It has been a while since my last post – in part because I’ve been jaunting around Paris and around Europe, and in part because I’ve been lazy. So here it is, my list of updates.
Easter was spent in a bright, frescoed, and Jesuit church with a drenching beam of sunlight that illuminated the incense rising and the little girl spinning with a stuffed cat over her shoulder. The chairs were seated that we could look at each other, and see each other stumble over the oddly complicated half-steps and sharps in all the hymns that the four-person choir sang with gusto and everyone else, including the priest, squinted at with raised eyebrows. It was an English-language Mass, which I was grateful for, and afterwards there was a small apéro with chocolate eggs and prosecco, which I was also grateful for. Although my Renaissance-haired sister had fallen ill that morning, and we felt the lack of her and of my brother in church, it was still one of the most wonderful Easters I’ve ever spent. In the afternoon we got semi-lost in Trastevere (still not certain whether to blame my mother’s sense of direction, the poorly designed guidebook map, or Rome’s street signage), but finally ended up at an arched restaurant where my sister slept and my parents and I swirled full-bellied glasses of a warm house red and talked about the future. Rome will always be a magical city for me—Italy will always be a magical country.
The day before Easter we went to a six-table restaurant where there is only a verbal menu given to you by the Alberto half of Alberto e Ada, and where we charmed him into a digestif of neon limoncello that my sister did not particularly like but I enjoyed very much, and an extra plate of cookies to be dipped in wine. Perfection. Then my sister and I returned unsuccessfully from an exploratory mission to find the Spanish Steps, and talked about life and dreams and boy on the lip of a statue in the Campo de’Fiori. Because it is Italy and it is a beautiful and friendly country, we were almost immediately adopted by a horde of flowing-voweled Roman teenagers who clapped when my sister laughed and somehow managed to bridge our language barrier through boisterousness, thoughtfulness, and broken English. When on our last night she was sick in bed, three of them—Marco with the braces and vintage blazer, Alessio who looked like he was going to laugh at any moment, Matteo the quiet one—came to awkwardly sing up to her, Giulietta framed in the window with three dancing Romeos. Only in Italy. That night we wandered around Rome for hours, and I laughed too much and got back in time to sleep three hours before a taxi whisked me to the airport at 3:30 am, through a darkened city that quietly watched me hurtle past the Coliseum and the Circus Maximus (there are really no speed limits in Italy) and out the Appian Way, but I wasn’t too sad because I threw my Trevi coin and all roads lead back to Rome if you want them to.
This week my feet were soaked because it turns out that even if you try to force it to be spring by wearing flats, it will still rain on you, but I installed myself in the corner of a woody bar that my French professor swears by, and had a glass of a jewel-colored wine that stained my lip but not my teeth, and wrote for a bit. The bar pretended at nothing, the bearded men at the register yelled about saucisson, and no one paid attention to me. It was perfect.
I thought a lot about myself and what has changed and about what I want out of my life. I have lived in this city very much on my own, and explored it very much on my own, which has been difficult at times but has slowly let me get to know myself more, and what I need, and what I can do. I suppose I came to Paris with the expectation that I would take it by storm, or that it would take me by storm, but of course neither of those things happened. What happened is that I arrived and Paris carried on as if I hadn’t, which is exactly what a city does and what life does. So I’ve had to learn to create my own adventures (something I’m usually pretty good at) but by myself (which I wasn’t so good at before). But now I have a whole list of tiny bars that I love and tiny bars I want to explore, bookstores that are better and less touristy than Shakespeare & Co., and parks and jardins where I can remember what a plant looks like. And more importantly than that, I’m doing things like learning Wolof last Friday with a woman from Senegal and a woman from Mali as we ate maafa with our fingers and we tried to understand each other’s accents, and then watching Youtube videos of the war in Mali with the same woman and realizing how lucky I am to not have to see tanks rolling into my hometown on streets that I recognize. I’ve signed up for famous Sunday meals with strangers and secret concerts on the rooftops of Montmartre and jazz nights on Mondays, and though I have lovely friends who I can drag along, I’m also perfectly fine with going alone. While friends in Paris may be harder to make than in Italy, it’s not unheard of—and at least I’ll hear some good music and eat some good food and drink some good wine, and if that’s not most of what there is to life I have yet to hear about it.
I hope for a lot of things. I hope to meet more people here, and I hope to make lasting friendships. I hope to not glutton out on bread even though it would be very easy. I hope for less people making out on the Métro and I hope to become more patient with the ones that do. I hope to grow more thoughtful here, more wise, and selfishly I hope that someone here remembers me when I leave. I hope that I don’t hope too much. Some of these things are out of my control, and I know that, but some of them are things that I can take charge of, and my goal for the rest of my stay here, whether it be till June or August, is to leave knowing that I did and tried everything that I wanted to, and maybe some things I didn’t.
Philosophizing in every post! What a world.
Emily Wolfteich 