back to Brazil, one by one. Missing the gatherings, the birthdays, the Sundays. I know it's the big price of being here, and even knowing it, it still hurts.
What keeps me going are the people: the friends who stayed, everyone I met along the way, the families I got to know, my work colleagues. And above all, the plans I made back in Brazil, together with my grandmother and my family. I never gave up on them. Not even when it got hard... especially when it got hard. And it's THE MOUNTAINS too. I love, love waking up and seeing this beautiful city. Walking in Stanley Park in the rain. That hasn't changed since my first year... what changed was me, looking at them.
In the end, moving to another country is just a bigger version of what life does to everyone: if you want to grow, something gets left behind. You can't take everything with you. A lot of people give up along the way, and I understand... persisting is not a decision you make once, it's one you make every day.
I'm grateful to God for every one of these days, even the hard ones. I've lived a fifth of my life here. I hope that one day this country stops being the place where I live and becomes, for good, my home.
From the rooftop,
੯‧̀͡⬮ João Siqueira