Roma….
It is so lovely to meet you! I walk along your verdant paths punctuated with Cypress pines and salmon colored buildings that are centuries old and wonder quietly to myself….
What the fuck am I doing here????
The beauty of Rome is staggering, unnerving really. It forces me to contemplate the divine for every step I take. The errands I embark on ( buying wine ), the groceries I pick up and the museums I scramble towards, amplify this dance between unimaginable beauty and the pain and bumbling of everyday life.
And for all the people that spill by me each day, there is a marked aloneness that I cannot escape. It is not because I am a foreigner or that I don’t speak the language or that I am not surrounded by family and friends. It is more complex than that. I am confronted daily with what happens when unabashed creativity and fortitude collide, human beings create grace.
Speaking of the aforementioned grace, I need a whole heap of that right now. I kind of feel like a dead woman walking, albeit a fabulously well fed one. She ( me ) is Molto Bene at navigating the Borghese Gardens and the coffee rush at Bar Peru, but not much else. This self excavation stuff is getting really hard and no matter how far you stroll or how many cashmere scarves you haggle over, the rubble stays, because it really has no place to go until you become very, very good friends with all the broken bits.
This not so subtle and frequent reminder of my unidentified longing, tugs at what can only be referred to as my soul. The 17th century building that hits me in the chest, tears that flow more now standing in this cramped alleyway, then at moments of my greatest losses. How witnessing a perfect angel in hues of aquamarine and ombre stretching across a basilica ceiling at 2 o’clock on a Wednesday afternoon is the air I now choose to breathe.
Along with the breathing piece of the puzzle I also choose to part with a shitload of Euros, lighting a copious amount of candles in deference to my ongoing nervous breakdown. I figure the powers that be will note my financial generosity and pool their resources to help a girl out. In retrospect I might have overshot that one a little bit.
Waking up in California, January 9th 2023 to be exact, I had not anticipated the need for a whole new existence. Yet, here I am on January 19th ensconced in a nine hundred year old building watching the rain come down, flooding my sweet little Dolce Vita courtyard.
I sip my perfectly made Italian coffee still surprised that my life had the nerve to fall apart on Thanksgiving November 24th 2022, a national holiday no less!! Not even my chestnut and sage stuffing could save me from what was waiting around the corner. Hence getting the hell out of Dodge.
So here I rest, on my own, speaking not one word of Italian in the most romantic place on earth, looking for as Byron said ‘more orphans of the heart.” I am staying next to the Palazzo Sacchetti on Via Giulia where they are shooting another movie about Mussolini; I heard it’s a comedy.
Outside the Palace Italian crew members stand around, smoking cigarettes and main lining espressos, completely ignoring me every time me I walk by. No words, no nothing, not even a friendly Ciao Bella! This happens like clock work day in, day out for two straight months until I purposely make out with a super hot stranger right in front of them! You know sort of like a “fuck you” to the twenty seven men who shun me on a daily basis. Grazie Mille fellas!
Yet I digress. That is further along in the story than I want to be.
What I didn’t know then is that all my endings would be beginnings and that my secrets wouldn’t kill me. Not yet.
Turning 60 made all this happen.
Allora.
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Grazie Mille!
MJx