Birds

I knew that birds flew south for the winter but I’d never thought that eventually they must fly back, and yet here they were. Hundreds and hundreds of bird silloutes appeared in front of the sunset. They rose from surrounding buildings like dust does when you blow on a shelf that has been left untouched for awhile. Joining together they flew in lines, one long ribbon into the northern sky. Another season was ending and it would be the last of this phase of my life. Southern California only has two seasons: summer and a pathetic excuse for winter. When the next season ends graduation will have passed and I will be an adult. I am terrified of the next season.

But I am comforted in the knowledge that some things will not change. Birds will stay in one place only as long as they are meant to. I watch until every last bird has disappeared to the north and the sky is blushed pink from the setting sun, and suddenly very clear.

*photo by me

Feel it all

"And your own life while it's happening to you never has any atmosphere until it's a memory."
-Andy Warhol

Say what you will about Andy Warhol, the man had his moments. We never think about the atmosphere of an experience until we find ourselves momentarily transported back to it. It's that way that a smell or a song can return you to a time in your life in a way that transcends the singular stimulation of one of your senses. Why does hearing Time to Pretend always make me feel a little bit less than sober? Andy nailed it. Atmosphere.
I have often tried to take note of these details, attempted to bottle that feeling up so I could recreate the moment again and again. These efforts have failed.
As I finalize my work schedule, buy books for my last semester of college, and happily return to beer of a normal alcohol percentage my head is still back in Park City. I could not capture the feeling of Sundance: of coming out of a midnight movie to a soft sparkly snow, of delirious sleep-deprived laughter and the electricity of thousands of people feeding on the creativity and passion of each other. I could not hold on to it and so instead I wait for it to find me. I wait for all the detail of a memory.


*Photo by me, through the hotel window in Park City

New Beginnings

"You get a strange feeling when you're about to leave a place, I told him, like you'll not only miss the people you love but you'll miss the person you are now at this time and this place, because you'll never be this way ever again"
-Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azir Nafisi

It's been a year since I have posted. At the risk of sounding like melodramatic, I thought I'd left the author of this blog behind in Italy. Another layer of life has settled over my soul and I will never again be that girl.
Studying abroad was the manifestation of every fantasy I'd ever had. The romance of it made me brave. The excitment of it inspired me. For the first time in my life, I believed that what I had to say might be interesting. Despite my four suitcases, I'd left all my baggage back in America. So I wrote. I read. I had lunch by myself and didn't feel like a loser. I did optional work for my classes because I wanted to. I didn't feel guilty for eating whatever I wanted. I achieved a kind of satisfaction with my life that was unprecedented for me.
When I came back from Europe, I thought I'd lost that. I stopped writing. I didn't think anything more wonderful or exciting then a semester abroad could happen to me. But then it did.
I fell in love.
I used to write things and fear that people would notice I didn’t know what I was talking about. And then one day I realized, I did

I think it's time to start writing again.

Arrivederci

As I trek home down narrow cobblestone roads I’ve trespassed a hundred times before, I fall into company with the realization (perhaps a bit prematurely) that this may be the last time these streets will see my shadow. Appropriately, this stroll on this street glorifies each step before it. It is the ultimate farewell, I couldn’t have directed a more beautiful scene. My boots crunch as I leave footprints on the snow-blanketed cobblestones, a conspicuous but fleeting documentation of my existence. That delicious and satisfactory crunch is among my favorite sounds in the world and better than any song I would have sound tracked. Flakes fall softly, gently speckling my steel gray pea coat in silence and collecting in the tangled mess of dark strands poking out from beneath my black knit beanie. My street is still. No cars go by and creaky old wooden shutters are closed against the frigid day. My eyes water, stinging from the cold and I shuffle a tad faster toward home accidentally squeezing the plastic cup in my hand too tight as I exhale a cloud of condensation. Hot wine sloshes over and dyes crimson a patch of snowflakes congregating on the front of my jacket. Wine flavored snow cone. Only in Italy.

My hushed walk home is a welcome escape from the asphyxiating sounds of the day. All day I’ve been imagining I heard my name. Hisses and whispers barely audible but vaguely familiar in sound. Shouted Italian words with homogenous syllabus. I turn around and no one’s there. It’s like Firenze it’s self is calling out to me, whether in tender farewell or a desperate plea not to leave I do not know. On either front snow was definitely the way to go to convey this. To see the city I love, the place I’ve grown to call home transformed into a winter wonderland makes the eminent goodbyes more bitter than sweet. An afternoon spent with some unlikely but not unwelcome company exposed the city in a magical new way: clean and sparkly under fresh white powder. The Duomo turned white, People laughed and threw snowballs, and every Christmas song cliché played out beautifully across the Italian landscape, no translation needed. The city turned out in it’s best and a beautiful new coat to say it’s farewells. The perfect goodbye made me oh so sad to go and as I left puddles and soggy layers around the radiator I curled up on my old woe begotten green couch and watched the snow fall in my backyard. I found my eyes watering again but this time from something very different then the cold.

Travel

She said to me

“Haven’t you ever loved something you were afraid of?”

You have no idea.

Sweaty palms, racing heart, trouble breathing

Why is it that to the body fear and love feel the same?

Cashmere sweaters folded in a bag weighing under 10 kilograms

Playing solitaire with my thoughts as I yawn to unpop my ears

She said to me

“Sometimes I feel like everything I say is being translated by someone far away in another country who has had to much to drink.”

You have no idea.

Parlez-vous anglais? Non capisco l’italiano. Voe ist the train station?

Relationships aren’t the only time things get lost in translation.

Kind confused eyes search crinkled maps for familiar names I have butchered.

I fold up and tuck sarcastic comments in my pocket for later, for people who will understand them

She said to me

“Did you ever find that you’d outgrown who you were? Cast it off like a snake sheds it’s skin and left a ghost of who it was?”

You have no idea.

A reflection I don’t recognize, words I can no longer define, déjà vu feeling with the scars to prove it’s real.

I squint, peering back into memories to make out the shape of the teenage girl in a uniform plaid skirt.

Words have all the translucence of a reflection. How do you describe something that is in one word everything?

Had to write this for travel writing and thought I'd share for a change of pace.

Thanksgiving/Amsterdam and Paris blogs are coming soon. Things are crazy with lots of wonderful visitors and only 11 days left in Florence.

....

At some point on every weekend trip I find myself watching the Tuscan countryside fly by with my nose squished against the smudged glass window of a Eurostar bus. It’s one of those in between details, the unaccounted for and subsequently forgotten moments of transition that come between airports and train stations, hostels and home. Despite the hassle of the extra 7,50 and added hour of travel I love these bus rides. Caught in the handover between my home in Florence and adventures in a new place I am often inspired, prompted to consider my current life with the clarity of an outside perspective. It is during these jaunts that I make the majority of my notes for later writing, hunched over my journal squinting in the dark as my pen scribbles in even worse handwriting than usual, thrown off course by speed bumps and sudden turns. I’m in awe of everything I am experiencing and newly resolute to harden every detail into a flawless unbreakable memory of the moment. I take in every curve of blue silhouetted mountains in the distance, plowed fields of symmetrical rows of skinny leaved trees, and clotheslines burdened with sheets speckling the hills as they puff up and try to elope with the breeze.

One day I saw an entire patch of dead sunflowers. Hundreds and hundreds of them still standing but withered and brown, their heads all dropped in surrender the same direction as if they had met their end as the result of some mass suicide or a Medusa like sighting that instead of stone transformed them all to decay at the exact same moment. The image of this field has haunted me and even without effort I can still conjure it up as if I were back against that bus window what must have been two months ago now. For a long time I could not figure out what it was that made me so sad about this sight. Sunflowers are not among my preferred flowers and the enjoyment I get from them is mostly in that they remind me of one of my best friends who considers them among her own reasons d’être. No, it was not the sunflowers themselves at all that saddened me but instead the skeleton of a beautiful thing lost.

As the epitome of a hopeless romantic, I love flowers. Neatly pruned blooms along sidewalks, mismatched grocery store bouquets on sale for $9.99, untamed and unnamed wildflowers in a field, a single tiny blossom poking through a crack in a slab of concrete, I’ll take them all. Peonies, orchids and poppies are best but even carnations will do. When I have been lucky enough to receive flowers I have done everything I can to make them last. Sniping stems, adding plant food and goggling the species for tips and optimal lighting suggestions. Of course within a couple weeks they all die and I find myself a bit more upset about this than is probably healthy or normal. I also (in true failure-to-let-go fashion) refuse to throw them away. I leave them there until all of the petals have fallen off, the stems have dried out and hardened and the water in the vase has begun to grow some type of white mold. I refuse to admit that my flowers are gone, still hesitant to admit that I have lost such a beautiful thing.

This peculiarity of mine is also why I find myself sliding into depression whenever I leave San Diego. I am sorry to withdraw from a magnificent life of laughter, sunshine, kindred spirits, and ocean spray, sad to have such a beautiful thing taken back from me much as mother nature takes back her flowers. The first weeks back in Arizona, I find myself in mourning, afraid I have lost something and can’t get it back. This anxiety over having something beautiful and then losing it has nurtured my desperate wish for a better memory. Lamenting my departure from San Diego, I recall sand in the bottom of the shower, watching life unfold in the reflection of the mirrored wall in Emma and Brittany’s kitchen and the exact ratio of powdered sugar to butter in Laguna 201 homemade frosting. A vivid and carefully cultivated memory is something that can never be lost or taken from me and I take comfort in the clarity of these details.

This is why I try to take pictures as often as possible, and more importantly why I write. Because despite my most ardent and unyielding attempts to notice every detail and lock it away for later, so often my memory fails and I can no longer remember if the vase of flowers was blue or green and whether we were in Lauren or Erin’s car when we brought home our Christmas tree. So I write. I write about the way that traveling has, for the first time in my life, given me a kind of solidarity with my own thoughts that makes being alone sometimes not feel lonely anymore. I write about bath room talks with roommates where alcohol loosened our tongues and brought the swelling on our egos down. I write about people I meet on planes and how the clocks on the buses are always inexplicably set to the wrong time. I write and I take pictures in the hopes that when this incredible adventure is over I will not feel that I have lost something that I had and loved but instead gained a collection of glorious experiences, carefully documented to later supplement omissions in rose colored cob-webby memories.

* Image from We heart it tumbler

Roaming Rome

A hand to her forehead as she speaks Maria tousles her hair and returns to kneading the air like dough, speaking with every muscle from the waist up as only Italians can. Her frizzy ash blonde bangs float back to her brow in a rumpled mess, seemingly aware that they will soon be disturbed again and so there is no need to look presentable. The rest of her hair is twisted haphazardly into a tangled knot of scraggly ends and forgotten bobby pins, which could have been secured this morning or the day before it’s impossible to tell. As usual Maria has on an array of neutral colored, loose, draping clothing arbitrarily layered together in a way that makes it difficult to identify on any given day what she is actually wearing. Today however, she is also wearing very baggy blue jeans whose frayed bottoms drag on the ground over clogs with a heel bringing her to around 5” 4’. She rummages through a large olive green canvas bag, clinking a chunky silver ring on her index finger against keys or coins as she forages for a cigarette, her fourth of the morning. Like the excessive fabric used for her clothes everything she does is intemperate. Her movements are leisurely and overindulgent, limbs never choosing the quickest route between two points, cigarettes drawing rings through the air on the way to her lips. All loose strands of hair, no make up, grandiose gestures and loud thickly accented English devoid of prepositions, Maria is equal parts animated and disheveled. The perfect picture of the single bohemian Italian woman, who is a little crazy and maybe a little bit drunk most of the time. She is a fascinating and fantastic mess. She is also, my theology professor.

As part of the Women and Religion class Maria seems to frequently confuse with an art history course, our saucy (and possibly sauced) professor herded us onto a seven am train Friday morning and guided us through a nine-hour tour of Rome. The Coliseum, Pantheon, Forums, Capitol Hill, Castel Sant’Angelo and six or seven churches all of which blur together in a muddle of frescos, filigree and fervently whispered prayers. They were however all very beautiful and afforded me the opportunity to see some relics for the first time1. It rained sporadically throughout the day, which allowed us to see first hand the pitfalls to having a hole in your roof (the Pantheon) and to take cute umbrella pictures during a deluge in front of the Coliseum. I won’t bore you with the history of these places but I will say there is something remarkable about standing on the stones where gladiators fought and individuals built a civilization that would influence the world for thousands of years to come. The Coliseum in particular was a marvelous thing to see. Rome, although very beautiful particularly with all of the fall leaves and history, is incredibly different from Florence. It is really amazing that the two are not only in the same country but a mere hour and a half train ride apart. I was secretly pleased to find that I much prefer the quaint beauty and accessibility of Florence to the dirty busy streets of Rome. After nearly three months, Florence feels like home in a way I believe Rome never could have.

At the end of a long day trekking all around Rome with Maria, my friend Sarah and I wandered off to find our host for the evening. Feeling very much like we weren’t in Kansas anymore and pooling together our limited Italian vocabulary we got tremendously lost and finally made it to Michael’s apartment in great need of a nap. One hour of sleep, two kebabs, and three bottles of wine later Sarah and I found ourselves in a situation that never happens in Florence and rarely at USD: we were outnumbered by American boys 3 to 1. Thus began a typical evening of bathroom talks, overpriced drinks, unoriginal Italian pick up lines and Sarah playing chess with a Columbian in a bar called the Drunken Ship. Huh? When in Rome? The night ended with Sarah and I pathetically huddled atop a make shift bed on the floor in our coats fighting over who would be big spoon and freezing after Sarah lost our blanket to a blacked out boy from Boston. It was too hilarious to even be upset about.

On Saturday we woke up bleary-eyed and grateful that we had opted for the later tour and set off in the pouring rain to grab a cappuccino and a cannoli, make a wish in the Trevi fountain, and complete the full 50-euro tour of the Vatican museums. Even running on five hours of sleep in two days, the three-hour tour flew by. The Vatican is the second largest collection of art in the world (the Louve is the first) and I was perpetually in awe of all the famous and incredible things I was seeing. The Sistine Chapel was absolutely phenomenal. Even with all of the build up and all of the expectation it did not disappoint. Especially when you learn all of the historical meaning and the anecdotes of its creation. Sarah and I also got to see the apartments of the scandalous Pope Alexander the VI, whose wild orgies and concealed murders had been the subject of a presentation assigned to us by Maria the week before. So all in all we were pretty excited.

Lastly, and rather embarrassingly, I had hoped to see the Fountana de Amora from the movie When in Rome. After several fruitless attempts to find it I finally asked our Vatican guide for it’s location and our conversation went like this.
“Excuse me can you tell me where the Fountana de Amora is?”
Blank stare. “Isn’t that in a movie?”
“Yes!” I exclaimed excitedly “When in Rome! Have you seen it?”
“No but I heard about it. They made that up. The Fountana de Amora doesn’t exist.”
I was too disappointed to feel stupid.

One hour and about three false alarm panic attacks later2 we are homeward bound. I stare out the window of the only seating car on an overnight train curiously ending in Germany, and I decide our little Roman Holiday was a success. Much like the intrepid Maria who started us on our adventure, we had navigated Rome with a careless and unmethodical attitude and a sense of humor. Minor set backs only added to the experience and all the must sees of Rome were accounted for. Leaving the city behind for God knows how long I decide that Rome is nothing like the movies and most people have no idea what the expression “When in Rome” really means. Except maybe Professor Maria.






1. I stood next to aged Italian women silently weeping and wondered who on earth decided this, really not very old looking, piece of wood had come from the manger Jesus laid in or why an iron chain was in a glass case with people kneeling in front of it.

2. Since Sarah and I bought a two-person ticket, it did not include the train number or time and it took several inquires to acquire this information. Then when the conductor asked for our ticket it seemed we had lost it and right as he was about to throw us off the train I found it soggy and folded in the forgotten outside pocket of my bag.