Our Journey to America- Part Two: Shattered dreams

Be sure to check out Part One!

After one year of blogging about our wish to cross the ocean and move to America, two people offered to help us.Through Twitter, we connected with Kat, a 40-year-old, who worked in the movie industry, while Facebook helped us met Eugene, a rich Romanian politician established in “The Windy City”, owner of a transportation company. They were both just what we’ve been looking for: wealthy American citizen, able to fly us there.

It's really amazing to see what courage and perseverance can do

Due to the time zone difference, I emailed them at night and get an answer at dawn. Reading their emails felt like Christmas morning; I would wake up, immediately open my laptop and checked my Inbox, anxiously scrolling down. When there weren’t any messages, I freaked out: “Did I say something wrong? What if they got tired of us?”

Soon enough, I began day dreaming about our future life. I would be Eugene’s housekeeper and my husband, his gardener — he actually can’t name more than three species of flowers, roses being one of them.  A variation of this plan was also made for Kat.  

We were kids...

Studying to become a journalist meant I was in charge of writing those emails. But unlike me, a natural oversharer who could easily spit out my entire life over e-mail, they preferred to remain extremely mysterious.It was frustrating.

Convincing them to share basic information about jobs or age was like pulling teeth, though I did manage to found out that Kat was Mexican and single and Eugene dreamed of running a political organization. None of them wrote back more than five lines at a time; I responded with pages. When their emails became few and far in between, I saw my fantasies slipping through my fingers. “I’m going to get you here”, they would say, then didn’t replied back for days. 

In the winter of 2011, our “pen-friendship” ended abruptly. Around the same time, election results came out: Eugene party had sunk. Kat, on the other hand, explained she had a dying father to take care of and recently lost her job. The news hit me like a lightening. I stalked them for several weeks, sending long, hateful emails in which I obsessively asked them to keep their initial promise, to bring us in America. None of them fought back.

I would often fall asleep with a keyboard soaked in tears in my lap and Chicago’s Downtown picture in the Menu Bar. “Are we still doing this or not?” I asked C., on a particularly sunny morning. It was April and we were ready to dust off our pride.