I moved to Cyprus at 24. Now I am 45, and it turns out that almost my entire adult life is somehow connected to this island.
So the Cyprus → Argentina story does not really begin with Argentina, or even with the decision to buy a ticket.
It begins with a much more complicated question: what happens when the place that was your home for more than twenty years is still dear to you, but you gradually stop seeing your next life in it?
I do not want to write a classic immigration story in the format of: everything is bad here, so I am moving to where everything will be good.
That would be a lie.
I love Cyprus.
I am grateful to this country for a huge part of my life. My twenties, thirties and most of my forties happened here. Here were my homes, my friends, my animals, my familiar roads, the sea, the mountains, the villages, work, projects, completely ordinary days and periods that completely changed my life.
Good and bad happened here.
Here I grew up.
Here I learned to cope with life on my own, to start things over, to make mistakes, to make decisions, to lose, to find, to build, to destroy and to build again.
And the people in Cyprus are not some faceless backdrop to my story. Over the years there have been many wonderful, ordinary, warm and responsive people beside me.
That is why I do not want to cross out more than twenty years with one sentence: Cyprus no longer suits me.
Life is much more complicated.
You can love a place and at the same time understand that it is time to move on.
You can be grateful to a country and not want to spend the rest of your life in it.
You can have a home, know the roads, the shops, the system, the people and almost the whole structure of daily life — and one day discover that familiar does not necessarily mean yours anymore.
That, I think, is what this diary will be about.
Not only about the physical move from one country to another.
It will be about how an adult person in the middle of life decides to consciously take apart an already built life and try to assemble the next one.
I am not starting with a clean slate.
A clean slate does not exist at all.
I take with me more than twenty years of Cyprus, life before Cyprus, accumulated experience, mistakes, fears, habits, people I met, things I decided to keep, and things I will have to part with.
And at the same time I am going where I will have to be a beginner again.
A new language.
Another variant of Spanish, which I am now learning almost from the very beginning.
Another continent.
Different social rules.
Different bureaucracy.
A different labour market.
A different everyday life.
New people.
And a country where I have never lived before.
I do not know in advance whether everything will turn out the way I imagine now.
That is exactly why I want to document this process not after everything is over and it becomes easy to tell a beautiful story in hindsight, but right now.
While Cyprus is still around me.
While there are still months before the plane.
While there are doubts.
While I have to count money, prepare the house, sort through cupboards, sell things, solve questions about documents, work, medicine, the dog, the language and a hundred small things a person usually does not think about until they decide to move their life across an ocean.
This is not an instruction manual on how to properly move to Argentina.
I do not know that myself yet.
This is a documentary diary of the process.
What I thought.
What I planned.
Where I was wrong.
What turned out easier than I expected.
What turned out harder.
What cost money.
What took months.
What kind of people I met even before arriving.
How my attitude toward Argentina changed as it went from an abstract point on the map to a real place with specific people, neighbourhoods, prices, problems and daily life.
And how gradually the life I am going to leave turns from the present into the past.