Toluca

I honestly have no recollection of any part of the address for the house, and it shocks me that I sit here trying to remember but I can't. This house taught me a lot, that last sentence may look weird, but I relate this house to maturity, to growing up, more importantly to waking up to reality. I found myself moving back to Mexico at a critical age. The age where you are trying to define yourself, and do not really understand who you are and what you stand for. I found my world changing from the way I carried myself to the life style that I was used to, to the language, to the friends, to the food, everything changed. I think this house made me go from stuck up and taking things for granted to being humble or learning what the word humble means. Even though I have no memory of the address of this house, I genuinly love this house. At the beginning I hated it it, it was cold, it had an ugly hideous color on the outside and a stupid ugly column made out of rock. The windows looked as if they were going to fall out and they were everywhere, this house honeslty had unnecessary windows. There was also a ridiculous plant garden in the middle of the house, with a sun roof over it. The sun roof however was lifted a bit so that when it rained, water would sip through the opening and invade our living room, I guess the architect thought that rain would be good for the plants, and the couch and the floor. Rain season was honestly not fun, we would have to put buckets out by this, I don't even know what to call it structure and rags and mops. Whenever we were somewhere else, and we saw that it started to rain, we would rush home, so we could prevent our living room from flooding. It wasn't just a simple flower bed though, it was a major structure, that was part of the house, it was so big that we had two trees inside the house. It was just incredibly weird and for the longest time I honestly disliked it. And then it started to grow on me. I spent some of the most memorable moments in this house and slowly, I started to care for the plants in the garden. I can feel the smell of lavender and lilac everytime I walked by and how much I enjoyed it. It felt like a very clean house, it always felt fresh, there was always sunlight coming in and although there was no heat in it, it felt warm, it felt cozy. It embraced and welcomed me and I think in a way, it was ok with me having a love/hate relationship with it. I'm sitting here, laughing at how ridiculous this house was, but if I could go back, I would.
I learned to view my mom as a woman, as an intelligent woman who can take on anything she wishes and be good at it. I think I always knew this about her, but she was so limited in the States, and hre she freed herself, she became herself again. And I love this house for that, I picture my mom just taking control over everything that happened in this house fully, nothing ever escaped her and she loved this house. You know its weird, because houses in Mexico are made of concrete, but as a structure/building, it felt the most unstable, it felt kind of fake and like it would fall apart immediatly. From the carpet, to the window, to the, just everything, it felt fragile.
I gained the most amazing friends during these years, I got in touch with a part of me that I adore, my heritage became incredibly important, I understood what pride for a country or for your own background really is and I loved it. I felt genuinly happy, liked I belonged there, even though I knew that it wasn't the best of life styles. It was rustic, it was earthy, it was real.
ridiculously funny and heart felt.