Attachment psychologist Foster Cline described bonding as “the successful completion of an ordeal.” Think of how many interpersonal bonds have been dramatically forged — whether in books or films or real life — via the process two (or more) people go through when thrown together during a crisis. That’s the whole plot-engine behind The African Queen, for instance, and why we start to care so much about what happens to Shelley Winters in The Poseidon Adventure. Bogart and Hepburn are oil and water at the outset of the former flick, but after an all-out struggle to survive they wind up deeply bonded and in love with each other. Likewise, a group of strangers helping one another up and out of a capsized luxury liner become like a sort of motley family, and the sacrificial heroism of Winters and Hackman mirrors the self-sacrifice of devoted parents. There are countless other examples, but you get the drift.

Nothing quite that dramatic happened this weekend…but if I was anywhere near the tipping point before, I definitely went over the edge, thanks to a belligerently drunk Vietnam vet and a seizing epileptic.

All at the company barbecue.

**

But let me back up a little. A few posts ago I identified among my apparent fans “two affable young supervisors who find excuses to hover around my cube like honeybees.” One of those supervisors is a potty-mouthed, politically astute stepdaddy with a shiny bald pate and an attitude who cracks me up all day long with his antics. I’ve taken to sitting beside him lately because he makes the day go by faster.

The other supervisor is Sam.

Sam is a tender twenty-one going on a seasoned forty. One of the other supervisors refers to him as an “old soul,” and her assessment is entirely accurate. He comes off as far more responsive and more responsible than the assistant executive director, a man roughly my age. Most people think Sam is at least thirty. I honestly wish he were running the place, and told him so once. Sam went to college (to study political science) at sixteen, so he’s no dummy and certainly no slouch. He’s long been one of my favorite supervisors for his approachability, his listening skills, and his unassuming demeanor. Everybody loves Sam.

Rick hung out with him one evening and later told me he found him a tad too straitlaced, even though Sam does drink and occasionally partake of the herb. At the time, I hadn’t yet figured out who Sam was. I’d barely even noticed him.

Not that he’s unattractive — not at all — but if he were walking toward me as a stranger in a crowd I wouldn’t even see him. None of the things that usually make me take marked visual notice of a man are present with Sam, other than the retro-hipster mutton chop sideburns he was growing for a while as part of a bet. (Those did look damn good on him, I must say.)

I’d been developing a bit of a mild crush on him lately, however, partly because of our excellent chemistry at work, but also simply because he’s so cool, and because he’s young and fresh and male and there.

And let’s face it, mama cougar is hungry. (They just started hiring again, finally, and one of the first hires was a peach-fuzzed brunette colt with skin the color of browned butter. I was sitting in on his training, staring at his tanned arms, and it was hard to keep myself from openly salivating. I actually started fantasizing about a four-way with me and the kid and Sam and the other trainer, Joseph, a wiry little whip of a fella I’ve always liked. Not exactly the consummately professional thing to do. So, yeah, my appetites are getting pretty dire these days.)

**

At the company’s summer barbecue in our recently departed campaign director Andie’s backyard, feeling the buzz of a couple of drinks, I flirtatiously turned Sam’s Castro-esque cap backwards on his head.

In my inebriated state, I found after a while that I wanted to be near him more than I wanted to hang out with anyone else, even though I was sincerely enjoying my other friends. It was really only for that reason that I eventually followed him into the special room designated for “herbology.”

I only allow myself that particular indulgence maybe once or twice a year, because I’m so sensitive. And usually not while drinking. But everyone in the room was so jolly, and one of the gay co-hosts was so wickedly, raunchily funny, I stayed in there for a good while and took several turns. I was significantly spacey as the evening wound down, with that surreal sense of being in a dream I typically have when I smoke. I begged a ride home (I had walked over two miles to get there) from one of the company’s resident den mothers, a dry-humored lesbian in her fifties who was helping with cleanup. As it so happens, she was also Sam’s ride.

Cue the beginning of the craziness.

**

Helping Miranda fold chairs and bring in dishes, I couldn’t help but notice (even in my dreamlike state) that the longhaired Vietnam vet who had worked for the company for years was getting agitated and shouting. He was clearly out of it, either drunk or tripping on something, and his bellowing had to do with guns and killing people. He may have been having a PTSD episode. At any rate, he was yelling curses and threats at the remaining partygoers in the backyard. One of our braver coworkers, a top performer and fundraising veteran named Jerry with a striking shock of white hair, was valiantly attempting to pacify him, with mixed results. It wasn’t helping at all that Renee, an alcoholic former beautician in her late forties, was still making the rounds of the sparse festivities, throwing out strident and drunken assertions at everyone and occasionally provoking Tom, the vet, by telling him to “fucking shut up already!”

Near the kitchen doorway Sam stood monitoring the scene. “We need to clear everybody out of here,” he said quietly. “He’s getting all riled up with all these people around. He’ll calm down once the party winds down.”

Which it was definitely doing; most of the guests had already left. Someone told me that Tom was going to camp out in the backyard for the night, and there were already blankets and quilts fence-side. It was good to know nobody was going to have to wrestle him into a car or see him home. Andie, the hostess, had disappeared some time before, having passed out on her bed; her roommate Russell was wandering around rather incoherent, having consumed several more potent vices than alcohol and weed. The only person vaguely in charge was Paul, the wickedly funny gay guy who helped organize this funfest.

Sam and I were more than ready to go, and everyone was moving to leave, but Miranda needed a rest. She was feeling fatigued. She sat down on one of the outdoor chairs and slowly smoked a cigarette, chatting with a bleary-eyed Russell. When at last we started moving toward the front door, I led the way, through the kitchen and into the dining room.

Which is when Miranda went down.

**

I was in front of her; Renee was behind. I turned sideways as she made a muted, guttural noise, and saw her reach toward the floor with both hands, as if she’d dropped something. In my altered state, everything seemed to happen in slow motion. Renee grabbed at her as I stood dumbly by, watching. Miranda narrowly missed the dining table and chair and went down on her hands and knees before hitting the floor, shaking all over.

Sam was there like lightning, kneeling at her head. “Turn her on her side!” he barked. Renee and I helped him roll her. The remaining guests (minus Tom the ranter) had piled into the kitchen and were starting to freak out. “Call 911!” someone shouted. Miranda’s body was jerking spasmodically. “Don’t call 911!” Sam shouted back at the others. I looked at him uncertainly. “Just hold her,” he said. I trusted him. He held her upper body, I held her midsection, and Renee held her legs. Miranda went still and began making a sort of snoring noise in her throat.

Renee, drunk as a skunk as she was, started to freak out then, and decided we needed to do CPR and keep Miranda from swallowing her tongue. She pulled Miranda to one side and shoved her fingers in Miranda’s mouth, shouting at us and clumsily trying to do mouth-to-mouth. Miranda lay limply. Sam wasn’t intervening; maybe he was thrown by the throat-noise and by Renee’s sudden command of the situation. I was confused and vaguely frightened and couldn’t make any sense whatsoever of what was going on. I couldn’t remember whether Renee was the employee with the medical background or not (she isn’t). My brain seemed coated somehow, like a furry post-hangover tongue. “Is she breathing?” I asked, baffled. Renee said she was.

Good old Jerry, unconvinced that this didn’t constitute a life-or-death emergency, was calling 911 on his cell phone. Paul was protesting loudly, saying that it was unnecessary and that Miranda didn’t have insurance. Andie came rushing out the bedroom, surprisingly alert, demanding to know what the hell had happened. She knelt by Miranda’s side and got Renee to quit the amateur EMT routine. Renee got up in a growly huff, saying “I fucking saved her life, man.” Jerry was on the phone giving somebody, the police or EMTs, a blow-by-blow of the action until they arrived.

Which they did, in record time, just as Miranda was coming to. She opened and blinked her unfocused eyes, her limbs stirring. Sam, taking charge again (“Everybody out!”), herded the majority of us out of the room and into the backyard. I grabbed Miranda’s broken glasses up off the floor. Andie and someone else (Jerry?) stayed in the dining room to talk to the paramedics and the police.

**

Once everything had been sorted out and Miranda had been loaded onto the ambulance (bound for a small hospital nearby and not the public-hospital zoo, which was so overcrowded they were diverting emergencies elsewhere), Sam came to get me. “Let’s roll,” he said. I had no idea where we were going or how, but I grabbed my purse and salad bowl and followed. He unlocked the SUV parked in the driveway, Andie’s car. I got into the passenger seat. There was some consulting going on about the change of hospitals and where the smaller one was. I got out momentarily to hug a dazed Jerry, and tell him he’d done a good thing. He was wound tighter than a drum and squeezed me rigidly. Andie climbed into the back seat of her car, I got in front, and Sam, one of the only guests fully alert and sober now, slid into the driver’s seat.

He drove us to the quiet hospital E/R, where it turned out to be remarkably easy to park and check ourselves in as visitors. As we were walking in, Sam slipped an arm around my shoulders. “How are you doing?” he asked. I told him I had picked a hell of a time to do my once-a-year partying and that I wished I hadn’t gotten so fucked up.

There was absolutely nothing going on in the E/R for a Saturday night. Once Miranda had been admitted, within minutes we were able to go in and see her. She was completely conscious and coherent by that time, lying in a private exam room in a neck brace and hooked to an IV. She was glad to see us, but rueful that no one, particularly the paramedics and police, had noticed the dog tags hitched to her belt that said EPILEPTIC and DO NOT CALL 911 along with a list of her medications and her emergency contact. She hadn’t had a seizure in over a year.

Sam had been in the right all along. He stood by Miranda’s bedside now, squeezing her hand reassuringly. I was the designated digger, digging in her backpack for her spare pair of glasses, her wallet, and her portfolio of contacts and medical records. The casual, shirtsleeved doctor consulted with her briefly, determined she was good to go, and directed the nurses to discharge her. The whole hospital visit took less than an hour from end to end. Sam made the calls to the others to let them know everything was all right.

We all drove back to Andie’s house, which was dark by now. Miranda was going to spend the night there; Andie was lending Sam the car until tomorrow so he could get us both home (she still wasn’t fit to drive). Sam and I exchanged hugs with Andie and Miranda and climbed back into the SUV. I silently rejoiced to have him to myself at last.

(To any other gals out there: seriously, aren’t you in love with Sam by this point too?)

**

I marveled at how we had wound up here, after all the night’s misadventures, exactly where I would have wanted to be. Zooming down a quiet Thirteenth Avenue in Andie’s car, finally alone with him following upon a Foster-Clinean, dramatic ordeal, I felt even more strongly bonded to my steady young supervisor.

He had turned up the radio at Andie’s request on the way back to her house, and it was still turned up. I heard Glen Hansard’s gently plucked guitar intro to “Falling Slowly” from the movie Once come on, at a volume impossible to ignore, and I thought, aw, geez. Here it comes again: one of those moments where you’re rendered a hapless pawn to the emotion in a song, a beautiful love song that kidnaps you and carries you away to places you didn’t even know you wanted to go. A song from a movie about two people who become close in a short amount of time and share an unforgettable experience, but who, for one reason or another, don’t wind up together. Glen started singing

I don’t know you
but I want you
all the more for that...

I asked Sam if he’d seen the film. He hadn’t. I told him a little about it and mentioned that this song won an Oscar. As we crossed the intersection of my street and Fourteenth Avenue, Glen was crooning

You have suffered enough
at war with yourself
it’s time that you won…

and I thought with a smile, hell if that ain’t the truth, but I’m the only one in this car to whom that line means much. I started singing along softly.

Sam pulled into the driveway on one side of my building, and extended his right hand as he thanked me for being there tonight. Freeing myself from my seat belt, I brushed aside his hand and went in for a full hug…which he gladly and gratefully accepted, nestling me against his chest with both arms.

We held each other for what seemed like a long time, as if one of us were leaving for good. His warm and relaxed embrace felt as rare and right as that of only a few other men, Sonny among them (and I have put my arms around a multitude of men). Melting into his body, I could have stayed there all night.

“You’re so great, Sam,” I sighed. “Do you have any idea how great you are?”

He murmured something characteristically modest in reply. I separated myself from him at last, placing a hand briefly, caressingly, on his stubbled cheek. “Boy, I swear,” I continued with wry regret, “if you weren’t my boss…or if I weren’t old enough to be your mother…”

I shot him a sidelong look as I released the door latch, leaving the sentence unfinished. My consummate professional of a supervisor had the loveliest shy, open, vulnerable expression in his shining dark eyes. It was the expression of a hopeful young boy. In the half-light under the streetlight, he had never looked more beautiful or more appealing. (Should I have tried to kiss him anyway? Dang it, I was too messed up to judge. My rational mind says I did the right thing, but that embrace felt like the kind of supreme trumping good that makes a body throw caution to the wind and break protocols and laws and even a commandment or two.) We said good night, and I gave him a conspiratorial wink.

Another man I had hardly taken notice of at the outset had become something irresistible before my very eyes.

**

I can’t get over how easily I topple, like a top-heavy stack of plates. I’m a one-woman cliche. A formulaic romance narrative: introduction, then buildup, then crisis, then realization of feelings  — without the Hollywood payoff at the end. But it wouldn’t be unfair to say that I’m like a windless sailboat when I’m not powered by some kind of eros. At least now I’m getting some energy back.

Walking in the park the day after all this madness, I thought about Rick, and about how much I enjoyed the time we did spend together. Isn’t that the point, I thought, to savor every moment you spend with someone you care about?

So I shared a bonding ordeal, and a lovely moment alone, with the capable and winsome young Sam…and I wouldn’t take any of it back or trade it for all the tea in China. That embrace glows in my heart the way Christ’s kiss glowed in the heart of Dostoevsky’s jaded old Inquisitor.

Is this going to be one more AlienBaby mishap? Oh, hell. Maybe.

Ask me if I care.

Well, Chris Guillebeau is way more fabulous than I will ever be, and ten years younger. This kid kicks my ass to Saturn, and probably yours too. Clicking around his hipster-riffic Web site I’m less That could be me! than Why even bother? or maybe Why not just kill myself now? There are other people out there living my dream better than I ever could. Who am I to think I have anything new or necessary to say or contribute?

**

It’s getting harder and harder to drag myself into work each day. My cubicled purgatory is still full of wonderful souls who smile and embrace me, and I love them, but without my beautiful boys the color and the pizazz as well as all motivation is gone. I’m living within an almost still life — as monochrome and sexless as the world of the angels in Wim Wenders’ imagination, longing like Damiel to cross over and take a big bite of the apple.

Thus the summer flies by. I thought I’d be elsewhere by now.

“You should come to California with me!” says my friend Drew, the amateur astrologer I previously called stocky and adorable, who comes around for his daily hug. He’s considering a move to the Los Angeles area to attend graduate school. Unfortunately he’s not driving there. If he were, I’d actually consider it, just to get on the road again (and the hell out of Dodge). I am fond of Drew, and he’s cute in his freckled redheaded way, even if his beliefs are a little out there for me. I’d consider biding my time with him the way I bided (bid?) my time with Seamus — although Drew has said himself that the Leo-Capricorn combination isn’t ideal. (His ex-wife was a Capricorn.) It’s not like I have a throng of irresistible fans lining up to take me out. Anymore.

**

A new reader points me to an online Zen expert. He’s a fine guidance counselor, Krishnamurti-like in his advice — “you have to decide for yourself what is best” — and gently compassionate in his outlook. He reminds me of the Buddhist therapist I saw for a number of years. I’ve always preferred Zen to most other philosophies and belief systems, even though it could be interpreted as directly contradicting what my own life coach and other live-your-dream types currently advocate. The “intention” and “manifestation” people, after all, tell you to desire, and to desire hard — the more the better! Which, I have consistently found in my own experience, only leads to more suffering when I invariably don’t obtain or achieve whatever it is I wanted.

Hence the appeal of Zen. Especially now. Of course, mine is probably the immature, sour-grapes version…kind of like when the Violent Femmes sing You know that I want your lovin/but Mr. Logic, Mr. Logic says it ain’t never gonna happen/so then my defenses say I, I didn’t want it anyway…yeah, I want to transcend desire and attachment and become one with Pure Being. But you know sometimes I’m a liar.

**

Samira emails me from India. I ask her how Ken is, and she replies “Great. Still HOT. Still sweet. My honey.” She, for one, isn’t helping to prove that so-called romantic love with another human is unfulfilling. But I don’t really want her to.

**

In my last installment of the Italy diaries, I wind up celebrating fleeting joys and fruitless desires, unapologetic about what I wanted and how I conducted myself. It’s kind of a pleasure to revisit, to tell you the truth. So here it is, the last of the series.

Part 6.3: MILANO (MILAN)

The next morning I boarded the 11:14 train to Milano at Santa Maria Novella station. It arrived at Stazione Centrale around two, and I wandered back and forth along Via Vitruvio until I located Hotel Bernino on Via Napo Torriani.

My room was smaller and darker than the one in Florence, but it was also half the price. After I dropped off my things, I set off down Via Pisani (a street of unattractive modern buildings that could have been in any city) toward central Milan in search of food. I was specifically looking for Asmara, an Eritrean restaurant recommended by Let’s Go that was supposed to be open for lunch until four.

After walking about twelve blocks I found the place, in what seemed to be a largely African immigrant neighborhood, but it was closed. Groaning and hungry, I walked over to the shopping thoroughfare Corso de Buenos Aires. Most restaurants were closed, observant of afternoon siesta time, and the snack bar on the corner was completely cleaned out. Across the street was a McDonalds, but I was not going to go in there. I continued down the Corso feeling almost lightheaded, fretting that I might soon pass out from low blood sugar (this is not an exaggeration, it’s happened before), when suddenly I had the calming thought (or heard the voice, depending on how you interpret it) — Have faith, you’re almost there.

Who knows what that was about? What I do know is that right around the corner, on Via Spallonzani, I found a piazza with a little snack bar full of Italians. I bought a piece of foccacia pizza, which they had in abundance, and a bottle of aqua naturale. The foccacia was melt-in-your-mouth delicious, but the story doesn’t end there. After I had finished I noticed that both the chalkboard outside and the painted words on the door said CANNOLI SICILIANI.

That’s the part that amazes me. I was complaining not long ago that you can’t get decent cannoli in my town the way you can in the Italian North End of Boston, and I had intended to find some authentic cannoli in Italy. But I had been in Italy almost five weeks, it was my last day, and I had located no cannoli. Antonio had insisted that Sicily made the best. Allora, this was kismet. I ordered one with a cappuccino, and when it came it was like a dream on a plate. The crispiest, flakiest shell, dusted with powdered sugar, was stuffed with the freshest, sweetest, gooiest filling (mascarpone, not ricotta!) and garnished with candied orange. Mamma mia. Mamma mia. It kicked the North End’s ass. I made all sorts of noises while savoring every bite, and licked my fingers afterward.

The local sitting in front of me talking to his buddy in Italian was wearing a shirt that said HEMINGWAY’S BAR across the back of it. When he got up I noticed that the front said “Mexico,” so it wasn’t just some Milano locale. What is it with these meaningful coincidences? Skeptics say it’s a matter of what we filter; others believe in synchronicity. I’m not about to say, although I do have a mystic’s tendency to err on the side of the mysterious. And this day in Milano was already turning out to be marvelously mysterious.

I followed Corso Buenos Aires until it turned into Corso Venezia, intending to visit Milano’s Duomo. This Duomo is the third largest church in the world, begun by Visconti in the 14th century and finished in the 1800s under Napoleon. I passed by the Giardini Pubblici, a park housing the natural history museum, as the Corso grew prettier and prettier.

Alessandro didn’t know what the hell he was talking about. He discouraged me from going to Milano on my days off at Centro, saying that it was too industrial, and that there was nothing to recommend it if you weren’t a fashionista. He made it sound like a mixture of Los Angeles and Detroit. I should never have listened to a young man who can’t even see into a mirror properly.

Milano is a beautiful city full of gorgeous architecture like that of Roma, laid out in ways that remind me, again, of my hometown Boston. You could say Milano is to Firenze as Washington, DC is to Annapolis, Maryland. One is an imposing urban metropolis showcasing innumerable periods of design; the other is a pretty historic town full of cobblestones and charm. Of course, Annapolis is much smaller than Firenze, but It’s the feel of the place I’m talking about.

In an area overrun by expensive clothiers and tourist-trap restaurants, I found the Duomo. It was overwhelming. There’s something frightening about a structure that large with more apparent spines than a porcupine. From the ground, what you see are rows and circles of stalagmites growing from countless spires to reach sharply toward heaven. If anyone were to be cast out like Lucifer, he’d be in danger of getting gruesomely impaled on these things. The style is ostensibly somewhere between Gothic and Baroque, having gone through five centuries of architectural tinkering. Mercifully, this Duomo has a lift that takes curious tourists to the roof, where they can clamber up and down built-in stairs and take in birds’-eye views of Milano.

Before doing that, I walked around the cathedral, and saw the Piazza del Duomo out front, which looks like the Italy you see in movies, gray flagstone and pigeons underfoot, with the arched doorways of Renaissance-era buildings on either side and a monument of the ubiquitous King Vittorio Emmanuele II in the center.

I took the lift up with a petite and sunny middle-aged woman named Margret who was visiting from Germany with a tour group. We walked together on the roof for a short time, and she pointed out the rooftop garden restaurant where they had stopped for lunch.

From here I could see that the “stalagmites,” which had looked like sharp points from the ground, were in reality tipped with detailed statues of saints and other religious symbols. Truly an amazing, painstaking accomplishment. No wonder it had taken so long. Beyond them, the stately roofs of Milano stretched for kilometers in every direction; here and there rose the round green duomo of a lesser church.

Why hadn’t I come here sooner? Why hadn’t I taken advantage of the opportunity to wander this extraordinary rooftop before, when I could have come here on a day off with my wonderful new English friend?

But it might have been too much for me. A sublime and centuries-old work of art like this cathedral would have brought home to me the small, transitory identities of (AlienBaby) and James — whatever one believes about the soul — and made me want him even more, with that bittersweet carpe-diem sort of longing. I leaned against one of the turrets and felt the familiar ache in my chest. This is why some people, after falling once, won’t let it happen again: loss is a bastard.

Yet we have to say goodbye to everyone, at some point. How is it a solution not to love anyone?

I walked back to the side of the roof across from Margret’s restaurant. Somewhere in that building, music was blaring. What the world needs now/is love/sweet love/it’s the only thing/that there’s just too little of…

I bent to rest my forearms on the stone railing and listened, smiling to myself. I could not have made this up. Even better was the next thing on the playlist, “I’m Not In Love,” that ironically penned protest against the obvious. I’d like to see you/but then again/it doesn’t mean you mean that much to me…

Big boys don’t cry.

…

I now had a massive blister on my left pinky-toe and was limping slightly as I walked toward Viale Premuda and the Osteria il Giardino del Segreti, a highly recommended restaurant. I stopped in at one of the many Farmacias, marked with a green neon cross, to buy plastic adhesive bandages, and sat down at a trolley stop to apply one.

Viale Premuda is another Boston-esque street, reminiscent of Commonwealth Avenue where it snakes its way through Brookline, with quaint little trolleys running up and down the center of it and slightly run-down shops and restaurants on either side. It’s unfortunate to see graffiti on some of the beautiful 17th- and 18th-century buildings, but local taggers are probably blasé about their city’s history.

The Osteria wasn’t open yet — the man inside told me quarter-past seven — so I looked around unsuccessfully for an Internet point for twenty minutes. When I came back, they told me ten more minutes, so I decided to start back uptown. I was far from the hotel, and I wanted to be a lot closer when it got dark. (I found an Internet point within fifteen minutes once I headed toward the Corso, and checked my email.)  I decided to swing by Asmara one more time, just for the heck of it, and found it open.

Seated by the smiling Eritrean hostess at a white-tableclothed table beneath photographs of beautiful African women, I ordered a piccolo beer and the vegetariano special.

Madonna. It was better than even the best very similar Ethiopian food I’d had in the States. Scooping up scrumptious greens, potatoes, and lentils using the spongy bread, I was reminded of a certain non-date I had had at an Ethiopian restaurant with a certain non-boyfriend of mine back in the early spring. It was nice to think about a man other than you-know-who for a change. The memory is a wonderful one, a Novara all its own.

And I considered how this person, who defies any sort of categorization in my life, has been a blessing, and possibly one of the best things that has ever happened to me. How could I fail to remember that? He won’t even mind my saying so, that’s how radically different and how terminally cool he is. I actually believe that we will always be friends. I feel I can tell him anything without fear of judgment (hence his presence on this list). And when you don’t need to seek after or worry about someone’s acceptance or esteem — when you know that it’s already there for you — the need for reassurances, promises, or contracts seems to largely dissipate. At least for me, at least in this case. And that’s no small thing. In reality, it’s a pretty big, rare thing.

He has given me exactly what I needed from him.

Bless him for that.

EPILOGUE

As my plane prepared for takeoff the next morning, I thought about all the places I hadn’t been. Venice. Pisa. Naples. Sicily. The Amalfi coast. Cinque Terre. Part of my original idea had been to see the Mediterranean, and I hadn’t gotten anywhere near it. But there was no more time, and even if there were, I had no more energy or stamina. My health was starting to wane.

Then I remembered how, not long ago, I was talking with my good friend Ruth, and was able to sum up my most personal dream for her in a few words: to be somewhere beautiful, with someone beautiful.

I had lived my dream. I had lived it for only two weeks, but some people never even see theirs for a day. High on a mountain overlooking Lago d’Orta, amid the jasmine and the honeysuckle and the peacocks, I flushed with happy excitement to see a witty blue-eyed Englishman coming up the gravel path. What could have been lovelier or more magical? It was worth a hundred steam burns in the dishroom and peeling endless piles of carrots, just to see him smile, to gain the prize of making him laugh. Call him a first class asshole, call me a fool for falling for a first class asshole, but I’d do it all again in a millisecond. James may not have believed he was very attractive or very lovable (and isn’t that the root of all evil?) but to me he was bellissimo, bellissimo, beautiful in every way.

And who knows, really…there are many beautiful places in the world. There are beautiful places right here. There are beautiful, lovable, ineffably dear people everywhere, and the more intimate you become with loss — the more you befriend it –the less afraid you are to love them.

Of course, there’s loss, and then there’s loss. In Philadelphia where I changed planes there were televisions tuned to CNN, and I mistakenly thought that their BBC clip commemorating the anniversary of last year’s London bombings was current. Did that ever make my heart hammer. Such catastrophic dispatches from that part of the world will never be the same. It’s one thing to feel empathy and sorrow for strangers attacked in a distant city, and quite another to care passionately for even one person there who may come into harm’s way. “It’s enough for me that you are somewhere here,” says Ivan Karamazov to his brother Alyosha at one point in Dostoevsky’s novel, and that’s how I feel, even though I don’t expect to ever see him again. To steal a line from Edna St. Vincent Millay, “More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world.” I can live without James, but I do want him to live.

Günter was fond of saying, you never know. And you don’t. You never know what tomorrow will bring, or if there will be one. Lightning strikes, cars collide, the body fails. A close friend of mine from college took her own life. I regret so much about that relationship, and about my silence within it…that was part of what shaped me into the apparent madwoman I am today, who won’t shut up about how great you are, and how much she loves you. Most “normal” people don’t behave this way in the English-speaking world. Raffe was like that, but James didn’t take her effusions seriously, and besides, she was Italian. Still, I won’t apologize for refusing to be cautious, for saying the things I said, or for trusting my own heart. Because you never know.

My flight companion on the way back from Philly turned out to be a delightful sixtysomething Englishman from Surrey. How perfect is that? He lives in Paris now, and we discussed some of the better French films and actors, much the way another Englishman and I discussed the better English-language films and actors, during one of the many good times at Centro.

It was a fitting bookend to my Italian aventura, my sojourn in Oz, my dream.

I won’t lie to you: I’ve become depressed again. And if killing myself could land me in Goran Dukic’s quirky limbo for lost souls, I’d be climbing into the tub with the hair dryer. Because even in that grey place that’s almost like planet Earth, “just a little bit worse,” friendships and road trips and great music and small miracles — even romantic love — are possible. (Besides which, you don’t have the usual paralyzing worries about getting yourself killed or starving in the street, because you’re already dead.) I wanted to get in the totally beat-to-shit station wagon with gypsy rocker Eugene (Shea Whigham, looking like Peter Krause’s mutton-chopped little brother) and take off for Tom Waits’ magical refugee camp in the desert where even the “crooked trees” among us are celebrated.

Of course, Waits’ character Kneller sums up my whole problem in one line. “Here’s the deal,” he tells the protagonist Zia (Patrick Fugit). “As long as you want it so bad, it’s not going to happen. The only way it’s going to work is if it doesn’t matter.”

I might be the best witness to that, having been brooding lately over a lifetime catalog of things I wanted so badly my ribs hurt, and to which I never even got close — attributing this outcome to ill fortune or my own baffling incompetence. But consider this: when all I wanted in the world was Sonny, I got the cash infusion that allowed me to go to Italy. When all I wanted in the world was to go back to Europe, Rick crept up like a wild creature to eat out of my hand. When all I wanted in the world was Rick, then Eli seemed to notice me. Whatever I was not intensely focused upon came easily, and what I desired most did not.

Of course now even scintillating Eli is gone (whose attentions I would have welcomed in lieu of my vanishing stoner’s), my pool of pretty young admirers has inexplicably dried up, and I have even less of a clue or a hope about how I’ll get to the other side of the lake. I’m in my own grey purgatory of solitary routines and ugly cubicles, consigned to a repetitive task that invites the hostility of strangers, living in a transient’s furniture-challenged crash pad, and sleepwalking through rapidly passing, oppressive summer days in which nothing new or interesting happens.

I seem to have jumped, as so often has been the case, from one of those delightful beginnings (where everything is new, and you can wind up playing pool in a hippie bar with an intriguing acquaintance at the drop of a hat) to a truncated end (where suddenly everything’s played out and exhausted), with no discernible middle. You’ve just gotten to first base on your first turn at bat, and now the game’s over. Rained out. So you sit in the window at home, gazing out at the drizzle, disappointed and bored.

Somebody please send Eugene over with the car! I want to hit the road and go see the Wizard. Although I think I know what he’s going to say. Still, I’d like to make the journey, because the journey itself is half the point. Besides which, Eugene — for all his skeezy antics — is damn cute. And he’s always horny. Seriously, I’d eat that little pirogi for breakfast.

But speaking of journeys…onward with the diaries…we’re almost done. This week I have a tale of Florence to tell.

Part 6.2: FIRENZE (FLORENCE)

The next morning I took a city train (as opposed to the faster Eurostar) and got to Florence at shortly after three in the afternoon. Without too much trouble I located the Ostello Archi Rossi on Via Faenza, off of the main drag Via Nationale. Faenza is like hostel central in Florence, with a number of small hotels along it as well.

The Ostello is clearly a youth hostel.  But I’m no longer a youth, and the staff was hostile.

They had gotten my e-mail, at least, and handed me the Visa slip to sign. Perhaps that had given them a prejudice against me already, I have no idea.

At first, I liked the funky feel of the place – noisy and vibrant in that collegiate way, with graffiti-covered walls that would have made my little anarcho-radical pals feel right at home (although the actual clientele looks much more American State University). When I got to my 6-bunk room I was glad to find it clean, and that I had a locker. They had assigned me an upper bunk, and I wondered briefly how I was going to climb up or down without stepping on the head of the person in the twin bed at the foot of the bunk. There were clean sheets, but no towel. Did they rent them out? I hoped so. I went down the hall to the “toilette” and noticed that there was a single shower off to one side of the toilet. Poking around a bit, I didn’t find a shower room, although I found one other similar “toilette” on that floor. I started to feel a little anxious, wondering how two such bathrooms were supposed to accommodate a throng of people who would be needing to both bathe and relieve themselves. I’d ask the staff when I went down to see about renting a towel. I decided, since the room was empty, that I could at least recharge my laptop.

Except that none of the outlets in the room worked.

I sat down on the lower bunk, feeling defeated, and gulped water from a litre bottle I had bought downstairs from the ostello refrigerator. I felt considerably dehydrated.

That’s when the migraine hit.

I had not had a migraine since March. Not since I had quit the job I had come to hate. At the time, I had attributed my debilitating condition to stress, sinus congestion, and general unhappiness with my station in life. So in a way, this was a perfect time for a migraine. My sinuses had been screwed up since my Pettenasco cold, I was beaten down by heat, fatigue, and loss, and completely stressed out by my surroundings.

I wanted to talk to the staff, to relieve some of my anxiety, but I was in too much pain. I took two Naproxen tablets and climbed up into the bunk, where I grew groggy as the medication hit. My head throbbed softly and I lay there in a near-trance, hearing very clearly the voices on the patio outside. Somewhere down there, I heard a man speak in a broad, working-class English accent; his voice had a familiar, midrange tenor timbre. My heart started to race. I knew the reaction was irrational and physiological — he was gone, gone for good — but knowing this just increased the pain, adding a heavy ache in my chest to accompany the sharp ache in my head. I listened to the man’s voice, and tried to relax into the pain, “becoming the pain,” as the Buddhists would say, eventually losing consciousness for the better part of an hour.

Later, when I managed to wander down to the desk in my medicated haze, I asked about towels, showers, and the outlets. Yes, towels were rentals. They seemed affronted by my fairly neutral shower question, and addressed me with a tone of condescension. “This is how it is in hostels in Italy!” I begged to differ, telling them about the Rome YWCA. They had never heard of it. You want your own shower, the impatient gray-haired woman said, thoroughly misunderstanding me, with a you-spoiled-high-maintenance-American-princess tone of voice, you get a single. They were none too happy about my asking to recharge my laptop behind the desk, either, although they hadn’t known about the outlets in that room, so I actually did them a favor.

Exploring the hostel for myself, I found that there were six bathrooms total (one shower and one toilet in each), two per floor, for 140 people. (Does that sound reasonable to you?) I determined to get up at six the next morning to beat the rush.

It was six-thirty PM and I was feeling weak, having eaten only a foccacia on the train. I found ZaZa’s after a short walk, and Osteria Pepo next door, but the latter opened at seven, and I just couldn’t wait. I sat outside on ZaZa’s pretty terrace facing the piazza, but the experience was lost on my achy, druggy self. I remember eating seafood pasta (it seemed a good time to indulge, for once) and yet another subpar salad.

While I was waiting for my food, a black man driving a silver sedan got himself stuck between parked cars (they really were too close together) in the piazza intersection. Everyone behind him started honking angrily, and the onlookers on the piazza started laughing at him. Feeling surrounded by hostility myself, I squirmed for the man, who doubtless already had to suffer innumerable difficulties due to having dark skin in this white country, and now was the glaring focus of so much public ire and ridicule. I thought, things could definitely be much worse for me. (He finally managed to back up, and maneuver between the parked cars.)

The waitress brought my pasta. It was full of shrimp. The waiter at the wine bar next door called to the hostess: “Gina!”

Bleary-eyed, fighting back tears, I thought to myself: Florence blows, man.

What was it, exactly? It was that feeling of being vulnerable and unmoored, in an (at best) indifferent and (at worst) hostile world. Alienation: that sense of being alone, misunderstood, and cared for by no one. In other words, how many Western men, like a certain Anglo I know, experience life on a daily basis. What was it I told him that night in the kitchen? “I can’t explain it,” I said. “I just have so much love for people.” My sense of connection, so it would seem, originated within me. Where had it gone?

Well, first things first. I was feeling like a sick, abandoned child. Some grownup part of me was going to have to advocate for the helpless part. WWED? What Would (my grandmother) Ella Do? I asked myself. I was in Italy thanks to her, and she certainly wouldn’t want me to be feeling so ill and miserable. What would she tell me?

You go and spend some more of that money, dearie, came the answer. It’s ALL RIGHT. Pay whatever you have to. This ain’t worth the savings.

I returned to the Ostello and asked the unsmiling clerk about paying extra for a private room. I even tried to explain that I wasn’t feeling well. He looked at me as if I were telling him some bullshit tale of woe, and said that there weren’t any. Eager to be rid of me, he said I could tell him tomorrow morning if I found somewhere else to stay my second night.

I went up to the (still empty) dorm to burst briefly into hot tears of weariness, pain, and humiliation, and then, with renewed resolve (Archi Rossi can kiss my spoiled American princess ass!!!), went outside and wandered up and down the street, inquiring with hotels and hostels. I found a tiny third-floor hostel for women called Hotel Paula that looked lovely, painted in coral tones, but unfortunately it was full. Around the corner from the Ostello, the small air-conditioned Hotel Vasari had a double available for 100 Euro. The quiet front desk clerk was deferential and kind-eyed; his manner made me want to hug him. I reserved the room with my credit card and immediately felt a hundred kilos lighter.

There now, said Ella. Isn’t that better.

When I got back to Archi Rossi, I met Werner and Sita, young Toronto-ites, in the room, which (yet another surprise) was unisex. I told them my whole Ostello story, and they were not only sympathetic, but also grateful to get the information about the towels, the outlets, and the sucky bathroom situation. At least my troubles benefited someone. They were more than happy to let me have the ladder hanging from Werner’s upper bunk, as he could climb up without it. How good it was to see and to talk to these friendly young Canadians after dealing with the unfriendly staff! They went out, and I went to bed early in a still-empty room.

In the morning I felt much better, like a human being again. I showered (with lightning speed) at seven, packed and locked up my luggage, and took advantage of the hostel’s included breakfast and Internet (booking my Milan hotel) before heading out to the Duomo.

Brunelleschi’s famous dome, that is, topping the Cattedrale di Santa Maria Del Fiore. The Cathedral is huge, and an amazing sight to see, looking, with its green marble stripes, like it was made out of very dusty peppermint candy. It’s almost too flashy, outside, to be a Catholic church; it should by all rights be a mosque. The top of the dome is the highest point in the city of Florence, and you can reach it by climbing at least as many stairs as are inside the Statue of Liberty. I paid the six Euro for this particular torture, seeing as it was early in the morning and there was no line.

Speaking of torture, there are frescoes inside the dome that depict the torments of hell, in true Christian doomsday fashion. These paintings are almost kinky…they belong to that genre of religious art that seems downright salacious in its voyeuristic violence. Christian porn, more or less. Grinning devil-men with horns and tails skewer naked humans with pitchforks; one unfortunate man seems to be getting a flaming torch in the ass. Such visceral physicality the artist envisioned for an essentially spiritual punishment! The grotesque, graphic images of the destruction of the flesh made me wince. Is it any wonder so many people hate religion?

From the top of the dome — if you make it — you can see all of Florence, and the mountains beyond.  It was quite a panorama to behold, but unfortunately I had to descend soon after my triumphant arrival in order to make check-out time at Archi Rossi.

I got back before eleven to retrieve my belongings, and spent an hour and a half in the cafe across the street from the hostel, sipping a cappuccino and writing. I wheeled my suitcase around the corner to the hotel at half-past noon, but my room still wasn’t ready. The paternal white-haired man at the front desk showed me where to stow my luggage in the meantime. Bless the Hotel Vasari. God bless them, every one.

Now it was time for lunch. I headed for Trattoria Mario, on the same piazza as ZaZa, a lunch joint Let’s Go cited as having a rabid following among Florentines.

It was crowded and raucous, an Italian greasy spoon, and I was told to sit at a table with three strangers. Allora (so)! I did. They were all Italiani, two men and one woman. The studious-looking, bespectacled man and the pretty brunette woman were together; the good-looking green-eyed man with the shiny, wavy black hair who smiled broadly at me was obviously a regular. He knew the waitstaff, and kept talking to the men at the next table. I told the cute shorn-headed waiter (he looked like Andre Agassi) “Non mangio la carne,” and he brought me a bread and vegetable soup.

It was only room temperature — appropriate, I suppose, on such a blistering day — but it was the best thing I’d had in days. Hearty and deliciously seasoned, it possessed the perfect balance of flavors — not too salty, sweetened by the bread. I ordered an insalata verde, too, and I got a plate of crispy dark greens with radiccio in a simple but tasty olive oil dressing. Bravo, Trattoria Mario!  Write that one down, folks.

The green-eyed hunk kept glancing at me while he and the others talked, and I finally said to him, “Non capisco niente. Non parlo l’Italiano molto bene.” (I understand nothing. I don’t speak Italian very well.) He laughed uproariously (had I actually fooled him with my ordering?), and asked where I was from. I told him, and he explained things to the others. Everyone introduced themselves, but I can’t for the life of me remember their names. Still, I loved the whole noisy, elbow-rubbing, familial feel of it all. What I told James is true. It’s the gente, man. Il popolo. You can be connected regardless of lingua.

From the trattoria I went straight to Accademia, the museum housing Michelangelo’s David. The slowly creeping line stretched around the block, and for once I joined an endless queue of sweaty tourists. If I was going to get into only one museum in Florence, it was going to be Accademia. What other sight in Italy was more up my alley than the great master’s timeless monument to male beauty??!

Behind me, I heard Spanish being spoken. Thrilled to hear a language other than English that I understood, I turned around. “De donde van Ustedes?” (Where are you from?) The three twentysomethings were from Mexico: Ana, Michaela, y Jose. Ana was a raven-haired beauty with a pierced nose; Michaela was cute, lively, and petite, with glasses like mine; and Jose was a stocky jokester with an interesting birthmark on his right temple. He gave me sips of their McDonalds Coke, and the four of us braved the unforgiving, humid heat together for an hour and a half.  Jose knew English, and Ana asked me a lot of questions in simple Spanish. I also chatted intermittently with the affable middle-aged Australian man in front of me. Time flies, or speeds up, anyway, when you’re in good company.

Finally we were in. Upon entering the museo, I was greeted by the spiral of the three figures in The Rape of the Sabine Women, by Giambologna: an older, defeated protector on the bottom, overcome by a younger, stronger man in the middle who is carrying away the gaping woman at the top. It’s necessary to walk all the way around for full effect. In the next room are Michaelangelo’s slave sculptures, appropriately still imprisoned in their stone, and his similarly imprisoned Saint Matthew.

The plaque by this last sculpture called attention to the strain of the figure in opposite directions, denoting the opposition between the temporal and the eternal, between the flesh and the spirit, the ongoing dualistic war within a man. Well, I thought. There you grand old Western patriarchs go again! Who decided we needed a war? What’s so compelling or unavoidable about splitting yourself in two?

Then there was the domed, high-ceilinged room at the end, where David towered in all his naked glory. It was necessary to walk all the way around him also, just to behold his three-dimensional perfection. Such attentive care was given to depicting the musculature of his chest and belly, his thighs, his back, the veins in his hands, the curve of his buttocks. Has anyone ever accused Michaelangelo of being queer? It seems to me (but you know how I am!) that one would have to love the male body to create such an appreciative tribute.

Beneath a discreet, sleeping member, his balls are plump, perfect globes. It’s amazing to me that after all these centuries David has managed to hang onto the entirety of his manhood. So many other statues, including the men grappling beneath the Sabine woman, have been emasculated by the ravages of time. A stone hurled during a riot in 1873 broke David’s wrist in two places, but otherwise he’s managed to survive, magnificently intact, with all delicate extremities precisely as they were created.

After staring at David for a while, I looked around the rest of the museum — it was mostly church triptychs and commissioned paintings dating back to the 14th, 15th, and 16th centuries. There were many madonnas with child, as well as assorted crucifixes, apostles and saints. Daddis and Gaddis and Peruginos. That these things have survived is impressive, but I’m not a huge fan of Christian art.

From there I went south, to the Bargello, a less touristy museum that houses sculptures by Donatello, but it was closed for the day. So I headed for the river and the Uffizi, home of Botticelli’s Venus, as well as works by Fra Angelico, Da Vinci, and Caravaggio. Alas, there was a daunting line, so I wandered the little plaza between the two branches of the building, which was a combination of buskerfest and art bazaar. Living “statues” posed for photographs with tourists, and artists lined the thoroughfare selling their original art. I bought a small original for the wonderful woman who covered nearly all of my work shifts from an inobtrusive artist who resembled Stephen Rea. (He struck me as having a better eye than some of his fellows, whose attempts at realism or impressionism tended to be between generic and cheesy.) I was sorry when the police chased off a group of youngsters who looked like our anarchist kids at home — they had illegally put down a blanket to hawk their stone and bead necklaces, and I had wanted to scope out their wares.

I had a quick look around the courtyard of the medieval Palazzo Vecchio next door, with its 15th century frescoes, and checked out the cluster of statues outside, including a smaller copy of the David and an attempt at Neptune by the student Ammannato which Michelangelo had historically slammed. (The Florentines apparently call it “Il Biancone” in derision, or “The Big White One.”) Across from the Palazzo, facing onto the Piazza Della Signoria (a wide-open and truly lovely piazza), is the stone stage Loggia dei Lanzi where some actual treasures are on open display, such as Cellini’s Perseus holding the head of Medusa. No tickets, no waiting.

From there I walked back through the plaza to the Arno river, to check out the Ponte Vecchio, the oldest bridge in Florence, which was built in 1345. These days it’s a tourist mecca of boutiques and jewelry shops, but it still maintains much of its ancient charm, and the view from the east side of the bridge is a postcard.

But now it was gelato time. I headed back toward the Bargello to find Vivoli, which Let’s Go says is a long-standing contender for the best gelato in Italy. With a little bit of wandering I found it — it’s so easy to get turned around in those skinny cobblestone streets — and discovered a creme caramel flavor that beat out even the chocolate mousse.

On the way back to the hotel I stopped in at Florence’s smaller Santa Maria Maggiore church. Like so many buildings in the city, it had undergone many incarnations.There were still faded paintings on the original pillars that dated back to the 14th or 15th century, and then there were the Renaissance and post-Renaissance religious paintings on the walls, and then there were the modern touches at the altars. At the altar along the left wall, candles were burning for the dead, and I gave my 30 cents to light a candle for Ella. I thought of how she had made all of this possible for me, the good, the bad, the ugly — and the beautiful. Thank you, Ella, I thought, for my Italian aventura. I was quickly choked up with emotion and with gratitude and with missing her, the plucky little farm woman from Pennsylvania.

Arriving back at the Hotel Vasari, I discovered my double room to be minimalist, but bright and clean, with a gleaming toilet, bidet, and shower all my own. There was even a hair dryer. I nearly fell on my knees and wept with gratitude, but instead I stripped off every stitch of my sweat-soaked clothing and proceeded to unpack every single item from my suitcase and backpack. I plugged in my laptop, and threw out all the random bits of paper and receipts I had accumulated, along with used-up toiletries and my grungy box of soap. I re-folded all of my clean clothes. Then I took a long sandblast of a shower, after which I dried my hair and applied makeup, two things I hadn’t done in a very long time. When I walked out into the evening I felt regenerated, and more attractive than I’d felt since leaving the States. Three young Italian men passing by on Faenza seemed to concur.

I went straight to Osteria Pepo. Stepping inside, I found a warmly lamp-lit, classy interior with wine bottles lining the back bar, and was greeted — much like at Arancia Blu — with a gratis glass of sparkling wine. They had me at hello.

The crostini I ordered were superb — one topped with Tuscan white beans, another with a zucchini pate, another with a classic fresh tomato sauce. The liver one I didn’t eat, for obvious reasons. And it was here, at last, that I got the good gnocci, swimming in tomatoes and fresh melted mozzarella. (I finished with a cappuccino and tiramisu, which was good, but not oh-sweet-Lord-in-heaven good, which tiramisu really should be.)

I went back to my room to write for a while, and heard the shouts and cheers begin when Italy defeated Germany in the latest football match. Long after I’d gone to bed, the honking and the yelling and the screeching tires continued.

Which left me susceptible to a blast from the not-so-distant past. I check into my social network infrequently these days, to deal with invitations and requests and to share my published articles…but this week I saw him in the news feed. A brand new picture: Sonny lounging barefoot in a patch of clover, propped on his elbows, heels kicking up like a kid. My heart was wrapped up in clover/the night that I looked at you. He’s growing his hair out, the way I always liked it best, and I think now that I lied when I called Rick the most gorgeous man on the planet. I wonder who’s kissing him now…

And I remember keenly some of the urgency I felt about leaving this town. Two weeks ago, one of my worst-case scenarios occurred without incident — I ran into my old studio boss, she of the batshit-insane emails — but she carefully avoided me, and I felt freer for that careful avoidance. Sonny, however, in his mere two-dimensional glory, has me running for Trebbe Johnson’s book again, seeking conceptual aspirin for these sudden chest pangs.

**

My lovely, groovy, gypsy-skirted friend Diana wrote this week on her blog about “god-love,” about hanging out with her free-lovin’ Dances of Univeral Peace/Course In Miracles hippie peers who make out on couches at parties like unchaperoned adolescents, and for only the four hundredth time I feel left out of the divine acid trip — without, in all honesty, feeling that bad about it. I’m definitely not a raging atheist like Bill Maher or Christopher Hitchens — I believe the best things in life are a mystery — but I also appear to be made out of spiritual Teflon. Considering how thoroughly my childhood insecurities were exploited in order to force-feed me the so-called Bread of Life, it’s a wonder I’m open at all to what those two gentlemen consider utter balderdash. I’m not going to argue with Trebbe or anyone else about my desires and cravings being misdirected longings toward The Divine…but based on my own experience (or lack thereof) they may as well be telling me that they’re misdirected longings toward The Heavenly Unicorn. I cannot tell a lie: God has never slipped me the tongue. Not with my knowledge, anyway.

Although Sonny is something of a “little-g” god. (I doubt there are two 21-year-olds alive who could in tandem outshine this luminous 42-year-old.) But this is why I have always adored Dostoevsky: his characters are passionate, lusty, complex people possessing tremendous depth of thought and feeling who struggle with a burning doubt in anything “divine.” He fully grasps the intoxicating allure of beauty (see Dmitri Karamazov’s unforgettable monologue) and the transcendental elements of desire. He shows extraordinary (one might even say Christlike) compassion for human vulnerability and our misguided, shame-driven actions. When he presents God as Love, you can almost believe. But you also get the feeling the author never fully settled the question for himself.

**

This week I’ve gone back to listening to Nick Cave, who (I would point out to my music-loving German friend, were he here) makes my darling Damien look about as sunny as The Partridge Family. Well versed in Biblical lore, Mr. Cave is a die-hard old-school goth romantic forever lamenting the loss of some dark-haired temptress with long fingernails. He knows fruitless yearning and restless seeking like the back of one of his bony hands. Little wonder Wim Wenders chose Cave’s dark, dissonant “Carny” and “From Her to Eternity” to bring together angel and trapeze artist in his marvelously subversive landmark film “Wings of Desire.” Bruno Ganz’s soulful angel gives up direct spiritual communion with God for fleshly communion with a human being! Talk about your wacky reversals! The two piano-driven songs to which I keep returning are “Nobody’s Baby Now” –

There are some things love won’t allow
Yeah I held her hand but I don’t hold it now
I don’t know why and I don’t know how
But she’s nobody’s baby now

and “Do You Love Me” –

I found God and all his devils inside her…
So completely filled with light she was…
All things move toward their end
I knew before I met her that I would lose her

What a line. I knew before I met her that I would lose her. That’s pretty much where I’m coming from these days. It sure wasn’t wrong about my good buddy Rick. Then again, in the grand scheme of things, it’s not wrong about anybody, is it? Maybe that’s the lesson to be gained from my various beautiful and disappearing teachers. The Buddha had it right, after all: impermanence is the only permanence. As Damien wrote, Life taught me to die.

But I’ve rambled on quite enough already. Here, without further ado, is my post-Centro diary from Rome.

Part 6.1 ROMA (ROME)

I begin this final chapter in the Piazza Della Madonna De Monti, on Via Dei Serpenti, just off of Via Cavour. There is a little fountain here, and up the street is some of the most killer gelato in Rome (Gelatone). Rome isn’t as big as you’d expect…you can get everywhere you’d want to go on foot, if you don’t mind a good walk. The blocks are shorter, usually, than in most American cities, so distances on a map look greater than they really are.

The journey was fairly uneventful, although I was glad to have given myself an extra hour in Milan because I had to navigate the subway system in order to get to Stazione Centrale. Here’s proof of how freaking hot it is in Italy: I didn’t have to go to the W.C. once during the four-and-a-half hour train ride. (In general, my usual problem is not a problem, even though I’m drinking litres and litres of aqua naturale, because here you sweat copiously and all the time.)

After a little bit of searching in the neighborhood of the Teatro Dell’ Opera — it took me some time to figure out that the street names are chiseled on the buildings — I found the YWCA tucked away almost invisibly on a side street. This particular area, near the Termini station, reminds me a lot of Boston, but I guess that’s not incomprehensible given than Boston was built by former Europeans. The crazy thing I noticed about Rome right away is that in these busy metropolitan areas, you may see some big chunk of ancient brick sitting in the middle of everything, an unnamed, unknown arch or wall. In the piazza Largo di Torre Argentina, there was a sort of interrupted dig in the middle of it, with a row of crumbling columns. I read somewhere that the third line of their subway system has been stymied by the ongoing accidental excavation of yet more undiscovered ruins. What a place to live — it’s a perennial treasure hunt.

The YWCA is an undiscovered treasure all its own. Girlfriends, take note! It’s a clean, quiet, pleasant environment specifically for women, although a man can stay if he’s with a woman. It feels safe, there’s no tourist stampede or rowdy college students, and the staff is friendly. My first night there, I had the 4-bed room to myself. Which is exactly what I needed — someplace safe, quiet, and cloister-like, to decompress and lick my wounds. Of course, quiet is a relative term when the streets are full of wilding Italian football fans. World Cup fever is in full swing here, and when Italy beat the Ukraine on Friday night, Rome turned into Boston after a Patriots Super Bowl win, with honking and hooting and hollering continuing long into the wee hours.

I followed my Let’s Go book’s advice and found the Hostaria da Bruno, near Termini, for a late (though not for Rome) dinner. The place was lousy with Americans, and for this reason I rather defiantly spoke only Italian with the waiter. I ordered a half litre of red wine, an insalata, and a plate of gnocci.

I never did manage to find a decent salad in Rome. I had a gorgeous salad in Pettenasco, with crispy dark greens like arugula, and a wad of the freshest mozarella you can imagine. And the pasta in Orta was everything you’d expect from Italy. But this salad was iceberg, and the gnocci was nondescript and a little too salty. I was disappointed.

Then the waiter suggested the special dessert, made (from what I understood — he was speaking only Italian to me) fresh that day. I agreed to give it a try.

It was the redemption of the entire meal. Santa Maria, was it good. A sweet, creamy vanilla custard, topped with a compote of small savory-tart berries I didn’t even recognize. They made me pucker. With a cappuccino, it was perfect. Somehow, a little wobbly with all that wine, I made it back to the YWCA and to bed.

The next morning I set out for the most distant sights, intending to get all my most tiring walking done on the first day. After a meager Italian breakfast of a croissant and a cappuccino at a nearby snack bar (Rome is full of these), I headed for the Villa Borghese, which, from what I could tell from my book, was a place I definitely wanted to see. The Galleria Borghese sounded wonderful, less of a tourist madhouse than some of the other museums, and it contained masterpieces by Caravaggio, Titian, and Raphael. From there I planned to head across the Tiber river to Vatican City.

I started at the basilica Santa Maria Maggiore, close by the YWCA. An impressive twin-domed structure, the interior of which dates back to the 5th century, it crowns the Piazza Dell’Esquilino where I had my cappuccino. It was built as a shrine to the Virgin Mary on the site where an apparition supposedly appeared, and the presiding Cardinal is none other than the scandal-plagued former Archbishop of Boston, Cardinal Law. (I went inside it the following day during a mass, but the part that was open to the public wasn’t all that amazing, unfortunately.) Directly across the main street Via Cavour began Via de Pretis, and I started up this street, soon cutting due north to walk through virtually deserted cobblestone streets in the government district (which reminded me of Beacon Hill and Cambridge back home). It was relaxing to be off the beaten path. Before I knew it I had reached the huge, green public park that is the Villa Borghese, and was at the manor-like Galleria.

A traveling Raphael exhibit had packed the place, and I found out that tickets were sold out through July 5th. Resigned, I decided to explore the park, which was a shady oasis in the oppressive Roman heat. Scipione Borghese had commissioned this immense garden upon becoming Cardinal in the early 17th century, and the Galleria was built as his villa suburbana.

I love the Villa Borghese. I would spend a good deal of my free time here if I lived in Rome. There are garden sanctuaries within it that were retooled in the 19th century, such as the Corinthian-columned Temple of Aesculapius, which sits amid flowering bushes on a still, idyllic little pond. Old Italian men sit on the park benches, and there is a zoo at the far end near the modern art museum (Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna). I walked beyond the Villa for a few blocks, past the museum and off my map, to the end of one of the Metro lines and a statue of Winston Churchill. Here I sat down to rest my weary feet, swig from my bottle of mineral water, and munch on the apple Elke had given me for the road.

From there I made my way across the park to the Piazza del Popolo, the people’s square, with its mirror-image domed churches Santa Maria dei Miracoli and Santa Maria in Montesanto. I hunted on side streets for a good lunch place before deciding on an elegant but affordable pizzeria with sidewalk tables. The pizza was tasty, but not nearly as tasty as the pizza I had had in Novara, with its wafer-thin crust.

Piazza del Popolo was only a short distance from a bridge over the river, and after crossing I cut south to Piazza Cavour, a place I was determined to see as a self-respecting Morrissey fan. His latest album had been written here, in Rome, featuring his signature sound samples (every time I heard a Roman emergency siren, I expected to hear him launch into “The Youngest Was the Most Loved”) and he mentions this piazza in “You Have Killed Me.”

A brief tangent (indulge me): I feel an even greater kinship with my former comrade-in-despondency these days, because his Roman experience ostensibly involved the breaking of his legendary, lifelong (romantic) losing streak. The new songs recount, in more detail than his coyness usually allows, a reluctant joining of the ranks of the content and fulfilled. Horrors! Someone has killed our morose old Mozzer! “At last I am born,” he croons at the album’s conclusion. I didn’t break my own perennial losing streak in Italy — I revisited it — but I did have something like this happen before I left, which defied all of my negative (and usually accurate) expectations. As for my own Italian journey, Moz’s first track “I Will See You in Far-off Places” has become something of a theme song, apparently written to some long-lost, beloved wiseass:

It’s so easy for us to sit together
But it’s so hard for our hearts to combine…
And I will see you in far-off places…
I believe I will see you somewhere safe
looking to the camera
messing around
and pulling faces…

I found the piazza, bordered by the pretty white Chiesa Valdese (church) and the massive Palazzo di Giustizia (Palace of Justice). There were very few people around. “Piazza Cavour,” I serenaded the Palazzo, “what’s my life for?”

Then I was ready to move on to Vatican City.

I followed Via Crescenzio to the Piazza dei Resorgimento,  where you first see the thick brick walls of the City. On the island in the center by the Metro tracks were clumps of overheated tourists and several African men selling duffel bags and luggage. They must have been doing so illegally, because when a police car drove into their midst they scattered and ran. I stopped to rest and to write in the shade outside of a gelateria before starting around the high brown wall in search of an entrance. I should have just looked in my book, because I wound up going in the wrong direction and hiking around the entire perimeter. My feet were hurting by the time I found the ingress by the Piazza San Pietro. I couldn’t help but think: what the hell is the Pope so afraid of that he has to live within this bloody fortress?

The Piazza was full of pigeons and tourists. St. Peter’s basilica was very large and imposing in the background, but I was too tired to do anything but take a few pictures and sit down. After that, without consulting my map, I headed down Via Della Conciliazione, again in the wrong direction, until I reached the Piazza Pia in front of the truly ancient Castel Sant’ Angelo, built by Hadrian in the first or second century. I was by the river again. Stopping, I wondered if I should just head back downtown. It was nearly six o’clock.

Accidentally, I made eye contact with a short, balding fortysomething man crossing the street, and he asked me for the time. Suddenly he was asking me a barrage of questions. (Here’s a tip for the womenfolk: never make casual eye contact with a strange Italian man unless you mean it.) I answered most of the queries good-naturedly (where was I from? what did I do?) until this man, named Giuseppe, asked me “Do you have a boyfriend who loves you?”

Not only did that make me wince (ouch), it made his intentions crystal clear. With a somewhat forced laugh I said “I think this conversation is over now,” and turned toward the Vittorio Emmanuele bridge. “Wait! Wait! Signora!” I could hear him calling behind me. Bye bye, Giuseppe. Thanks for letting me know it was time to leave.

It was a long walk back to the YWCA, down Corso Vittorio Emmanuele, past the aforementioned ruins in the Largo di Torre Argentina, through the Piazza Venezia with its huge white marble monument to king Vittorio Emmanuele II. Here I helped a lost Australian tourist locate his whereabouts on a map. From Venezia, I took less touristed side streets over to Via Cavour, and from there it was a straight shot back to Santa Maria Maggiore and the YWCA.

After cooling down and looking through the food listings in Let’s Go, I decided (rather insanely, after all that walking) to venture southeast of Termini into the San Lorenzo neighborhood for dinner. There was a vegetarian restaurant there called Arancia Blu, Orange Blue, which opened at eight-thirty (Romans eat late). It was probably at least two kilometers away, but I started off anyway, walking the length of the Termini station to Via Bibiana. It was definitely the skids along that route, complete with abandoned buildings and drunks, and I wondered about the walk back after dark. Once I turned onto Via Tiburtina, I found myself in a vital, if run-down, area that reminded me of parts of Somerville, Brookline, or Cambridge (Massachusetts). This was San Lorenzo, south of the city university, and it had that youthful, vibrant, multicultural vibe found in urban student neighborhoods. There were a lot of kebab shops and ethnic restaurants, and I loved it immediately.

I passed by Arancia Blu at least once without seeing it, a concrete building covered with graffiti. It was only eight-fifteen, but the pretty green-eyed waitress told me I could sit down anyway. I opted for the attractive raised wooden patio. A squarely built gentleman with salt-and-pepper hair (who, unbeknownst to me, was the chef) came to ask me if I wanted red or white wine. Apparently they give you a free glass at the outset — how cool is that? — so I asked for white. The man returned with the wine and a small plate on which were the two most delectable samples of focaccia I’ve ever tasted.

I liked this place.

I ordered a pasta dish with saffron and asparagus from another waitress, who reminded me of a slimmer, more unassuming version of Ingrid Bergman with a longer nose. (The pasta came very al dente, and was bright yellow.) While I was waiting for my food, a young woman, looking vaguely retro-punk with black-rimmed eyes and a black Blondie T-shirt, sat down at the next table and spoke American English with the waitress. She looked like my kind of people, so I struck up a conversation. Her name was Julie, and she was a student at the state university in Atlanta. This was her last day in Italy. She had come back to San Lorenzo because it was one of her favorite parts of Rome. We chatted all through dinner, through my decadent dessert of chocolate cake (so dense it was like fudge) with bitter orange sauce, and she told me where to go in Florence for good food. Specifically, Osteria Pepo, next to the very popular ZaZa’s. I wrote this down.

We walked back to the hostel neighborhood together afterward, and I felt completely safe.

The next morning after breakfast I sent out my travel diary from the YWCA computer. I had to retype the whole damn thing, because there was no way to hook up my laptop to the Internet (this was true at Internet points around town as well). Then I made an online reservation at the Ostello Archi Rossi in Florence for the nights of the third and fourth. The Web site confirmed availability for both nights in a 6-bed dorm.

It was eleven-thirty when I finally set out for the Ancient City. It was much closer by, fortunately; I was really feeling the effects of yesterday’s trek. Walking through the Domus Aurea park, where Nero’s house had been, I arrived at the Colosseum.

I had gotten quickly accustomed to Rome’s Renaissance grandeur, but this was something else entirely. There’s old, and then there’s old. The remnants of this colossal structure truly belonged to another, dead age. I didn’t pay to go inside; having only two days for all of Rome, I had determined that I wouldn’t spend much time standing in line. From outside you can get glimpses, through some of the arches, at the stadium inside, and that was enough for me.

I had a forgettable lasagna and another iceberg salad at Luzzi on Via di San Giovanni in Laterano, the street across the Piazza del Colosseo from the Colosseum, before entering the ruins. I took Via Sacra, the oldest street in Rome (a stone-paved pedestrian walkway), past what was left of the famous Roman baths (walls) and the Temple of Venus (ten columns), to the well-preserved Arch of Titus, A.D. 81, which depicts the sack of Jerusalem. Here there was a splitting-off of streets: Sacra, Nova, and Clivus Palatinus, with stairs on the Sacra side leading down into the sunken area of the Forum. Clivus Palatinus led to the Palatine Hill, but I didn’t feel like shelling out for the view when the rest of the Ancient City was mine to see scot-free. I descended into the valley and wandered amid modified temples like the columned Temple of Antoninus and Faustina, which had been (like so many buildings in Italy) remodeled by later architects and turned into a church. Other temples like that of Vesta, up on the hill, were nothing but a crumbling wall, and the adjacent House of the Vestal Virgins could have been any number of things. I read in my book that the Vestal Virgins were among the most respected people in Rome, with the power to pardon prisoners – but that if one of them was found to have partaken of the pleasures of the flesh, she was buried alive with a loaf of bread and a candle.

May I take a moment here to vent? Jesus H. Christ, I am so over this ancient, culturally pervasive madonna/whore business. We’re still feeling the effects of centuries of this perverse dualism, this sexual sickness. You can be esteemed, like a Vestal Virgin, or dispensed with, like a worthless piece of shit. (Sound familiar??!!!) I want to be a Sacred Prostitute, goddammit. These ladies, Heterae, tended the goddess temples in Greece, and healing powers were attributed to their sexuality. A war-scarred man limping home after the trauma of battle might go to the temple to be “healed” by one of these respected priestesses. (Yeah baby, I’ll heal you up real nice!) Deena Metzger wrote a famous feminist play inspired by this practice, “The Woman Who Slept With Men to Take the War Out of Them.” At the root of it, it’s about engagement, about giving something back to a man that has been sorely lacking: not merely pleasure, but the Feminine itself. Literally, it’s about “plugging a man back in” — to connection, to community, to the ethic of care.

I kicked around in the ruins for a little bit longer, and then exited up to Via dei Fori Imperiali, crossing the street to have a look at the bits and pieces of the Forum of Augustus. I recognized where I was immediately; down the way was the gleaming Vittorio Emmanuele II monument, and here was the beginning of Via Cavour. I took Via Cavour to Via dei Serpenti, where I found the heavenly gelato at Gelatone, and sat in the piazza to begin this massive missive.

I checked my email at an Internet point on the way back, and discovered that Ostello Archi Rossi had confirmed me for only the 4th, so once at the YWCA I used their pay phone to call Florence. The young man on the other end of the line told me that if the email confirmed only the 4th, then they only had availability on the 4th. “That would have been nice to know before I made the reservation,” I said. He repeated himself about availability. “All right,” I said, realizing I was getting nowhere, “whatever. Can I cancel my reservation?”

That made him change his tune. He actually checked availability, and said that they had a space, but that he couldn’t take my reservation over the phone. I was to email them and authorize them to charge my credit card for the night of the 3rd. I paid the YWCA the 2 Euro to use their Internet (their minimum charge, for an hour) and followed his instructions. Then I went back to my room to freshen up before heading down to San Lorenzo. I wanted to have my last dinner in Rome there.

I took a different route and thought I had gotten lost, in a very down-and-out looking area by an ancient ruined bridge, but I do usually have a bloodhound’s sense of direction (despite yesterday’s Vatican fiasco) and eventually found myself on Arancia Blu’s street, Via dei Latini. I explored the neighborhood for a while, looking for an open restaurant, but in this part of town it seems everyone opens late. After eight o’clock I gave up, already ravenous, and went to see my friends at Arancia Blu.

The green-eyed waitress, Silvana, was there, and let me sit outside again and eat bread. We talked for a few minutes, and I mentioned that I had been working up at Lake Orta. She was from the lakes region herself, but had never heard of Centro. The Bergmanesque waitress, Daniela, who had waved at me when I passed on the street, brought me a glass of sparkling wine to go with my bread. When the kitchen opened I ordered the potato and mint ravioli, which was certainly an interesting combination, if not ecstasy-inducing. For dessert they recommended the parfait of eggnog, which had a marsala-caramel glaze that gave a wonderful bitter tang to the creamy sweetness underneath. Daniela brought me a (gratis!) glass of marsala to go with it, and I sat back, content, chatting with the cute college-aged couple from California at the next table. Life was good.

When I left, reluctant to part for good from this new home away from home, Daniela motioned to me, and made her way around the tables to kiss me, Italian-style, on both cheeks. This pleased me to no end. What a terrific place this was, and what marvelous people, like a slightly upscale, Roman version of my local organic community cafe at home — only with free wine.

Walking out into the night, I heard drumming. I followed the infectious tribal beat to the piazza near the clock tower where I had snapped a picture earlier. (I have no name for the place; it’s off my map, and nowhere on the Internet.) A crowd stood there watching a group of student activists in blue and orange costumes dance in front of a banner decrying the Mexican government for human rights violations. It was election week in Mexico, but I wasn’t sure what these kids were advocating in terms of Italian participation. All the fliers had already been handed out, not that I could have read them anyway. Still, it was fun to watch their choreographed dance and catch the contagion of their youthful energy, that spirit of resistance.

They moved on down the street, and I turned back toward Termini. The marsala and the good people of San Lorenzo had calmed my nerves enough that the walk back, along those dark and deserted streets, gave me no pause.

I did express trepidation to my friends, over and over again, that the longer I stayed here, not following my intention to live abroad, the more momentum I would lose, and the more likely it would be that I would become embroiled in some new drama on the local level that would suck up all of my energy and motivation. I wasn’t wrong. Candy-loving AlienBaby got a job working alongside some tasty boys, and wound up, once again, in a metaphorical Shanghai.

**

But there’s more to it than that. I realized something earlier this week when my cannabis-clouded friend was unusually clear-headed: there is something entirely palpable between us. I know that he has strong feelings toward me. I can see it; I can feel it. For my part, I simply soaked up that life-giving energy while it was present, adoring him right back (which wasn’t hard, as he really is fricking adorable). I’m glad I made the most of our time then, however, because he disappeared into a bleary-eyed fog the next day, before literally disappearing.

Within this certainty, I’m much more comfortable extrapolating that, as he never planned on having these feelings toward me, he’s not okay with them…or at least a significant part of him isn’t. At the risk of seeming like I’ve gone from one extreme (of severe self-deprecation) to the other (of insufferable conceit), I think the problem isn’t that Rick doesn’t want or care about me. The problem is that he wants and cares about me a lot more than he wants to want or care about me. And that is a problem. Just ask Psyche. It’s the age-old story…déjà vu all over again.

I was a little afraid, myself, at the outset; I felt vulnerable, overwhelmed by his radical differences in habits and lifestyle, and ambivalent about his appearance. But one of the most poignant things about this young man is that he has — throughout so many of the experiences that make men hard (and not in a good way) — retained a certain childlike wonder about the world, and an open, curious, friendly attitude toward other people. I feel as if I’ve had the rare privilege to have touched a heart that’s known far less love than it deserves, and is far less armored than one might expect. How could I not love this person, regardless of the package he came in? Sure, I may think he’s the most gorgeous thing alive now — but my faithful readers know he was not what I had in mind. And there were so many reasons for it not to work on any level. In spite of all that, when the moment came for me, I surrendered.

For a man, however, that kind of surrender may mean intolerable weakness, or public humiliation in the ignoble tradition of the hand-wringing Mark Sanfords of the world. The seductress Delilah cut Samson’s hair and robbed him of his strength; every worldly warrior since has been wary of her. She tied you to a kitchen chair/and she broke your throne/and she cut your hair/and from your lips she drew the Hallelujah, wrote legendary songwriter Leonard Cohen, a man who could easily be described by detractors as “whipped” and who actively savors that kind of surrender.

I mean Rick no harm — I mean him anything but harm (and I love those long black waves of his) — but the argument could be made that he’s better off not getting mixed up with me, a substantially older woman intending to move overseas. (I do have the occasional thought that he could always come along, as he wants to see the world.) Maybe it was better for James not to get mixed up with me, either. I don’t know. It’s just too bad if what was better for them didn’t involve me getting a little sumpin-sumpin.

Anyhow, without further ado, here are my reflections on that not completely dissimilar episode.

______________

PART FIVE: LEAVING OZ

I have stolen something from Centro d’Ompio.

A virtually useless item, cheesy-looking, and broken to boot, it has no value to anyone but me. It’s a Christmas mug with a broken handle. Most people drink their tea and coffee from glasses up at Centro; only Bisetti has mugs. But there was a certain working guest who absolutely had to take his tea in a mug, and this particular mug somehow found its way up the mountain, where it dwelt in a secret hiding place near the dishroom. And now I have taken it. HA.

Maybe it’s extremely third grade of me, but nevertheless. It’s all I have. No shirts no shoes no jackets no blues, to borrow from the old Mel Etheridge song “No Souvenirs.” I never even got a picture of the bloke.

*

Here’s one for the May You Live In Interesting Times file: I got an email from my mother, who has no idea what’s really been going on. As you may recall, she and my father are ultraconservative born-again Christians. She told me that they have been praying I’ll have “a very memorable experience” here. You can imagine the laugh that one gave me. Be careful what you wish for, Ma.

There were some definite bright spots my last week. Last Saturday night we had a barbecue at Bisetti. Marjorie and I were drinking a potent dark rum with coke; she got “leathered” and fell out of the hammock, to everyone’s amusement. Eddie, the newest working guest, a student in international relations from Long Island who resembles the young Daniel Johnston (not that that may mean much to most of you), is now Finn’s roommate. He’s a funny kid, and he and Finn get along extraordinarily well. That night Cosmo (in typical Cosmo fashion) had called Eddie “Herman” by mistake, and Finn was especially tickled because “Her Mann” in German means “mister man.” Finn and Eddie started bantering back and forth drunkenly…Finn harassed his roommate about his tendency to snore, and Eddie countered by accusing Finn of yodeling in his sleep. Somehow or other, the two of them eventually decided that they should be in a band together called “Herman and the Yordeling Snodelers.” Maybe you had to be there, but the two of them made me laugh harder than I have since…well, you know. I was definitely inebriated, myself, but it was the first time I’d had such knee-slapping fun since before my escape to Orta.

Eddie’s got the New Yorker sarcasm that never fails to crack me up, but I’ve been most grateful for the arrival of Finn. The man is a blessing, like sunlight — his mere presence can make the difference in the tone of your day. He fixes you with these serene green eyes as clear and pure as glacier water, and grins widely before erupting into uninhibited laughter that jumps two octaves. Such unabashed, high-pitched giggling from a man betrays a striking cultural difference; Centro’s Swiss groundskeeper Gerhard has a similar unselfconscious titter. American (and English) men wouldn’t dare sound so “girly,” but truth be told, it’s completely infectious, and a joy to be around.

Finn’s girlfriend will be arriving at Centro on the day I leave Italy, and I regret not being able to meet her. She is undoubtedly an amazing person. Sitting beside Finn at lunch and watching him talk, I considered what an incredibly lucky woman she is. Socrates would have pronounced Finn kalos, a word meaning both beautiful and good (of the highest kind).

One day at the bar I told him, “We should clone you, and repopulate the world.”

His response was to giggle happily and to respond in his incomparable Viennese accent, “But who then would there be, to love Finn?”

*

We were talking about attachment at one point. He’s definitely on the side of the yogis and Buddhists, and believes that we cause ourselves unwanted suffering by clinging to our experiences. He never takes photographs for this reason. This is one way in which we differ, although I couldn’t precisely articulate my disagreement at the time. But while sweeping bamboo leaves from the gravel path outside Centro, I thought of the famous Auschwitz survivor Viktor Frankl, who founded the school of logotherapy. In Frankl’s view of the world, there is no doing away with suffering — what is important is the meaning we derive from it.

I realized then that I don’t believe it’s necessary, or even desirable, to try to banish suffering from our lives – it seems, to me anyway, to be an attempt to escape our inescapable humanness, much like what those Western White Males were trying to do in subjugating or denigrating the Feminine. What I find that I need to do instead, more than anything, is to make some sort of sense of what happens.

I suppose that’s why I started writing in the first place, and telling these stories. Every culture on Earth has its stories and its storytellers.

This is one thing that appears to be universally human.

*

Hanna and Alessandro, perhaps intuiting that I would want to hear them (there have been no open discussions of what happened), shared some James stories with me. Alessandro told me about their trip to Florence together early on, where they enjoyed bloody, juicy steaks (very welcome after Centro’s strict vegetarian fare) and spent the evening talking with a couple from one of the Dakotas. The man was a fan of British television, and he and James apparently had a fantastic time together. Alessandro said he’d never seen James laugh so much. “He seemed really happy that night.”

Hanna told me about going to the nearby Ameno blues festival with James and Robert. Robert told the ticket booth that James was a journalist from Rolling Stone magazine, and that he was the photographer. Hanna, of course, was a groupie. Unbelievably, the gullible staffperson bought this shameless bullshit story and let them all in, free of charge.

*

Cosmo left on Monday, and I forgot to say goodbye.

Cosmo was frequently unintentionally, side-splittingly funny with his misunderstandings and mangled versions of English expressions.  He was an offbeat character to begin with, having gone through younger incarnations as a hippie and a Rastafarian; earlier this month he even visited an Aquarian community. James thought he was a total flake, naturally — when Cosmo and Mila were having problems in the kitchen, he said “Mila doesn’t seem like one who suffers fools gladly” — but I got a big kick out of him. And he coined my favorite catchphrase of all. One night when I broke a beer glass in the dishroom (much to Robert’s dismay), Cosmo came in, surveyed the mess, and pronounced sagely, “Shits happen.”

He didn’t understand my ensuing hilarity, but at appropriate moments thereafter, I would turn to Eddie (who had been my dishwashing partner) and repeat Cosmo’s wise words.

Christian and Marjorie left Monday as well. On their last night, I found out from Marjorie her actual age, which is thirty-seven. I couldn’t believe it. She’s almost twice Christian’s age. She could be his mom, for crying out loud. But that didn’t stop them from embarking on their little foreign affair.

Now I’m truly envious. Some people I know have trouble with a decade.

Alessandro stayed another day, and left at five in the morning by taxi. I didn’t get to say goodbye to him, either (though I imagine we’ll be in future contact). The night before, Gina was in Bisetti again, and I just had to get out of there and away from her. The last time I saw Alessandro, he was sitting beside her on the stairs. Her shiny black curtain of hair fell over one shoulder as she smiled up at him, almost leaning in to him. I wondered if she meant to give him a similar sendoff, the incorrigible little puttana. In Alessandro’s case, I actually hope she did. He could seriously use the boost.

As long as it didn’t come with a rash.

Me-ow.

*

On my last night at Centro, the group on retreat known as “The Libido Group,” who had been doing primal dances in the pavillion all week, had their going-away party. It became my going-away party, too. Robert played his best dance music, and I got decidedly drunk on a bottle of wine. Elke, Bettina, Finn, Eddie and I all danced to Marvin Gaye and Tom Jones. I even let a soused Hanna cuddle me and tell me I was “so cute.” She confessed drunkenly that she and Robert have been carrying on all this time (which everyone knew anyway), but my fifty bucks says she’ll be living with another woman before she’s thirty.

After most of the staff and working guests had gone, things got kind of wild. Juanita, one of the retreat-goers, a sprite-like African-American woman from Santa Barbara, got up on the bar with a slim blond German man, a German woman named Marta (who can’t be a day under forty-seven, but has a firmer body than I ever will) and a cute Indian guy named Ajit, and started dancing. Marta was the first one to take off her pants, and the others followed suit (or un-suit, as the case may be). Soon they were all topless, and by the end of Tom Jones’s cover of “You Can Leave Your Hat On,” they were all as naked as the day they were born. Robert had offered me a toke of some quality weed earlier, which I had, for once, smoked, so the entire thing felt completely surreal. And yet it wasn’t that sensational once you got used to it. Yeah, naked people. Dancing. Hey, this is Europe — big deal.

*

Finn was up early the next morning, and made me a cup of Earl Grey tea. I sat on the smokers’ porch with him eating cornflakes as some of the others roused themselves and started moving about. Eddie, Hanna, Mila, and Elke all came to hug me goodbye. Finn carried my luggage to the car and gave me a long, tight squeeze and his card. It was like he was kinda attached to me, or something.

Bettina drove me down to Pettenasco station. The train was twenty minutes late, and the waiting and waiting was a déjà vu. I felt nostalgic, there on another bright Italian morning, at that abandoned stazione. I knew I would never step in that river again. It was bittersweet as I hugged Bettina goodbye.

I had to change trains at Novara, on the way to Milan. There was so little time between trains, I wasn’t able to buy as much as a postcard. I wish I had gotten at least one, to commemorate the place where I was so beside myself with joy, if only for a day. Novara. Mia Novara. I don’t have any photos, and I disagree with Finn about them. I want to remember the place – how it was, and what it looked like, that one summer when I was thirty-eight and met that beautiful young Englishman in Pettenasco, the one who accidentally stole my heart. “It all goes by so fast,” I tried to explain to him, that long night in Bisetti’s kitchen. Ten years are nothing. When I come back here — if I ever do — I may have blue hair and dentures, and romance of any kind may be a distant memory.

Bettina and Finn both expressed the opinion that Mezza Coda chose her “time” because she was incredibly happy. Several of us were picking her up and cuddling her on a regular basis, Finn had taken to feeding her and keeping the other cats away until she’d finished, and Padma had gently cleaned her dirty fur on the day that she disappeared. According to them, the little kitty more or less said to herself, “It doesn’t get any better than this,” and gave up the ghost. It seems like a feasible theory. I wonder: is it possible for us two-legged mammals?

I mean, think about it. I don’t know about you, but if I could choose, I’d prefer to throw in the towel after a day like Novara.

The problem is, how do we know when we’re done?

*

Before I left the U.S., life seemed better than ever. I was (finally) focused, hopeful, living with intention, cultivating new and thoroughly healthy habits, feeling like I was getting somewhere. I started to experience a sense of trepidation (and some outright anxiety) about my Italy trip at some point, as if it were a tangent, or worse, something that might derail my fine progress, change everything that was good.

In a way, I turned out to be absolutely right. I mean, here I am, slacking off on my yoga and meditation practices, drinking more than I have in the last six months together, depressed, a bit lost, a tad hateful even.

Would I take it all back?  That’s the million dollar question.

Probably not.

Sometimes you live with intention, and sometimes life just grabs you by the collar and shoves you in the boat and takes you to Shanghai.

I actively resisted going. I did. I remember trying hard to keep my pulse down, that one day early on, when the cute English guy flipped up his shirt to show me what was apparently a newly flat and muscular stomach (he was so proud of the recent loss of his “loov handles”). That trash-talking rascal could look so inexplicably hot in a dishwashing apron, showing me how to turn the glasses over to let them evaporate, and giving me hysterics all the while. Jesus, there was just no way I could have ever helped myself. I was doomed, totally doomed, from day one. And secretly so thrilled, later, when he took to calling me “loov,” an endearment English women usually take as insufferably patronizing, like being called “honey” by your male boss. No matter. It made me unbelievably happy, James calling me this, with a tone of affection behind it. Almost as if he meant it.

Riding from Novara to Milano on the train, I had time to contemplate how often I’ve found that the old stereotypes are a lot of bollocks, and that it’s straight men who are frequently constrained by some kind of internal chastity belt. Put simply, you can’t get into both their hearts and their pants. At least not in that order.

My roommate Elke, as it turned out, understood a lot more that one might have thought about what happened, despite the language barrier. She had seen everything. She knew without my having to tell her, and I have to say I was gratified that she had only distaste – grimacing and shaking her head – for Gina. “Sometimes the men, they just want the sex,” she offered tentatively.

I had to laugh at this. That’s exactly where I got myself into trouble. It was me who wanted the sex, Elke dear.

It was my fault, in a way. I went and got greedy. Coming back from Novara, I experienced a kind of bliss, simply being there with James while he dozed. We were in the process of developing a quite wonderful bond, but I was the one who started to want more. I relished that growing ache of lust, that hunger that makes you weak with anticipation and need. It’s a bit addictive, no?  I thought I could have his warm body as well as his warm regard. But with men like James, you just can’t have both. I’ll never forget his nervous laugh when I told him outright that I wanted him — how young he looked all of a sudden, and how uncertain. It was as if I had betrayed him by changing the rules in the middle of the game. How dare I, indeed. First I make him start to give a fook about me, and then I want to touch his willy. Dirty play, that.

But by the end I didn’t even need it. I just wanted him to know how much I cared for him, which was the most unforgivable sin of all.

It amazes me, in retrospect, how little time it took to fall so hard and to have it end so abruptly. At the risk of exposing my abject geekiness — I feel like Jean-Luc Picard in that episode of “Star Trek” where he lives out an entire accelerated lifetime in another dimension, while unconscious for only fifteen minutes on his ship. Centro d’Ompio has been like that other dimension, and returning home will be like waking up. This has all been an episode in a parallel universe.  Or maybe a technicolor dream I had, after getting smacked on the head during a tornado.

*

But now I’m in Rome, and I’ve been walking all over town looking at all manner of buildings and eating all manner of food. I’ll try hard to make number six about my final aventuras in the citti d’Italia, since I know you’re probably getting weary of hearing me go on and on about my beautiful lost limey bastard. You know how I am, though. Such ruminations are part of the package. And besides, I never planned on any of it.

You know how it goes. Shits happen.

**

I almost didn’t participate in the yard sale. Two women on my floor let me know they were going to do it — one has just moved out — but I wasn’t sure I was ready to take that leap, to act as-if. As if I were really leaving, that is. Besides which, the forecast was for rain all day. I got a bunch of items ready and priced the night before, but in the morning I was reluctant to get out of bed. At eight-thirty I shuffled to the window and opened the curtain, expecting to see clouds and drizzle, but the sky was an uninterrupted blue. Throwing on some old clothes, I started carting things down the three flights of stairs. My housemates were already set up on the lawn, their secondhand wares spread out on blankets. I enlisted one to help me with my heavier items.

While I was still bringing armfuls of miscellanea downstairs, Meg Ferris showed up.

Margaret Ferris is a writing coach and blogger my age who leads writing tours in France and Italy, and who just came back into town after living in Portugal for a year with her sexy younger Portuguese boyfriend. In other words: my heroine.

Now here she was on my lawn, asking about my baker’s rack and my printer.

When I reminded her of who I was — citing emails we’d exchanged recently, in which I asked her for advice — she remembered, and said she’d been thinking about me. “I think I might have an idea for you,” she said. She had sent me her 29-step process to “taking a creative leap,” one she had gone through herself on her own recent journey, and she thought it might be interesting to have me be the first outside guinea pig, following her steps myself and publicly blogging about them.

I felt a thrill go through me. It was as if she had appeared out of nowhere and said, “I was thinking about how we could have you do precisely the sort of thing you want to be doing.” (She calls these kinds of happy synchronicities “juju,” when our intentions and actions seem to magically draw in serendipitous people and opportunities.) Meg said she had a full plate at the moment, getting situated in her new apartment, but we exchanged phone numbers before she carted off my former belongings.

Later that morning, a former work acquaintance came walking by. I started chatting with him about my European aspirations, and he mentioned that he had been intent upon going to Ireland last year. Amazed, I told him that that was actually my first choice of destinations. “I have a great book I could give you!” he exclaimed. This excited me even further. It was like getting two green lights in a row from the Forces of the Universe — not something, as you know, that I’ve experienced much, so I’ve been skeptical about trendy personal development concepts like the Law of Attraction.

**

I haven’t had any follow-up contact since then, although my former co-worker promised to drop off that book. I don’t want to be guilty of pestering Meg, especially since she asked for a little time…so, nervous and impatient as I am, I haven’t been in touch with her for a week. At least at the moment, I’m earning some income, so I’m not in quite as anxious a situation as I was last time around.

But this strange new employment opportunity has turned out to be the unexpected occasion for some additional lessons in (non)attachment.

**

For those of you who weren’t following my last comment thread, that progressive telephone fundraising employer did hire me on, after a probationary period in which I did well enough to merit over two dollars more per hour than the base wage. Amazingly, even though I tend to watch the clock, I don’t hate calling donors like I thought I would, because enough of the people turn out to be friendly, intelligent, and chatty once I get past the initial self-identification and the script’s bottom line. I also enjoy scoring substantial donations for good causes and watching my percentages rise. Plus the people who run the place are smart, ethical, and well-informed. So there’s one prejudice shattered.

Another was shattered when I started developing a crush on a younger coworker who isn’t at all what I consider my “type” other than coloring-wise (a brunette with dark eyes). Unlike the aforementioned Dexter, he’s by no means a “brain,” and physically he resembles a thin version of Kevin Smith in his Silent Bob incarnation (right down to the backward baseball cap). But he seemed — at least initially — somehow fascinated by me, asking me lots of questions about myself and gazing furtively at some of my better attributes (which flattered this horny old broad’s ego). So shortly thereafter I started matching his attentions, and what appeared to be mutual electricity crackled in the air between us like kindling. When he disappeared for the better part of a week I found myself suffering from disproportionately severe withdrawal symptoms.

After having been in a place of freedom from attachment for once, finally able to think clearly about my future, I was a little annoyed to be thrown back into the uproar I’ve been in for most of my life, but I decided to simply observe it — neither encouraging it or pushing it away. I tried just sitting with the butterflies and the all-too-familiar impatience and craving.

It was a new exercise for me. Usually I invent a delicious story to fit the more pleasurable feelings, project hopefully into the future, and lose myself in obsessive fantasies. Interestingly, the intensity of the feelings subsided after a couple of days, and I resigned myself to the probability that Rick had quit or been let go.

**

What a sped-up version of my old story! Girl meets boy, girl likes boy, girl loses boy, girl moves on. The whole process in just one week. I had to laugh. Maybe I am making progress. I tend to cling like polyester in Arizona.

**

He did return, eventually, but when (with that predictable rush of fight-or-flight hormones) I tried to resume the flirtation, I felt a change and a distance in his energy. The spell had been broken. Perhaps it’s my personal Heisenberg/Schrodinger observer effect in action — that the moment I focus on a man, his behavior instantly changes — but I didn’t habitually spiral into the usual self-questioning and overanalysis and brainstorming about how to get the magic back.

I made the firm choice, too, to refuse to feel ashamed of myself. Normally the little kid in me immediately believes — the way little kids do — that a rejection is somehow due to my inherent rejectability, and that I’ve been humiliated for showing (so baldly) my unreciprocated feelings.

Screw that. If I’m open, it’s to my credit, especially given what I say my values are.

**

Which reminds me…I mentioned, the other week, a much-loved teacher who impressed upon my adolescent brain the integral importance of authenticity in all things. He indisputably changed my life, with his mini-lectures on Zen and his Thomas Merton handouts and his in-class readings of Pablo Neruda. This past week, I received word that he had died (from I know not what) at the relatively young age of 61. I read a beautiful tribute written in a local paper by one of his recent students, and wept. I loved that man like a father.

If the woo-woos are right about each of us having a cheering section of personal spiritual guides and disembodied advisors, I sure hope he’ll be on my team.

I’d like to think, at least, that he’d be proud of me.

**

If I’ve learned anything from this latest tempest in a teacup, it’s how much our inventions can cause us to suffer (or not). Asking the perennial question, What The Hell Is This? was truly invaluable in this case. I became a total stranger’s creature in a matter of hours. So what was all that about?

As it so happens, I’ve lately been reading the literate and intimate autobiographical work The World is a Waiting Lover: Desire and the Quest for the Beloved by Trebbe Johnson. I think the title appealed to me because on some level I already knew that the voice I had been hearing — in the guise of Damien’s incomparable tenor — was the voice of the Beloved calling me back to my own truth, away from my “small-b” beloved. This has got to die. This has got to stop. This has got to lie down with someone else on top. He knew what I needed to do before I was ready to even acknowledge it, and the anguish in his lovely representative’s voice didn’t gloss over how much it would hurt.

It’s definitely more of a classicist-Platonist-Jungian-spiritual concept than a existentialist-Romantic-materialist-literalist one (and I’ve been on both sides of that fence): the idea that what we’re longing for and seeking is really much bigger than the one human person. Even six months ago, I would not have found this book all that useful or apropos. Today, I’m practically on the same page. Although I still refuse to conclude whether the Other is really a mirror or a parent or a portal or a body double for the Divine — all of which have been postulated by various psychologies, mythologies, philosophies, and religions, and are dutifully reported by Ms. Johnson. I’m partial to Rumi, myself, who experienced unsayable ecstasies through the medium of Shams Al-Tabriz, but who liked to leave things mysterious.

Dissolver of sugar, dissolve me,
if this is the time.
Do it gently with a touch of a hand, or a look.
Every morning I wait at dawn. That’s when
it’s happened before. Or do it suddenly
like an execution. How else
can I get ready for death?

If I’m that ripe to be dissolved, Silent Bob can come along with just the right look or the right touch and melt me in the middle of a night shift between ACLU calls. And it will have very little to do with Silent Bob and everything to do with my ripeness.

But that’s where I didn’t run away with inventions this time. And I’m proud of this: that I didn’t gallop full speed ahead and write the whole thing into a romance (or porn) novel the way I usually do, and then become inconsolable when things didn’t proceed as scripted.

As it turns out, if you don’t indulge a habit, it can cease to be one. Who knew?

**

But I still don’t have a plan for following that soul-call I heard through my darling Irish brother. I was discouraged to find out that a “green card” permit for Ireland would require at least $1000 and a year wait. (I still check job listings every day for sponsoring employers and organizations, but if you don’t have IT or foreign language skills, there aren’t many.) Residency for non-EU members is as tough to achieve there as it is anywhere else in Europe. (An artist friend of mine, a terrific, anarchic soul of considerable talent, said in response to this “You should just go!!!”) I did manage to get pictures taken and send off my passport for renewal, as it’s due to expire in six months.

My life coach friend has former in-laws in Holland, and might be able to find me temporary accommodations in the Amsterdam area. I’m still waiting to hear back from my best friend from high school regarding her cousin in London and her college friend’s brother-in-law in Dublin. My friend Karl, whom I mentioned last time, just emailed that old friend of his who lives in Dublin, so no word there yet.

Last week I joined Couchsurfing.org, an organization I found out about through Meg’s blog that lets world travelers help each other out by (you guessed it) providing their couches, guest beds, or floors as an alternative to hotels and hostels. I also attended a Peace Corps orientation meeting on Wednesday, but they don’t go anywhere I want to be. I even checked out The World by Road, a documentary film crew on a 2-year world tour who were passing through on their way up to Alaska, but nothing about the last leg of their trip or the people involved particularly struck me. I’m interested in seeing Alaska and Canada sometime, just not right now.

My dream, after all, is to be in Europe. I’ve never been quite this clear about anything. What I did during that summer in Italy, living my adventure and writing about it the way I write here, felt like what I was meant to do. (Incidentally, would you guys like to read parts — or all — of that journey?) Ever since I rode the buoyant current of that experience, nothing else has felt right. Maybe I’m hopelessly “self-indulgent,” something of which Elizabeth Gilbert has been accused (and I fear she stole all the available thunder, too), but so help me God, this is what I want to do.

It would be great if Meg could help me find the means, because as you know, I lack funds. I’ve certainly worked hard these last twenty years, but like so many people have nothing in the bank to show for it. This is my largest obstacle. I’d be more than happy to write under the auspices of her Web site or blog if it meant getting financial assistance or sponsorship on my mad journey.

**

But then again, it may take something entirely mad. About ten days ago, I had the delight and privilege of going to hear the wonderful, internationally loved poet David Whyte talk about his latest book The Three Marriages at a local bookstore. Born in Yorkshire to an Irish mother, David speaks with gorgeous lyrical intonation on subjects like longing and vocation and what the soul really needs in a world based on logistics and expediency.

During the course of his talk, he told us the story of how Robert Louis Stevenson first met the love of his life, Fanny Osborne. A young man of slender means, Robert was out walking one night at dusk when he passed a large window, on the other side of which an elegant dinner party of about a dozen people was taking place. The window was slightly ajar. Peering inside, Robert saw a radiant woman sitting at the head of the table (who happened to be eleven years his senior, and married), and he was at once captivated and smitten.

“Now, perhaps, if he were like most of us,” said David, “he might go around to the front or the back door and make some inquiries about whose house this was, and so forth, or made a mental note to ask around in the following days, among people he might know in the area, regarding who that woman might be…generally going about things in the orthodox and polite way to which we are all accustomed.” But this is not what Robert did. Instead, he opened up that window and stepped right through, bursting in upon the party like a sudden apparition. Amazingly, rather than getting himself arrested, he made quite a hit at the party that night, and a strong impression upon the lady in question. Many years later (after Robert nearly died of consumption pursuing her across the American continent), they were married.

The point of David’s story being, as he told us, that sometimes you have to forego The Way Things Are Always Done and burst in through the window.

I laughed, and I cried. This is exactly what I feel I have to do, somehow. Break the rules. Do something crazy. Come crashing through the window by committing some original and unexpected act. And then the doors will start opening.

I just don’t know what the thing is. Will I have the courage to do it when and if I do?

**

Well, I practiced a little courage yesterday.

I saw Dexter Sunday afternoon, unexpectedly. He was working for someone else when I came into his cafe to write after finishing my weekend shift. Conversing with him over the espresso machine, I found that he still makes me flush hot in some pretty cool places. (And I know I’m not menopausal quite yet.) Such a bite-my-finger gorgeous boy…he has incredible bone structure, glossy golden skin, and enormous liquid eyes the color of seawater. Even the moles on his face are perfectly placed. Are the girls at his school blind, or just stupid?

Before leaving, I stopped by the counter again and asked in a casual joking tone if he needed to see my ticket to Amsterdam before he’d agree to have a beer with me. This made him laugh (and I think took him aback a little) but he was unhesitatingly open to meeting, possibly even this week. He asked me for my email address, in case we didn’t see each other there at the cafe. It was all very friendly and painless, and I walked away believing I’ll actually have a drink with Dexter very soon.

Beyond that, I’m not going to write a novel — porn or otherwise. I could be wrong, but I think he was actually pleased to be asked. For my part, I felt like a champ…or at least like a seasoned adult woman who knows what she’s doing.

**

And end note: this may strike you all as cheesy, but as long as WordPress provides me the means, I may as well do it. I’m going to add a PayPal ‘donate’ button so that readers can make a contribution toward the What The Hell Is This? European Dream Fund if they are so inclined. If some shameless blogger paid off her exorbitant debt through online begging, why should I feel bad about putting the option out there for people to give to something slightly more constructive?

Far be it from me to leave any stone unturned. Shoot, I’m even buying a lottery ticket every week.

And I’m already exhausted, between the tremendous internal pressure I’m feeling (increasing as the days go by) and the strenous efforts I’m making for hours every day to brainstorm possibilities and contact possible allies and research possible leads. Now that I’m finally open to anything and everything, opportunities don’t seem to be just magically appearing, the way the rah-rah intention people promise they will. It’s stressing me out.

I’m trying to just walk through it, breathe through it.

**

Although I’ve resolved to blow this cow town, I’m still looking for short-term work (doing things I would never have considered in the past, like cold-call fundraising) in an effort to ease my mounting financial worries. I will be completely cleaned out of every last dime in my existing bank accounts if I stay here through the month of June without working, and that’s barring any and all unforseen or emergency expenses. As it is, I hope to be here only through May. Then, perhaps (in the least desirable case scenario), I’ll have to load my pared-down belongings into someone else’s car (obtained through one of those companies that lets you drive cars cross-country for other people) and roadtrip back to my kinfolk’s state on the East coast, hopefully with enough money left in my pocket for gas, food, and cheap motel lodging.

There was a time when such a prospect would have driven me to leap out of a tenth story window. Now, however, being in this curious place of having released just about everything to which I was formerly so attached — including my beloved 1973 VW Beetle — dying along with my former life seems redundant and unnecessary.

My best friend back “home,” bless her heart, is busy trying to line up a place for me to stay other than at my fundamentalist parents’ house, but I really would rather avoid that eventuality altogether. Today a longtime friend called to tell me that an always cheerful and caring former co-worker of ours, only a few years my senior, had collapsed at work with a massive blood clot to the heart. (She’s currently in intensive care and in need of a heart transplant. Visitors and calls are being discouraged.)

**

I haven’t seen Rachel in years, but this couldn’t have happened to a nicer person. Or to a man sweeter than her husband, who lost his younger sister to suicide many years ago. Talk about devastating loss…

Suddenly it’s thrown into even sharper relief, how fragile these bodies of ours are, and how little time we have on this mad, whirling planet to do what we will.

When I feel pangs in my legs (I’m a prime candidate for clots myself) and the odd palpitations from my idiosyncratic little heart murmur, I have weird intimations of my own demise. Nate Fisher of Six Feet Under may have been a fictional character, but he was a kindred spirit: I always appreciated and identified with the way he grappled with his own mortality, ultimately to be dispatched by AVM (yet another circulatory disorder) at the age of forty. I honestly don’t think I have the constitution for longevity, either, and like our friend Russ, half expect not to complete another decade. So I’m no longer unconcerned about wasting time.

Going back to where I came from smacks of wasting time. As does staying here. I’ve been treading water in this place for a long, long while, feeling like I don’t quite belong…but waiting, hoping, for years, for certain outcomes that never turned out.

All of a sudden — with my growing discontent egged on by online self-helpers and coaches who essentially contradict the laissez-faire spiritual teachings (about non-striving and such) I tried for so long to embrace — I find that certain long-suppressed (not necessarily “reasonable” or feasible) wishes and longings of mine have re-emerged, clamoring at maximum volume, with an urgency that won’t allow me a day’s rest or a minute’s peace. I’m casting my nets wildly in every direction, driven to tears by internalized drill sergeants who hammer and hammer and don’t care that I’m doing the best I can with no fucking clue of what I’m doing. As if my life were riding on my ability to spin gold from straw alone and overnight. Where’s that fool Rumplestiltskin when you need him?

I’m looking for a way, and I needed it yesterday.

**

Today I heard back from the American University of Paris. They won’t accept applications from foreign workers who don’t have their work papers in order. Yesterday I was on the phone for forty-five minutes with my aforementioned friend Talia, who is an associate professor there and would be happy to put me up in her spare room, but she was as discouraging as the University about coming over without the proper work visa (which is apparently a bureaucratic nightmare to obtain). France is tough. Italy, from what I’ve been able to find out, is equally tough. Apparently the entire EU has tightened up its immigration laws a lot in the past few years. You used to be able to cross over to Switzerland for a couple of hours after your 90-day no-visa visit to Italy was up, and then come back for another 90 days. No more.

There are still some shortcuts available. If you’re a student, you can obtain a student visa and work up to 20 hours a week legally (of course there are also some under-the-table cash jobs around, like au pair). If you’re an entrepreneur planning on starting a business over there, they make it much easier for you to get your working papers. If you’re in a highly skilled, high-demand field like IT and get hired by a European employer, they also pretty much wave you through. I’ve read on blogs that Ireland’s immigration authorities don’t care that much about illegal Americans, so some employers (particularly in the tourism and food and beverage industries) don’t care that much, either.

I’m definitely leaning toward Ireland, but then again, I was already. Surprised? I thought not. Every time I listen to Damo now I feel this deep if irrational conviction that I need to go over there, with an inexplicable certainty that “soul-honoring,” mythically inclined authors like David Whyte and John O’Donohue and Thomas Moore would encourage me to trust. (Are any of you readers in Ireland? Need somebody to tutor your kids or hoe your garden? Wash your car? Write your dissertation? My email is right there on the sidebar. Seriously. Help me out.)

My highly skeptical friend Karl, probably the biggest pessimist I have ever met, tried to dissuade me from my mad notions by reminding me of the global recession and how difficult it is to find jobs anywhere — but I still managed to find out that he has a good friend in Dublin, and got him to agree to put us in touch. I didn’t try to enroll him in my crazy scheme, I just asked him for a favor. (You have to choose your battles.)

There are some volunteer opportunities over there with Simon Communities for the homeless, as well as with an international Catholic group assisting the disabled…they give you room and board for your troubles, and a tiny spending allowance of 50-65 euros per week. Frankly, I’m not so keen on going that route. I was a VISTA volunteer when I first came out here, so I’ve been there and done that. And twenty years of living on a shoestring has gotten pretty dang old. A girl needs non-holey socks and underwear, for crying out loud. Besides which, keeping basic cell phone service could eat up at least one-quarter of a month’s stipend.

Yahoo has a decent-paying Web editor job over there (and I bet they help Yanks get their legal ducks in a row), but you have to be fluent in at least one European language besides English, and even my strongest secondary language, Spanish, isn’t very good. I don’t think I could fake it. Should I apply anyway? Lord knows, I’ve been searching everywhere for jobs for which I might be qualified, through international recruiters and international job sites and even EU government sites. I spent five hours Saturday updating my profile on Monster.com (making very clear my desire to relocate) and doing just this kind of research. Today I was online for at least another four, clicking around and brainstorming, while also lining up possible buyers for what’s left of my poor VW and setting up a job interview at Telefund (ugh).

I’m effing wiped. And I’ll wake up tomorrow in a cold sweat and do it all over again.

**

Last Friday I started reading through my 2006 Italy diaries again. And I thought, damn, these are pretty good. I had the time of my life, really, living those singular experiences and then translating them to the page to share with my closest friends. In many ways, I felt like I was doing what I was meant to do. I loved it. Sonny even said to me (and I forget this, but it makes me pause and wonder whether he loved me more unselfishly than I loved him) that I should remind myself of that more expansive time, and try to get back to the feeling of what it was like.

So bittersweet: both being with him and being over there were wonderful, but mutually exclusive, dreams come true. He told me he was happy I found someone to laugh and love with — meaning that ultimately rejecting English s.o.b. — the memory of which makes me want to cry my eyes out for another hundred years or so.

(Cough.) Moving on…

Anyway, this is one case where internet research quickly became demoralizing. My coach recommended that I look into travel writing, so I started doing some searching, and turned up innumerable articles and blogs that basically all conclude “Don’t expect to be Rick Steves” or “Don’t expect to make a living at this.” My scarcity prejudices were heartily and repeatedly reinforced. The world and the Web are overflowing with wannabe travel writers, and there’s no demand and no market for all of you. The best thing to do, apparently, is to write those little 200-400 word “shorts” for magazines and Web sites at $25-50 a pop, and hope for the best, but keep your day job.

So fuck me, I guess.

**

But speaking of fucking me — on a lighter note — a quite young man (23, to be exact) I’ve known for several months seemed to be pitching me totally unexpected vibes the other day. I found myself perspiring a little, and feeling very Anne Bancroft. He’s an attractively geeky, bespectacled vegan philosophy student with a self-deprecating sense of humor who (now that I recall) once tried to buy me a drink at the coffeehouse/bar where we both sometimes hang out. I was on my way out at the time, but now I’m sorry I didn’t take him up on it. Damn.

Given that I could have a stroke tomorrow, and that I may wind up moving back to my birthplace or a whole other country within the next couple of months, maybe a little carpe diem is in order. Or should I say carpe vegan? Seize the vegan! (I just put a really filthy joke about eating meat here and then thought better of it. You can make up your own.) I haven’t laid a hand on anybody since you-know-who. I haven’t really wanted anybody, other than that impossible Brit. But Dexter (I’ll call him that, it seems to fit) really is pretty hot, in his skinny, brainy hipster sort of way. And he’s so fricking young! I’m absolutely floored, if that was actual electricity I felt crackling in the air. I don’t know that he’s not spoken for, but he was complaining that women don’t exactly flock to philosophy majors. (He should have gone to my college.) Holy crap, how many more years do I expect to be able to attract snackable young things like that? What am I waiting for?

What do you think? Shall I invite him over for some quinoa pasta and fill him up with organic wine? Steal up behind him as he’s looking around my apartment and nuzzle his slender neck, murmuring Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?

**

Looking around this apartment myself, I imagine I’ll start my possession eliminations with things like the television, which is all but useless without a digital converter box. The hardest thing to let go will be books and CDs, but they’ve got to be scaled back if I’m going to ship them cross-country or stuff them in a car. Scanning the kitchen, it makes me vaguely anxious to think about having to start over from scratch after how long it took to build up a decent stock of spices and secondhand dishes and utensils…but that’s assuming I’ll always be as poor as I have been.

It’s strange to consider that just six months ago I was still trying to acquire things for this apartment, to turn it into an inviting place where I would hopefully entertain a certain more-than-friend, eventually. I got art for the walls, and a desk, and a baker’s rack for the kitchen, and a new comforter and duvet (all, I should add, with a little help from my friends). I do love this space, it’s one of the nicest and brightest I’ve ever lived in on my tiny budget. If I were going to spend my life in one room, like Emily Dickinson, I might stay here. But I also know I can’t stay here forever, and it seems like Big Change Time is now or never.

The voices of pessimism start in, and tell me that things will get worse rather than better…that I’ll be lonely…that I’ll miss my friends…that I’ll be sorry. And I can’t tell those voices that I know they’re wrong. But I’ve let them hold me in suspended animation for far too long.

**

This evening I waved from the steps as the pleasant young couple who had just given me three hundred dollars for my rusty and problem-ridden Beetle pulled out into the street: he driving, having just gotten the motor running again, and she following in their battered pickup. They crossed the intersection, and I watched as they disappeared up the hill, the unmistakable put-put-put-put of the VW engine fading away for good.

I have had a recurring dream that I’ve somehow wound up somewhere very, very far away with that car — usually my state of origin — and I start to panic about not being able to get it back home (here) in its dilapidated condition. One time it rolled down an incline into a lake, and I was trying to pull it out of the mud even as it sank! Such symbol-laden dreams, telling of anxious, encumbering attachments to things that don’t last, and the lifelong horror I’ve had of getting stuck back in New England with my fervently religious family. I would wake up depressed and fearful every time.

Now my most dreaded relinquishings are becoming easy. After the job, after the community, after the man, the car is a piece of cake. Nonattachment will be forced upon you, whether you like it or not, and when it comes…

Well, maybe you’ll sleep better, after all.

For the past few days I’ve been sporadically weeping with elation, relief, and another sensation that doesn’t have as ready a name. Think of it as the sweet agony of relaxing the heart muscle into receiving kindness and respect after countless humiliations and cruelties have left it armored and tight. Or as the raw, painful reawakening of joy after thousands upon thousands of deadening disappointments. You receive kisses where you were braced for blows; bread where you expected a stone. I’ve experienced this exquisitely poignant sensation before on a personal level, and my country has heaped humiliations, cruelties, and disappointments upon its black citizens on a collective level for centuries — so when I saw the tears in Jesse Jackson’s eyes Tuesday night, forty years after he watched Martin fall, I crumbled with empathic overwhelmment. Could it really be? Could we, as a nation, have so resoundingly exalted a member of his perpetually embattled and subjugated race? Can we, dare we let ourselves believe it’s real?

Yes. Yes. Yes we have. Yes we can. The impossible dream of Dr. King has come true. Barack Obama, a brown-skinned man with an unabashedly African name, has just been elected as our forty-fourth president.

And he is clearly the best man for the job.

How can we not weep?

**

Over the weekend preceding the election, I committed an act of radical personal catharsis. My idea was to finally release my own obsolete, failure-ridden, profoundly unhappy past, and clear the way for transformation, at least on a microcosmic level. In other words, to do what I would have my dysfunctional country do. After all, as goes AlienBaby, so goes America! But seriously: over the space of two days and almost fourteen hours, I destroyed bales upon bales of old journals and writings, some of which dated back twenty-five years. I surrendered my history, my so-called “life story.”

I had wanted to burn them all for more than a year, ever since reading The Power of Now had led me to discard, recycle, or give away most of my belongings and reams of old files in an act I called “the purge.” I knew that those yellowing notebooks were packed full of miserable ruminations and regurgitations that had served only to aggravate and cultivate the chronic depression and self-loathing I had suffered throughout my adolescence and young adulthood. I saw them as relics of a dead past I had no desire to keep alive any longer. (Besides which, I knew that if anything were to happen to me, they were the last thing I’d want my family to read.)

As I still hadn’t found a convenient and legal place to incinerate them, they had been sitting in two heavy boxes gathering dust in a corner of my apartment. Charged up with optimism after voting on Friday, I decided that there was no better time to dispense with them. On Saturday afternoon, armed with nothing more than a pair of kitchen scissors, I began pulling off the cardboard covers and shredding the pages into vertical strips. By the time I was finally finished Sunday night, I had filled six large shopping bags with recyclable materials.

Along the way, I read passages here and there, revisiting the memory of my younger self. At times I felt shame at her naïveté and utter self-absorption; at others I was embarrassed by her ill-informed grandstanding. What surprised me most about the writing, however, was how much of the content was redundant, and how little of the style was as good as I had thought at the time. This was no great loss to the literary canon, believe me!

Its greatest value, I would have to say, lay in its ability to demonstrate the extreme acrobatics of a deeply insecure and thoroughly hyperactive ego. “The tongue caresses these exacerbations,” wrote Wallace Stevens, “…like a hunger that feeds on its own hungriness.” That more or less sums up my collected works.
**

There were only a few things I found worth salvaging. Some of what I pulled out I’ll reproduce here, starting with a Walt Whitman quote I’d all but forgotten, but which is still entirely relevant:

Why are there men and women that while they are
        nigh me the sunlight expands my blood?
Why when they leave me do my pennants of joy
        sink flat and lank?

What was I just saying last time?

Speaking of such men and women, I got to rediscover my first impression of my college boyfriend (and first love) León Arenas at our freshman orientation assembly.

A young man stands up. His stance is slightly slumped, head and pelvis thrust slightly forward, hands in pockets, with what could be called a cocky air. Adding to this is his distinctive clothing — a black T-shirt and light yellow pants with white suspenders. His brown hair falls above his ears by reason of its wave, but he has a sort of forelock tumbling rakishly over his right brow. His jaw is lean and wolfish. He has a lanky attractiveness about him.

“Yes…I was wondering…for those of us who plan to go to graduate school, and are worried about grades…”

Here, an appreciative chuckle from those in the audience worried about grades; confident of his audience, he continues, smacking of wiseguy/class clown: “I know math isn’t my best subject, and I’m sure there are people here wondering whether it’s their efforts that are going to be recognized…or just what they produce.” He strokes his chin for dramatic effect. Students are tittering at the weaselly question, and the asker’s awareness of its weaselliness.

Across the aisle, I’m thinking: Oh, Lord, and I thought I’d gotten away from this kind when I left high school. Stay away from this hotshot, he’s annoying, and probably full of himself.

Yellow suspender pants perpetuates this image at convocation: students traverse the stage to shake the president’s hand and sign a registry. He not only shakes the president’s hand but at the same time gives a little bow and clicks his heels together, eliciting titters yet again.

He was an attention whore, sure, but I loved him. And after spending fourteen hours reading over my own obsessive self-dissections, I know I’ve got no business calling anyone else narcissistic. (I used up a couple of volumes suffering excruciatingly and verbosely when my Argentinian smartass broke up with me and affixed himself to one of my best friends.)

**
Also among those thousands of pages were some of my sophomoric attempts at erotica. Much of it bodice-ripper-grade, and fueled largely by my vast frustration. Back in the days of the first Clinton term, when Kurt Cobain was still alive and everyone was wearing flannel, I scribbled this R-rated paragraph. It isn’t as graphic as some of my other passages, but it’s better written.

I confess: I respond to beauty in men. Beauty of a particular — perhaps peculiar — sort, but beauty nonetheless. I want them. All of them. I want a smorgasbord of slackers. I want a grunge buffet. Pure pleasure, to run my hands through and smell their tousled locks, caress their stubbled faces, and breathe in the strong healthy scent that the skin and even the breath of such men have…to feel the definition in their hard, lean muscles and rub my cheek against the silken sworls of hair on their bellies, and lower, lower still…Ah, the smell of a man’s sex in warm denim. The animal in the cotton. It sleeps there in a mound, hibernating. I like to see it there, to know that it is there, whether or not he is going to let me touch it, wake it up. When I know that he is not, and I can see that it is there, it makes me crazy.

I hope that at least puts François’ doubts about me to rest.
**

There were a few surprises in the mix, and odd moments of edgy levity. I was particularly delighted to find this little ditty, written as it must have been while I was sick in my noisy tenement apartment. I had forgotten all about it; it made me laugh.

FLU AT THE BOARDING-HOUSE

The bass from the alley neighbor
drills its beat into my bed;

the taxicab driver in number six
is walking on my head;

burrowed beneath my pillows, there’s
no rest for my aching brain;

no wonder no more why it’s always the poor
who kill, or go insane.

I do remember writing the following not-quite-nursery-rhyme in my thirties to a twenty-four-year-old who flirted outrageously with me but never made good on his threats or even returned my nervous calls. He was full of clever jokes and bravado, but in retrospect I think he may have been more nervous than I was.

AGE-APPROPRIATE VERSES

You pocket your posy,
my little boy blue.

‘It’s mine, you can’t have it,
so go suck on poo.’

It’s all games and nonsense
and nyah-nyah to you.

Nothing is serious
when you’re brand-new.

Crow’s-feet and varicose veins,
boo-hoo-hoo.

Worms will have eaten me
before you do.

That’s not really much worse than Ring-Around-the-Rosy, which is ostensibly about the Black Death. Ashes, ashes, we all fall down?

But it’s this piece of relative doggerel that sums up the entire bitter AlienBaby oeuvre in four short stanzas:

EVERYTHING GOES ALL TO HELL

Those lips that first kissed me, for hours on end,
soon made excuses, excusing themselves,
soon told me how he loved her well.
Everything goes all to hell.

Once, I was happy when she would call,
until grievance and blame and demand coerced me
to give her far more than I had to sell.
Everything goes all to hell.

He begged for love or scorn. The first
felt right. And Christ, but his eyes were blue.
Now he makes me watch him court young belles.
Everything goes all to hell.

When they dredge me up from the reedy depths
Blue and bloated like a manatee,
those who knew me best won’t say “She fell.”
Everything goes all to hell.

Nothing like a little suicide fantasy with your fatalism.

**

The biggest surprise of the weekend, however, was a long-forgotten passage written after one of the most heartbreaking “misses” of my twenties. Luke Taylor and I might really have been something, if either one of us had had the courage to put ourselves out there and not just bluff and duck (I’m a master at the hit-and-run). Luke was a gentle giant of a guy, lovely in his ragged hippie way, with whom I could discuss Virginia Woolf and Nabokov. He had a broad vocabulary when it came to his emotions, and when I looked in his clear, kind eyes I felt somehow at home. Reading that part of my story again, I could see how we circled each other for months like uncertain animals, each waiting for the other to do or say something definitive. The openings Luke gave me, I blew, paralyzed by the prospect that my actions might actually have an effect. I was frankly terrified about what might happen. Maybe he was, too. Eventually he moved away to New York to be with a woman who wasn’t afraid to ask for him. I wonder where he wound up, and whether he’s happy. I hope he is.

I remember being crushed at the time, however, and crying a lot, grieving the loss of a good connection that I knew intuitively could have been amazing. What I don’t remember is writing this after he was gone:

Tonight, I felt strength. More than that, I felt something like greatness. By that I mean, I felt bigger than anything that was happening to me. Without even considering the future — how I hate those well-intentioned advisings of ‘it will get better’ and ‘you’ll meet someone!’ — I found myself in a present where both nothing and everything were, at once, possible. Walking the tightrope of paradox, I was powerless and all-powerful. I had nothing, but because I had nothing I had everything. Kierkegaard’s ‘knight of faith’ makes sense to me! Finally I understand…the deathbed revelations of Prince Andrei, the postwar epiphany of Pierre Bezukhov (in War and Peace). To love everyone is to love no one in particular, is to be supremely free…I feel again the strength and fearlessness of having nothing to lose, and I can at last speak my mind. How many people, do you suppose, have felt that liberated fearlessness?

This is not the sort of revelation I used to have back then. I was never one for living in the present, or for feeling fearless. It goes without saying that this was long before I ever picked up Eckhart Tolle! But I had definitely had some kind of firsthand experience of presence, nonduality, and even transcendence here; I was describing something in language used by spiritual teachers I had not yet read, something I hadn’t understood when I encountered versions of it in classic literature. In contrast to all the incessant why-me left brain activity characterizing the majority of my twenty-five-year diary, the above paragraph stood out like a neon sign. It was like an intimation of awarenesses to come, awarenesses that would eventually lead to my active destruction of these same diaries.

Ironically, losing Luke seems to have led to the loss of the fear that in all likelihood contributed directly to his loss in the first place. If only I could have found that expansive space of equanimity before! I can rarely find it now, still invested as I am in outcomes, in doing or saying the right thing, and still taking everything personally — in other words, still living mentally in the past or future. Today I might be a little more aware of the necessity of separating Luke from my anxious need for something from Luke. The higher you make the stakes, the more fear can enter, and fear is the greatest obstacle to love.

At any rate, I will no longer be hoarding the painful stories of my past. They sit, ready to be hauled away, lacerated beyond recognition in six jumbo shopping bags. Good riddance to my mopey opus! I am bigger than anything that has happened to me.

Something African-Americans have known since this nation’s inception, and which the election of President Obama confirms.

President Obama. I love saying that.

This sensation, achingly poignant and at the same time broader than the Atlantic, had been a touchstone of identity for me since my teen years, when I traded smug religious certainty for a sort of tragic-romantic existentialism. Namely, that worldview in which the noble speck of a human creates fragile monuments to him or herself in a vast and indifferent universe, pushing the stone up the hill over and over again, attempting to seize the fleeting day, and raging, raging, raging, against the dying of the light….you get the drift. Pretty much a no-win situation, which Camus and Thomas, among a multitude of other modern and postmodern artists, apparently considered hard reality.

Some precepts of this philosophy’s sobering conclusions are that you are utterly separate and painfully alone in the world, and that you have one brief and all too destructible life in which to try to achieve your desires and connect with other humans, against stiff odds. This lends a terrible urgency and weight to the undertaking of relationships as well as ambitions. This is all there is. The beauty of the flower, or the girl, belongs only to that flower or that girl — so pluck it! Pluck it as though you could save it for yourself and press it like a leaf between the pages of a book. In a world of only form, one loves only form, the particulars and acqusitions of an individual life that are as ephemeral as individual blades of grass. You love her delicate profile and her fondness for Vonnegut novels and her collection of vintage Bebop on vinyl. But is that the totality of what she is, really? What about when she ages, changes, gets Alzheimer’s? Ultimately, in such a world, everything you love is lost, like piles of old letters thrown in the dumpster by unsentimental relatives.

**

My aforementioned stay in New Mexico came after a turbulent and perilous year. The witty but darkly pessimistic boy I felt destined to “save” (inasmuch as anyone can be “saved” within that fatal paradigm), a lanky Argentinian actor with beautiful green eyes who turned me on to Depeche Mode and Christina Rossetti, decided he would rather rescue my endangered princess of a friend from the dragon of her controlling boyfriend than continue to be the center of my universe. Bereft of his adored particulars, his unique tale of woe and his sensual lips (as well as my life’s mission), all seemed lost, and I nearly threw myself in the river that ran behind our college campus.

I did not, however, and by school year’s end had decided upon a radical change of scenery to cleanse my emotional palate. I went to Santa Fe to live with a friend and make cappuccinos for affluent tourists and artists. But in that arty community there was still much to stimulate that pressing sense of ephemerality, that deep, ineffable longing. (No one had yet heard of Ani DiFranco, but another unknown, a young African-American Tufts graduate named Tracy Chapman, provided the plaintive soundtrack to our summer, strumming an acoustic guitar and cataloguing a host of hopes deferred.) The stark landscape emphasized my smallness in relation to earth and sky, while the art spoke to me of striving toward things that seemed perennially just out of reach, like beauty, ecstasy, knowing fully and being fully known, timelessness, completeness, belonging. This longing was never without an object — I always thought of someone specific, and always with a pang of if only. If only X and I could be together in perfect harmony, then maybe we could create a green oasis of consummate joy in this desert of boundless loneliness and certain death, and all the secrets of the universe could finally be revealed. (A tall order, yes, but it’s the “irrational” part of us that makes the wishes!) When my friend and I drove back across the country at summer’s end, I was already driving back toward someone. (Needless to say, that didn’t turn out in my favor either.)

**

I realized, in feeling those pangs of longing again, that I’d strayed from it for quite a while — intentionally. It used to be an integral part of what I thought of as my identity. What happened?

**

The shift had been slight, but it was the kind of slight shift that when made by tectonic plates on the ocean floor creates tidal waves in Indonesia. It started when I began to actually listen to those who had had “waking up” experiences that were all very similar. People who had broken down and broken through. I began to listen, because I was breaking down too. The things I had told myself about the world and other people for so many years had left me with little but layered accumulations of increasingly unbearable pain and grief. I was on the brink of losing it.

Of course, sometimes you have to lose the world in order to gain your own soul.

What I discovered that these people had in common was a fundamental experience of consciousness as the awareness of the seamless oneness of all that exists (which is true on a molecular level, anyway, we’re swimming in an atomic soup), and the conviction that all suffering begins and ends with oneself, i.e. one’s reactions and judgments. (Even Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl argued for that kind of choice.) They also possessed the deep calm of the assurance of indestructability, a sort of non-rational knowing that they had (enviably) experienced firsthand.

As I began to afford them the benefit of the doubt, I began to afford more trust to my own perceptions and intuitions of what might exist beyond the surface forms of things. For the first time in my life, I was able to start to separate my observing consciousness from my repetitive and mostly unoriginal thinking, the running (and rather depressing) narrative called What My F-ing Life Is All About. It was freeing to approach whatever presented itself without that precious backstory, that complicated personal mythology. Almost gleefully, I tossed out loads of junk and stacks of papers, acquisitions I had been holding on to for decades. At the same time I noticed that, within those external and changeable particulars to which I always become so attached in people, there inhered something that felt eternal in a very immediate way, a sort of luminescent presence too bright to be extinguished. Within myself I felt a powerful response, something greater than my pain, my frustrated longings, and even my perfectly reasonable fears. With these discoveries came a peace and a reassurance that could be articulated as nothing you truly love will ever die along with your love will never truly die.

I would never have thought that being so “irrational” would lead me to a place of far greater sanity.

**

Within my longtime worldview, as I mentioned, almost every challenge or risk felt impossibly heavy and deadly serious, not to mention full of hazards. Everyday disappointments took on the gravitas of irreversible loss; urgent attempts at achievement or connection gave way to inconsolable grief. What an awful burden I placed on the souls whose cooperation I required for my fulfillment! Is any wonder that my poor actor opted out of trying to fill the role of my Purpose and Salvation in life? No mere mortal with a belly button and a butt-hole should have to shoulder such a yoke. Nor should he have to support a dependency so dire that a sudden withdrawal of the needed “supply” could result in blinding hatred or suicidal rage. Yet I demanded this of more than a few hapless individuals, and — surprise, surprise! — every last one fled.

**

The “awakened ones” said: your happiness can’t depend upon what anyone else does, because you have no control over what anyone else does. Find the places where you react, and inquire. What’s really going on here? Where am I wounded? Where am I lying? Looking deeply this way removes the clouds of self-deception from your heart, and uncovers the sun that shines perennially underneath, the radiance of unconditional love. (For one example of such an inquiry, you can read about Byron Katie’s Four Questions in this past post.) When you’re not trying to control other people, and not resisting the way things are, you naturally return to your original state of well-being, and are able to act in a manner mindful of theirs as well.

This made an astonishing amount of sense. That so-called radiance was the “something greater” I started to strengthen inside myself by refraining from doing the rational, usual thing and following the dictates of fear and self-preservation. By following their lead and delving inquisitively into my own reactions and projections instead of withdrawing from situations that cause me pain, I’ve begun to bring to light a great deal of unconscious behavior in myself, fundamentally shifted my orientation to the world, and opened up to greater generosity and lovingkindness. (Spiritually sensitive people frequently tell me I actually “look brighter.”) When I look at what passes for common sense about interpersonal relationships in the popular books and media, I wonder if we haven’t severely limited our experience and growth out of a short-sighted unwillingness to go through the discomfort of embracing something other than what we’d had in mind. It’s easier, I think, to blame others for their inconsiderate freedom (the nerve of some people!), and shut ourselves down, shut out the contradictory noise that refuses to arrange itself into our pre-written symphony.

Maybe it sucks to not get your way. But maybe it’s not “the soil falling over your head,” either. Is this all there is? What if there’s more to what-is than you think there is?

**

Those more enlightened than I would say that to directly access the numinous (or divine, depending on who you’re talking to) and to feel the resultant wholeness removes the sense of separation that creates the longing for it. All I know is that for most of my life I stood in art galleries and museums feeling like I was missing something. These days what I’m missing, more often than not, is the feeling of missing something.

I’d like to think that’s progress.

I had been reading a book by the Buddhist nun Pema Chodron — When Things Fall Apart, or was it The Wisdom of No Escape? — and some subatomic particle of wisdom must have penetrated my hard head. I remember walking down the street on a sunny day, lost in my usual obsessive and negative thoughts — why me, why me? — when suddenly, for no apparent reason, I looked up at the blue sky and thought, I am not that important.

All at once my anxiety dispersed, as if by magic. For several hours thereafter I remained in a state of calm and (dare I say it?) peace.

This was wholly counter-intuitive. I grew up in America, dammit, land of Davy Crockett and Horatio Alger and libertarianism. Isn’t the individual the measure of all things? Isn’t the whole point of life to distinguish ourselves from the herd, and to get our piece of the apple pie? Or to make it onto the cover of People magazine?

And then there was my upbringing in evangelical Christianity, which teaches us twice-born kids from birth that we’re so very special, our separate, unique little godfearing selves are so utterly important to our Heavenly Father, that He sent His Only Son just to die on our behalf so that our disembodied personalities wouldn’t fry eternally in the lake of fire with the godless heathens (who aren’t very special at all, apparently. Unless you’re a missionary or something).

Add to that some accelerated early learning — I was labeled as a “gifted” child, and did schoolwork two grades ahead for the first several of my elementary years — and, presto! you have a recipe for borderline megalomania. If Americans are superior to the rest of the world’s citizens, and Christians are superior to the legions of nonbelievers populating this evil planet, and “gifted” children are superior to their idiot classmates who do age-appropriate work, then I was la creme de la creme. I was Supergirl. I was way more important than you, you poor slob.

Thus I started off my life journey completely identified with things that made me “special.” Things that made me need to guard my turf, to oppose, to compete. Things that could be taken away from me at a moment’s notice.

And that’s exactly what happened. Other kids surpassed me in school. My ossified faith crumbled to ashes. I failed to make money or headlines, to pull myself up by my red-white-and-blue bootstraps. My self-esteem took a nosedive. The flip side of grandiosity, after all, is inferiority.

Eastern faith traditions like Buddhism (as well as modern mystics like Eckhart Tolle) recognize all of this as the activity of the ego, the constructed self that strives to maintain the illusion of separateness. It feeds on feelings of personal importance, and thrives on grievances and the need to be right. Anything that strengthens that sense of individual special-ness or better-ness is good, to the ego. Unfortunately, its constant internal monologues can create a monstrous tunnel vision, eliminating all perspective and sense of proportion. Ego concerns can dominate a person’s entire consciousness, to the exclusion of anything and everything else that might be going on.

Case in point: there I was, on a beautiful summer day, obsessing and ruminating miserably about my past and all its repetitive, seemingly insurmountable failures. For me, the sky may as well have been pitch black and raining down hailstones. Consumed by despair, I think I was actually contemplating suicide.

And then, the miraculous thought: I am not that important.

In that moment, my massive, dark, bloated, all-consuming ego deflated like a stuck balloon.

The pressure was off. Pressure to live up to expectations, whether they were my family’s or my peers’ or my own; pressure to do something, for god’s sake, and get it right; pressure to solve the never-ending and intractable problem of AlienBaby. Was the earth going to stop turning on its axis if I didn’t get my act together? Who the hell did I think I was?!

All those frenzied thoughts, all their well-worn circuits of self-blame and self-pity, just ceased. I had obliterated their underlying operating assumption. If my strictly individual concerns and desires and achievements really weren’t the be-all end-all in the grand scheme of things, then why expend so much energy? Why create so much distress?

It was radical, to me, coming from where I came from. It was a relief.

…

Many times since, personal importance, the labored machinations of my overactive ego, have more often that not been the prime culprit when I’ve fallen into the heavy quicksand of depression and the sticky sinkholes of despair.

If you’re like me, you may find that when you don’t get the job, the promotion, the coveted affection and attention of a certain person, your sense of specialness is mortally affronted. Why haven’t I “won?” And who, then, is the superior candidate? What often doesn’t help matters is that your friends, relatives, and colleagues, who care about you and have your best interests at heart, may collaborate with your ego and encourage you to think that you deserve X more than someone else because you are better. (Your fear, of course, is that you are worse!) How many times have we sat over coffee with friends, bemoaning the phony bastard who sucked up to the boss or the shallow bitch who got the guy? There would be no plot to most romantic comedies were it not for this need for somebody (e.g. the sweet underdog suitor) to be “better.” Professional sports franchises might likewise languish and go out of business without the fierce identification of fans with a team they believe is superior to all others. (I’m not saying people wouldn’t still enjoy the game, but the more fanatical manifestations of such identification would have no impetus.)

Let’s be frank: a rather nerve-wracking ego investment in being Number One is ingrained deeply into our collective American psyche (USA! USA!), and no one ever wants to be the “loser.”

But the game theme is perhaps a good one to stick with. Some of the more (to my mind) “enlightened” individuals on our planet, like Tolle, author Don Miguel Ruiz, and the wonderful Roz and Ben Zander, have suggested in one way or another that everything in life can and should be treated as a game, albeit not a high-stakes one. (I think my new friend Pablo would say the same.) Their focus is upon gentle experimentation and lighthearted play, upon the appreciation of the richness, texture, and variety of all that exists on the “game board” of life, rather than an attachment to getting some nifty prize in the end. Engagement, to these seemingly happier souls, is much more vital than outcome.

Within this alternate framework, we might start to loosen the clenched fists of ego, of our own personal importance and our need to win, thereby becoming more capable of holding gently and then releasing whatever cards the present moment deals us. We could perhaps enjoy the game of life, without taking it all so personally.

Playing this way would require of us greater patience, kindness, and awareness. Unlike our usual games, this one presupposes cooperation rather than competition.

But anyone and everyone could play, if they were willing to take off their platform shoes.