Travel Thought Tesserae

Tile One

I keep having to remind myself (or on blessed occasions serendipity reminds me, sparing me the chore): I am in Italy. Down into the dungeon anxiety, a nebulous sense of duty, fears about money and diet and the mechanics of life drag me. When I am swallowed by earth and stone and complaining flesh, out of the light, I know nothing, I sense nothing, I am reduced to calculations. How much? How soon? How, period?

Beneath the earth, I am nowhere. There is only one place and it is terrible - fluster-feathered, oily, damp-fattened ledgers, gangrenous page upon page of tallies, delinquencies, bills and remittances.

I loathe these books' red, subterranean spines and the creeping tendrils they send coiling up into the light to grip and crease and twist everything I am above. May I sever the vines of necessity? Math and chemistry, physics and biology, allergies and language barriers and finances - disciplines which may delight and divert but which also fascinate, transfix, entrap. How can I turn these instruments to my own devices, instead of always being their device?

Tile One [not a typo]

Two people in two different cities have exhorted me, for different reasons, “Don’t worry.”

Yesterday, 6/10, I was freaking out about something - maybe it was brief trouble I had with an ATM - and just a few minutes later I passed by a man talking on the phone who said, loudly and in plain English, just as I passed by, “Just take it one day at a time.”

Today, while getting ready for the day, I started stressing mightily again, to the point of feeling ill: do I go to Naples after Rome, or Sicily? For how long? Do I skip Sicily completely? Do I jump to Athens, then come back? Do I skip Greece altogether? If I go to Greece, how long do I stay? Feverish, stomach aching, I shut down my computer, grabbed my day bag and went outside, resolving to deal with it all later. After less than five minutes of walking I passed an electrical box onto which someone had plastered a big sticker, again in English: “Everything is going to be okay.”

Thank you, universe, for getting my emotional back.

Tile Two (while on a train)

The train presses like a finger upon a page of hills and valleys, waking in its course tiny flowers shaped like boxes with other, tinier flowers sprouting from them in the form of windows and even more, colorful, peach and teal and white and purple flowers resembling people poking out of those windows. The train drags itself along a line of living text, along the crease between words, it races from one phrase to the next, the mighty comma of humanity, a pause between mountains and sea, a mere breath, a marvelous sigh of life lying sinuous in the palm of the land.

Tile Three. (sitting by the Lago in Mergozzo)

The world has been here all along - I just didn’t know it.

Tile Five (also in Mergozzo)

I feel I don’t fit in. Maybe that is exactly how I fit in. I want to be a citizen of the world.

Tile Eight (in the Pinacoteca de Brera)

I want to be in love. I want to make love for people to encounter in the world.

Tile Thirteen (on the Cinque Terre, between Monterosso del Mare and Vernazza)

Trees tumble tight like cursive down a page of cliff, in a race to tilt into the sea. Ocher-faced the lower they stumble, hoping to pale their cheeks in the slow, trembling chill of cobalt waters.

Tile Twenty-One (in Portovenere)

The past is dumb. We soak its dry tongue in stories, drown its mouth with words. We do not learn from the past by speaking for it, so how shall we learn?

Tile Thirty-Four (again in Portovenere)

To see and not know is a profound gift. I have enjoyed several guided tours during my travels, and the depth they have provided, but to visit a place and listen to its resolute silence, the mystery of undisclosed tales, taps a deeper, wordless channel in my soul.

Tile Fifty-Five (Corniglia train station, while climbing about two hundred stairs to town to start a hike)

I always think that I’m not good enough for anyone, but maybe I’m not good enough for myself. When I see disappointment in others’ eyes, maybe it is my own discontentment I observe.

Tile Eighty-Nine (back in time to Portovenere)

Today while tromping about the centuries-old stairways and fortifications of this town, I was visited - as often happens to me - by a sudden explosion of technicolor memory, saturated with shame and self-recrimination. Almost as quickly, I remembered that I am In Italy, walking streets first laid a thousand years ago.

My worse self, my shame-self, flapped its gums all the way across the Atlantic and gnawed its way up a Mediterranean cliff face, dodging seagulls and vivid, salty breakers, just to slobber in my ear about something that happened twenty years ago.

Something happened then that has never happened to me before: I laughed out loud. I laughed in the face of the thing always trying to pull me below. To my past, I said out loud, “you have no power over me.”

Tile One-Hundred and Forty-Four

I am kicking forty’s ass.