Process

When I went to Italy with a Shakespeare class from my university, I intrigued a younger man.

He was, in short, exactly the type of guy your mother would love for you to bring home. He was polite, good-looking, with curly blonde hair and anxious blue eyes that were as lovely as they were calm. I knew from seeing him interact that he was in love with knowledge, that he craved more and appreciated every little bit that graced his perspective. But I also knew that he was young. And though I was only 26, I felt a lot older than he.

We started talking one night when I decided I wanted to hang out with the younger kids on the trip—the ones who had just or not quite turned 21. They were all about staying up late in the apartment and drinking wine. It’s easy to bond with drunk happy people when you’re an open person, willing to share in the fun.

Throughout the night more of the roommates went to bed until a few of us were seated at the living room table. He took a seat adjacent to me and we began talking. Somehow we got onto the topic of mushrooms, which he had just tried for the first time, and we shared stories of our experiences with mind-altering drugs. It didn’t take long for me to realize, again, that outside of our apartment were the streets of Florence, covered in night and dozens of smells and sounds that I had never met before. So I suggested we go for a walk and he agreed a walk was a good idea.

We roamed aimlessly, allowing our conversation to turn as many corners as we did, somehow always circling back to something familiar. I was thrilled to have such an interested listener. He kept posing questions. Some of them stock (if you had three wishes…), some of them more unique. Most of them requiring a thoughtful answer—the kinds I like. I enjoyed his conversation, enjoyed hearing some of the conclusions or discoveries he had come to at that stage in his life. Our conversation roamed with our feet and I was simply pleased to be out on a promenade in the streets of Florence, discussing the things that really mattered in life.

The next night I decided to visit the kids again. They had purchased a few bottles of wine during the day and were all too happy to share. We played games and laughed and enjoyed being in a new place with so many new, fun people. I had a considerable amount of wine, but ran out of Camels. I found myself leading a group of us through the streets of Florence, scouting out a place where we could buy cigarettes, picking up another bottle of wine along the way, asking in very poor Italian where we could find cigarettes. Even in my inebriation, I was embarrassed to be the drunken tourist skipping through the streets with only the need for cigarettes and more cheap Italian wine. Not to mention the fact that I was leading a group of young drunk Americans behind me, encouraging them to let loose, disregard the stereotype we may have been perpetuating.

The wonderful thing about Florence was that it was not asleep yet. During the time when my mind had only begun to feel more alive, there were people out walking. Walking home, walking to a friend’s, or just walking. I was so infatuated with the streets of Florence. Their age, and therefore wisdom, seemed to seep through the soles of my shoes with every step and every glance. Sure, Italians are people like us, and they take their environment for granted like us, but to live in a place that had its golden era and had settled into something more calm. Sure everywhere you walked you could not avoid capitalism. But here had been the birth of the Renaissance. The rebirth of culture out of the Dark Ages. But I digress.

When I finally found a cigarette it was from another American wandering back to his own apartment after a night at the bars. He asked where we were staying, I answered vaguely lest he try to follow some of the naïve blonde girls with me. I thanked him for the cigarette and kept the group moving.

At the door of the apartment, I still had half of a cigarette to finish. Most of the group decided it was too brisk to stand outside, so they went in. He said he would stay with me while I finished the cigarette. We sat on the stoop and continued our conversation from the night before. Opening up a little more, sharing a little more. Becoming a little more comfortable with each other. People were walking by, I paid little attention to them. But I do remember looking up at the awnings and second floor balconies of the buildings lining the street. The street itself, with huge worn stones that more shoes than tires had passed over. The glow from the lights reflecting off the moisture on the street, making discreet halos in the darkness. A darkness that was not malicious or mysterious, but romantic and warm, despite the chill in the air.

He eventually talked to me about his girl trouble. He had a crush on one of the girls in our group. They had fooled around. He wanted to be close to her again. But she, along with a couple other girls, had repeatedly blown him off or excluded him somehow during other parts of our trip. I didn’t dislike the girl he had a crush on—in fact she and I had had a lot of fun drinking together. But, I told him that she was obviously not into him. Or that if she was, she was manipulative and not someone he should waste his time with. I said, “So you should just kiss me instead.” He nodded, I laughed, and we leaned our heads closer until we were kissing, there on the doorstep of an apartment, in Florence, at three in the morning. We hummed Beatles songs and chattered long after my second cigarette had burned out.

He had other friends on the trip, so I did not expect him to spend all of his time with me. I did not hang out with the kids during the day—I preferred to spend time sightseeing with the older students (a nontraditional woman who turned out to be a good friend and who, a year later, moved to Florence permanently and a grad student, like me, who was nearly engaged). But when I did run into him, and if the girls had abandoned him, he would tag along with me and my group.

Once we were on our way to a famous book shop where they made the covers for and bound the books. We watched as the craftsman poured paint into a vat, traced designs in the thick paint and glue, and carefully laid a piece of plain paper over the top to absorb the surface design. I was with the older students and a couple professors. After the demonstration, we split up, but one of the professors walked him and me back to the apartment. He was staying in a room with the only male professor on the trip (the one who walked us back) and a few other boys. I went back to his room with him since no one else had yet returned from their outings. We decided to take a nap, and so I curled up against him in a twin bed, in the heat of the day. I remember hearing the professor return and come up to the loft where the beds were to retrieve or put away something. I knew he was trying not to look at two of his students lying in bed together. I wondered what he thought of me (robbing the cradle?) lying there with this boy I had just met. I remember wondering why I cared.

We walked together again in the narrow and wide passages of Venice. I walked until my feet hurt and then walked some more because there was always some other part of the city that I hadn’t seen, or that I wanted to see more closely. We ended up in a square with a restaurant and some locals. We sat on a bench where three friends, one with a guitar, came to sit and sing songs. They played a couple English songs, a beautiful Spanish lullaby and some other Italian songs that I wished I’d understood better. I sang along with the English songs I knew. He encouraged me to sing louder, but I didn’t want to steal the show (and be that American again). We were hungry so we went into the restaurant, which was busy, but had wonderful (we were in Italy!) food. We talked over dinner about relationships and I reassured him that I was not looking for a one. And that there was no need for him to feel obligated once we got back from our trip. He said that he wasn’t looking for a girlfriend either. He seemed relieved that I brought it up. Seemed to have even more respect.

We sat on a corner, near a tiny dock and stared out over the Grand Canal where the lights of the city glowed in ripples and into the watery air. Mid sentence he leaned over to kiss me. It was one of the nicest moments of my life. What I was saying, I don’t remember, but I knew he did not lean over because he was trying to get into my pants, but because he saw something in me that he adored and wanted to be closer to.

He later confessed that he had fallen in love, essentially, with my mind. But not so much with the rest of me. Of course my ego did not take this well, but, as he had reminded me mid-first-kiss in Florence, I was seven years older. There was too much distance between where we were in our lives for it to feel like anything more than teacher and student. I was foolish to hope that we could spend more time together romantically, but I was willing to try. And eventually he admitted he could only be friends, then I gradually lost touch with him.

I’ve run into him a couple times. Once when my band was performing at an arts festival for the university. Once at a bar in town shortly after he had turned 21. He was sweet, polite, sincere. It was nice to see him. I even felt a little boost knowing how good he looked, how intelligent he was, and how I had managed to intrigue him. To capture his interest within towns whose surrounding had much more time and wisdom to them. I’m glad he ended up walking with me, kissing me, instead of a girl who would not have appreciated the experience to the degree that I did.

One night, as we sat in front of the Duomo in Florence, down the street from our apartment with a very cheap bottle of wine, I said that I was in a state of disbelief. The place felt surreal. Too beautiful to be real. The time with him felt dreamlike—too perfect to last. “I wasn’t expecting this to happen,” I said.

“Neither was I,” he replied. “But I’m glad it did.”

That can be said about my entire life.

Process.

Where to stretch it out. Where to add more detail. What details matter? I would have to go back into my writing from the trip to try and regain a more detailed sense of what I felt. I would have to look at the pictures, the notes, the postcards from the trip to sharpen the memory and include more sights, sounds, smells, tastes.

I cried in front of The Birth of Venus and spent nearly as much time in front of Springtime. I had never thought that I would look directly at a Botticelli. Or Michelangelo. Or any of the other artists I had learned about in Art History. And we were there because of William. Some gifted Brit who created and rewrote plays that took place in the birthplace of the Rennaissance. Who used the setting, already so rich, as the background to for his ideas to form and express. It was all so romantic. So lovely. And I was broke, and felt underdressed and had just broken up with my boyfriend (my decision, at nearly a year I just didn’t feel the same inclination to continue being with him). And my father had died four months before. And I had just started playing in a band. It was really the happy climax to a very tumultuous time in my life. I was also in my last semester of grad school, trying to work on a thesis that had no thesis, just so eager to soak up whatever experience came my way because I was acutely aware of how precious every centimeter of space and time was. And how much of it flooded my awareness. And he was someone who understood that inherently. Who appreciated life and was so optimistic because he had not yet been devastated and repeatedly disappointed. He was privileged, but understood his fortune and planned to go in every direction that his passion led him. I was still cradling that idealism though it was encased by years of negativity and self-limiting thoughts and behaviors.

At the core of me, there is a strength that no one can tamper with. But on the surface is a very vulnerable, very impressionable person. Amid the layers that protect this strength are aspects of a being unique to the times and places it has moved through. I am privileged. I recognize my good fortune. I know pain and it has not driven me to the point of hopelessness though it has tempted my patience for this body. It was so nice to feel recognized, to feel adored and appreciated. To feel interesting but not interrupted. To have space and to receive closeness. If I could find a person like that in every place I visited, who lasted as long as the trip, I would feel content. Because the person, like the place, is not home, but offers some level of familiarity that makes it easy to feel welcome, cozy.