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It’s 4:00 pm, my roommate sleeps, and the room is dark. Cleaners’ve just finished their job in the bathroom. It is calm, and here, the smell is less horrific than in the ridiculous, stifling study-room, so I’ll write these words in here.

People often ask why I made the choice to live in a hostel, as if it was a choice. At the beginning, everyone had the same god damn words in their mouth. They’re gonna stay two weeks, find a job, find a flat, and then leave. But from fleshy lips the naïve sentence is barely pronounced in English. Working as a waiter while having a Spanish, Italian, or French master’s degree might be frustrating but who would give any job to someone that doesn’t understand a single word of the spoken language?

This place has become, for the moment, very secure. Most people are from the middle class, nothing really to worry about, they are here to work, study, have fun or because they are completely lost. But at least a lot of them speak French.

In Notting Hill, the brownish facade of my building makes it look like a black spot on white skin. The former hospital can greet about 300 people of my kind. Part of us are in an open debate about the allocation of financial benefits in London, some are students or want to learn English. Others are here on holiday or trying to find themselves.

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I’ve been living here for two years. It feels like I’ve been in a coma for so long. It doesn’t mean I have no life, laughs, and pain, no joy, dreams or tears, but step by step my hand-writing does not meet the white walls to write a story. They could tell the experience of the ones who slept under their protection. They have seen so many waves of the same sort of people: of guys shining or breaking down, speaking a million languages except for the “Brit” one. I’m lucky to have the biggest little box in which I’m living; we don’t own our space though. The hostel seems to have swallowed me. He is chewing us ‘till he can spit out our guts when we don’t pay the rent. For sure, the journey will not leave us unchanged.
I used to think that throughout the white corridors special souls were walking. Each of them, for a moment taken down to the monster, paused in a bubble to restart, to go further, or to go back home.
One by one, room by room, we make our path down through life in one way or in another. In the eyes of the new ones, I can see my younger self and today, hope to look like those who left, but we ought to make our proper choices.

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“So yes I know you are French, it’s written on your forehead, but can you say ‘Hi’ instead of ‘Salut’? And no you shouldn’t assume that I want to be a friend of yours, and get drunk in Piccadilly. And no, I don’t suffer from a kind of illness that makes me a weirdo, I’m just trying to make it in London.”

I have no time, rather I don’t take the time, to move out from this place, even in this claustrophobic sense of overwhelming solitude, I keep meeting new people. Without emotions they pop in and pop out in my life, like we are part of a TV show. The French somehow continuously make a mark here, always close to my sensitive ears, growing a stream, so far overflowing. Sometimes, rarely, but surely today I wish to flag the distance that separates me from my further aim, whatever it is. Today I met the ease of a sweet blonde French answer that will leave in few weeks and will make me closer to indifference.

Charles, my first friend in London, told me that after he left the beast, he had the feeling to live again. He shared a scandalously messy room with another of our mates who moved out. Once he told me that the third bed was cursed. It drew in people, they either turned into a drug addict, had financial problems, had issues adapting to London or from the very beginning were simply creepy.

  • They had Omar. He found a first job but got sacked. Found a second one-it was too much and gave up. After that, he spent 3 months in his bed watching TV while eating junk food. He didn’t speak a bloody word of English but fucked a girl near dustbins in front of the church. Charming.



  • Then there was the ghostly white vegan Eastern European guy. Charles thought he was a serial killer. He never figured out whether or not this fragile and depressive young man was looking at him or the wall.



  • A Frenchman was friends with the housekeeper. The latter was a sort of fourth roommate, sleeping in the room instead of working. Keeping, cleaning products, mop and bucket of dirty water in the room. The art of laziness.



  • The "CIA" dude from Alaska. Ex-soldier who fought in Iraq. He had a chat with my two friends, left his luggage on the bed spent the night in a hotel, had another chat, a second night out, took his belongings and left.



  • The last roommate was a drug addict who smoked his brain away, lost every possible thing he had, including his keys five times in two months.
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I myself had a bunch of crazy-fucks as roommates. Some people may also think I’m strange but it does not matter whatsoever. As long as you have the feeling to learn, as long as I make sure my mind is open and my journey is useful, then my personality becomes stronger. I’m about to depart to a new stage of this trip which is life. I’m not really quite sure of who I was before or who I am right now, but I feel more confident in my choices and very much turned towards the future. In the end it’s really not that bad, it’s just a matter of what you make out of it.