The fact was I hit a wall and my body was suddenly exhausted. I guess waking up early in London and all the traveling, plus leftover jet lag, was starting to affect me. I was about to tell Dave I was going to head back to my room to get settled and have a nap when his roommate showed up.

She looked to be in her late twenties, maybe older. She was tall, almost as tall as Dave, and just as thin, though her skin had a nice healthy glow to it, the kind that came from lots of yoga and coconut water. Her name tag said she was Beatriz. She eyed our tattoos and piercings and gave us a shy smile, probably thinking we were a couple and she’d interrupted something.

We quickly made introductions and after Beatriz put her bag away, Dave had brought out a bottle of grappa liquor he’d bought a few days ago. The two new roommates settled on the couch and I perched on the armrest and we all raised our glasses before taking back the foul-tasting poison.

The shot was a bad idea. I’d only learned that Dave was from Ann Arbor, Michigan and was a guitarist in an “ironic punk” band (whatever the fuck that meant) and Beatriz was from San Sebastian and was a local news anchor who wanted to try going international, before the room was spinning and I could barely keep my eyes open.

I excused myself and said I needed to unpack and I’d see them at dinner. I left them behind in the warm glow of their living room, feeling the slightest bit lonely all of a sudden. I shrugged it off and gathered just enough energy to make it back to the reception area and pick up my bag.

Again, I didn’t see Mateo or Claudia, even though there weren’t many people mingling anymore. With great effort, I swung up my backpack on my shoulders. I was so looking forward to putting it down in my room, unpacking and never having to see it for a month. I loved the idea of backpacking but after struggling with mine for one day, I wasn’t too sure how cut out for it I was. It was probably my fault for taking so many pairs of shoes. Narrowing them down to five pairs had taken up an entire day and was a traumatic experience.

My building was right across from the reception/dining hall and at the edge of the property. A bucolic low-stone wall, crumbling and spliced with dried moss, lined it on one side, bordering a barren field as it swept down the hill to the narrow road below. It was early evening now, around five o’ clock or so, and the air was growing colder and the sun was starting to dip toward the mountains.

My first night in Spain was upon me.

And I all I wanted to do was just to crash onto my bed and sleep. I couldn’t even fathom unpacking. Even the idea of food seemed overwhelming.

My apartment was on the upper level of the cottage, so I staggered up the wooden steps to the second floor and stuck my key into the door. The apartment looked more or less the same as Dave and Beatriz’s, except that there was a balcony that ran all along the front with French doors that led out from the common area onto it. Two iron wrought chairs and a tiny round table beckoned you to sit for a spell.

I beelined it to my room and had just enough energy to appreciate the white bedspread complete with Spanish embroidery, the dark wood floors and furnishings and the wonderful dying light that streamed in through the large, gauze curtained windows, before I dropped my bag to the floor and collapsed onto the bed.

Just five minutes, I thought to myself.

Thirty seconds later, I was out.

Here’s the thing about me—I’ve never been very good at fitting in. I know that goes without saying in some respects but when you think about it, there’s no reason why I shouldn’t have found my tribe/gang/group/family over the years. Sure, in high school I hung out with the “skids” but only because I liked to smoke pot and get tattoos and listen to punk and metal. But I was smart too—I liked to learn, I wanted to attend a good university, whereas they did not and wouldn’t even go onto community college. So while I was accepted and had made some friends, none of them were the best of friends, those people that had your back, that made you feel like you could be yourself. I was part of my peers and yet apart from them at the same time.

Same went for university. People were far more tolerant and they were less cliquey but for whatever reason, I still had problems finding the right “team.” My closest friend was Jocelyn, who I met during my first year, but she moved back to Saskatchewan (no idea why you’d willingly go back there) and so we only saw each other once a year if lucky. Our interactions were reduced to emails and Facebook messages, which is how most relationships operate these days anyway, but still. I missed the face-to-face interaction, the laughs over watching stupid skits on YouTube or getting drunk at local dive bars and betting on who would hook up with who.

Yet, the moment that I stepped off the bus in Acantilado yesterday, I felt like if I hadn’t found my place, I was at least halfway there.

Not everyone was immediately likeable or even friendly, but for the most part, people were pretty fucking cool. At least, all of the Spaniards were. Though they took the program very seriously, they also wanted to have fun—my kind of people.

It probably helped that I’d already made a friend or two. It was nice feeling as if Mateo and Claudia and I kind of all knew each other, even if only in the most superficial ways. I could see a few people had bonded with their seatmates during the bus ride, too, something that seemed stupid at first but now I could see the point. Even knowing Dave, Beatriz and Froggy Carlos seemed to go a long way with me.

Unfortunately, I missed out on crucial bonding time because I ended up sleeping all the way through dinner. I was so tired, I passed right out and woke up only briefly when my new roommate—a tiny, cute little thing named Sara—knocked on my door. I think I yelled at her to go away (which I later apologized for) and that was that.

It was six am when I woke up by my own natural clock. I groaned and sneered at the room that was flooding with natural light before I dragged myself off to the bathroom to shower. I felt like I’d been hit by a freight train but I certainly didn’t want to look it. There was Dave to impress and perhaps some other people I hadn’t met yet. After all there were forty of us there and I think I’d only gotten a good look at a handful.

Of course, if I was being really honest with myself, I wanted to impress Mateo, too. I knew it was really stupid and inappropriate how he kept on crowding my thoughts—I mean, why was my brain and body wasting impulses on someone that I could obviously never have and who wasn’t even my type? I didn’t understand it and yet the fact remained: I wanted to look pretty for him. I wanted him to look at me and think that I was “very beautiful and very sexy” like the way he had described Marilyn Monroe.

And that was oh so fucking wrong. He was married, with a kid. I shouldn’t want him to think I was attractive. I should want him to think I was ugly but just funny enough to want around as a friend.

Sometimes I thought I was a terrible person.

I looked at my phone. It was probably too early—or too late, I was never sure how the time difference worked—to call home and speak to Josh or see if I could get Jocelyn on Facebook messenger. Though I never made it a habit to talk about my love life with my brother, he was adept at making me feel like I was a good person. And Jocelyn, well, she heard about every exploit with every boy, enough that she called me her little slut. I’d call her a whore back and that’s just how things went.

My finger hovered above the screen to turn on the data roaming and cellular coverage—I was being so strict with the phone, I couldn’t even receive texts. I took in a deep breath and waited, then put it away. There was no wireless internet in this place so if I really wanted to contact someone I’d have to either use the payphones or the computers near the reception. They really, really wanted to make you feel isolated here.