I've been re-reading Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert. It admittedly doesn't have the same oomph it had when I read it the first time, back in 2008 when I was still searching and at a loss without even being conscious of it, when I had not yet confronted my life head-on and begun to force it into something even resembling a shape that I could step into and still be able to breathe.
But there was one moment that stands out to me. I had just started reading the book, on the advice of my Aunt Diane and my Mom. From where I sat, drudging through my emotionally abusive relationship of a career and slogging through self-imposed credit card debt, high-tailing it off to Rome for four months seemed like an unimaginable dream. I devoured it like heroin. I chomped through Gilbert's Italy section, slurping up and then underlining every idiom, every description of pizza and piazzas. (It made her transition to India a tremendous letdown.)
I remember staying up late one night and reading "What do you want to do, Liz?" And I read about her impressions of the Italians' willful acceptance of hard work in pursuit of the ultimate reward -- the beauty of doing nothing. It so happened I had also recently read an article about a sommelier who decreed most solemnly that champagne was the only beverage that should ever be served with smoked salmon. And I decided that what I wanted to do (I was staying at my parents' for the weekend) was to get up early the next morning, go to Whole Foods for the appropriate ingredients, and then enjoy a breakfast of champagne and smoked salmon on the back porch.
So I did.
It was just one morning, nothing special. I bought my champagne, my bagels, my smoked salmon, my cream cheese. I came home and boiled eggs and sliced red onion. And I read my new book, which at the time was beginning -- just beginning -- to unlock ideas inside my brain that I had never considered.
Looking back now, four years later, I see that morning as the moment when my life began to change. When I began to... wake up.
Not long after that, I bought a ticket to Rome. I say that like so many travel writers do, like it was easy somehow, but in fact I bought my ticket almost eight months ahead, in order to give me enough time to implement the new superstrict Excel budget spreadsheet I'd just made, and so get rid of my debt and also save up enough that I could enjoy my week in the Eternal City. One week. That was all I could afford, but I was going to make it count.
I planned for this trip like no one has ever planned before. And I dove into Rome like it was... a city-sized lifeboat. A lifeboat full of wine and lovely laughing Romans and 2,000 year-old priceless ruins in the middle of traffic.
I don't usually make New Year's Resolutions, but in the New Year of '08-'09 I made the resolution that I would get at least one new passport stamp every year. I made this promise to myself after the Rome ticket was booked but long before I would actually get to go, back when my last venture abroad had been almost eight years previous.
The next year I fulfilled my promise to myself and went to Eleuthera, in the Bahamas. It was beautiful, and supremely relaxing, and I sat outside under my private little tiki hut and wrote like I haven't written since high school. When I got back, I shared pictures with my co-workers. I remember one colleague asking me:
"So, you just save up all year and then go someplace cool?
She meant it as a compliment. I could hear the wistful envy in her voice -- after all, I had just been to the Bahamas. But her words struck me like a jellyfish sting and I couldn't stop playing them over and over in my brain. Over time, they morphed into this:
"So, you work all year at a job you hate in order to have one week being happy?"
It was also around this time that I posted on my LJ a list of things I liked about my job (I was trying to convince myself), and listed as Number One the extra week of vacation I had just been granted due to seniority. A very good friend replied something to this effect:
"The thing you like most about your job is how much time you don't have to spend there. There is something wrong with this picture."
A few months later something bad happened to me. This thing was entirely my own fault, but it was Not Good and I responded to it by purchasing three paperbacks on amazon.com -- all of which were supposed to hold the elusive key and guide me through the necessary steps to living a life abroad. Suffice to say I was disappointed at the content.
Six months passed. I was still not living abroad. I was still wretchedly unhappy. After one particularly awful phone conversation/abusive screaming session from my boss -- the one and only Ursula -- I began a Hail Mary internet search for ESL positions abroad, that would take me with no experience and no TEFL certificate. You (more or less) know the rest.
I will always be supremely grateful to Georgia -- for the time it granted me, for the graciousness of its people, for allowing me a place to escape to when I needed that escape like oxygen. And yes, there is a part of me that feels guilty about not going back to Georgia like I had planned and promised.
But you see... I now have a chance to see ROME again. And that, my friends, is something that I am simply not going to pass up.
There is a very good reason why I am flying into Paris rather than Rome, why Italy is the last country on my itinerary, and why Rome itself will probably be the very last city I visit, flying out of Leonardo da Vinci (what a name for an airport!) back to my real life and what will hopefully be my next step. The reason is that I know that if I land in Rome I will very probably not want to ever leave it again, and instead of three months seeing as much of Europe as possible I will simply spend three months wandering through every Roman back alley, eating gelato and ordering la vino rosso della cassa y acqua frizzante, and being utterly, sublimely happy at my situation.
So instead I am saving the best for last.
I feel slightly foolish about the fact that the thing I am looking most forward to on my trip is visiting a city I have already been to. But there it is. I have made several lists -- things I will do my first night in Rome, and then, things I missed the first time that I will not miss during my second chance.
My first night in Rome, I will walk to the Pantheon. I found the Pantheon by accident my first night that first time, and stood in flummoxed astonishment at my good fortune. I will have a glass (or three) of wine at one of the outside tables at one of the many trattorias that line the Pantheon's piazza. And then I will walk to the Trevi, seeing if I at all remember the way, if the streets feel even slightly familiar under my adoring rockstar-groupie-esque feet. Gelato at the Trevi, of course. In a cone.
And then, I will find the sodium-light bar that was around the corner from my old hotel, just up the street from the Colosseum. Cocktails are not served at this bar. Beer from the tap and house wine. If they like you, they will pull bottles of liquor from under the counter and invite you to do a shot with them. On the house, of course. Last time, on request I taught my bartenders how to correctly say in English: "through the arch and to your right", these being the directions to the bar's toilet. As a reward I was given a cookie. The shots were later.
They won't remember me. But I will walk in, smile, sit and order un bicchiere da vino bianca. I will open my journal and not know how to begin.
You'd think by now I'd know the right words to convey how it feels to come home.
"Buona sera, amica. I've missed the hell out of you."
But there was one moment that stands out to me. I had just started reading the book, on the advice of my Aunt Diane and my Mom. From where I sat, drudging through my emotionally abusive relationship of a career and slogging through self-imposed credit card debt, high-tailing it off to Rome for four months seemed like an unimaginable dream. I devoured it like heroin. I chomped through Gilbert's Italy section, slurping up and then underlining every idiom, every description of pizza and piazzas. (It made her transition to India a tremendous letdown.)
I remember staying up late one night and reading "What do you want to do, Liz?" And I read about her impressions of the Italians' willful acceptance of hard work in pursuit of the ultimate reward -- the beauty of doing nothing. It so happened I had also recently read an article about a sommelier who decreed most solemnly that champagne was the only beverage that should ever be served with smoked salmon. And I decided that what I wanted to do (I was staying at my parents' for the weekend) was to get up early the next morning, go to Whole Foods for the appropriate ingredients, and then enjoy a breakfast of champagne and smoked salmon on the back porch.
So I did.
It was just one morning, nothing special. I bought my champagne, my bagels, my smoked salmon, my cream cheese. I came home and boiled eggs and sliced red onion. And I read my new book, which at the time was beginning -- just beginning -- to unlock ideas inside my brain that I had never considered.
Looking back now, four years later, I see that morning as the moment when my life began to change. When I began to... wake up.
Not long after that, I bought a ticket to Rome. I say that like so many travel writers do, like it was easy somehow, but in fact I bought my ticket almost eight months ahead, in order to give me enough time to implement the new superstrict Excel budget spreadsheet I'd just made, and so get rid of my debt and also save up enough that I could enjoy my week in the Eternal City. One week. That was all I could afford, but I was going to make it count.
I planned for this trip like no one has ever planned before. And I dove into Rome like it was... a city-sized lifeboat. A lifeboat full of wine and lovely laughing Romans and 2,000 year-old priceless ruins in the middle of traffic.
I don't usually make New Year's Resolutions, but in the New Year of '08-'09 I made the resolution that I would get at least one new passport stamp every year. I made this promise to myself after the Rome ticket was booked but long before I would actually get to go, back when my last venture abroad had been almost eight years previous.
The next year I fulfilled my promise to myself and went to Eleuthera, in the Bahamas. It was beautiful, and supremely relaxing, and I sat outside under my private little tiki hut and wrote like I haven't written since high school. When I got back, I shared pictures with my co-workers. I remember one colleague asking me:
"So, you just save up all year and then go someplace cool?
She meant it as a compliment. I could hear the wistful envy in her voice -- after all, I had just been to the Bahamas. But her words struck me like a jellyfish sting and I couldn't stop playing them over and over in my brain. Over time, they morphed into this:
"So, you work all year at a job you hate in order to have one week being happy?"
It was also around this time that I posted on my LJ a list of things I liked about my job (I was trying to convince myself), and listed as Number One the extra week of vacation I had just been granted due to seniority. A very good friend replied something to this effect:
"The thing you like most about your job is how much time you don't have to spend there. There is something wrong with this picture."
A few months later something bad happened to me. This thing was entirely my own fault, but it was Not Good and I responded to it by purchasing three paperbacks on amazon.com -- all of which were supposed to hold the elusive key and guide me through the necessary steps to living a life abroad. Suffice to say I was disappointed at the content.
Six months passed. I was still not living abroad. I was still wretchedly unhappy. After one particularly awful phone conversation/abusive screaming session from my boss -- the one and only Ursula -- I began a Hail Mary internet search for ESL positions abroad, that would take me with no experience and no TEFL certificate. You (more or less) know the rest.
I will always be supremely grateful to Georgia -- for the time it granted me, for the graciousness of its people, for allowing me a place to escape to when I needed that escape like oxygen. And yes, there is a part of me that feels guilty about not going back to Georgia like I had planned and promised.
But you see... I now have a chance to see ROME again. And that, my friends, is something that I am simply not going to pass up.
There is a very good reason why I am flying into Paris rather than Rome, why Italy is the last country on my itinerary, and why Rome itself will probably be the very last city I visit, flying out of Leonardo da Vinci (what a name for an airport!) back to my real life and what will hopefully be my next step. The reason is that I know that if I land in Rome I will very probably not want to ever leave it again, and instead of three months seeing as much of Europe as possible I will simply spend three months wandering through every Roman back alley, eating gelato and ordering la vino rosso della cassa y acqua frizzante, and being utterly, sublimely happy at my situation.
So instead I am saving the best for last.
I feel slightly foolish about the fact that the thing I am looking most forward to on my trip is visiting a city I have already been to. But there it is. I have made several lists -- things I will do my first night in Rome, and then, things I missed the first time that I will not miss during my second chance.
My first night in Rome, I will walk to the Pantheon. I found the Pantheon by accident my first night that first time, and stood in flummoxed astonishment at my good fortune. I will have a glass (or three) of wine at one of the outside tables at one of the many trattorias that line the Pantheon's piazza. And then I will walk to the Trevi, seeing if I at all remember the way, if the streets feel even slightly familiar under my adoring rockstar-groupie-esque feet. Gelato at the Trevi, of course. In a cone.
And then, I will find the sodium-light bar that was around the corner from my old hotel, just up the street from the Colosseum. Cocktails are not served at this bar. Beer from the tap and house wine. If they like you, they will pull bottles of liquor from under the counter and invite you to do a shot with them. On the house, of course. Last time, on request I taught my bartenders how to correctly say in English: "through the arch and to your right", these being the directions to the bar's toilet. As a reward I was given a cookie. The shots were later.
They won't remember me. But I will walk in, smile, sit and order un bicchiere da vino bianca. I will open my journal and not know how to begin.
You'd think by now I'd know the right words to convey how it feels to come home.
"Buona sera, amica. I've missed the hell out of you."
