Matador offers a 12-week online course for aspiring travel writers and photographers. Their faculty and alumni write for paying travel blogs and magazines like National Geographic Traveler. I had been trying to figure out how I could pay for “tuition’ ever since finding out about their program. My initial plan had been to get a better job and save up, but that obviously wasn’t happening, and I could see myself putting off the course indefinitely in the meantime. I seriously considered charging it on my high-balance, consolidated-debt credit card, but I have enough trouble meeting the monthly minimums as is.

Instead, the crazy-making job I do have, after my many attempts to leave, provided me with the unexpected means. Go figure.

So I have taken the first step toward at least one dream.

**

The day before Christmas, I had a massive shock: I found Sam.

Online, that is. On Facebook. Through a mutual friend. He had been loath to join Zuckerberg’s internet playground back in the day, but his girlfriend must have convinced him otherwise.

Yes, I said girlfriend.

Given that Sam has never tried to contact me again, I didn’t attempt to ‘friend’ or even message him, but as the contents of his page weren’t hidden from me by privacy settings, I simply looked at his info page, wall, and photos. I guess you could call that Facebook stalking. Since I’ve known nothing about his life after he left, however, I don’t think anyone will blame me.

There was a relationship status and anniversary. Sam had apparently gotten involved with a young woman his own age eight months after leaving me. They are still together after a year and a half; living together, in fact. I like the look of the girl: she has that sweet, slightly bug-eyed vulnerability of a Jane Adams character, sweatshirt-clad, sans makeup, with a pierced lip that defies midwestern conservatism. She’s not the type to inspire violent jealousy in other females. Sam still looks ineffably Sam, of course: a sly smile flickering in only his eyes in one photo, breaking into an unabashedly happy grin beside the girl, who looks delighted to be with him, in the next. She should be delighted to be with him. In one photo he is kissing her, and I remember his knee-weakening kiss. I helped him perfect that knee-weakening kiss. I helped him perfect a few things. Blessed art thou among women, I think. It’s all hers, now. But Sam…he looks so terribly adorable, and so terribly Sam, I miss him all over again, and burst into a torrent of hot tears. Sam!

**

It is a bittersweet Christmas. I am both gratified and newly heartbroken. Finally I know where and how Sam is; finally I know Sam is never coming back.

By way of consolation, I find myself contemplating Dan Savage’s “campsite rule,” which has been summarized thus:

If you’re in a sexual relationship with somebody significantly younger or less experienced than you, the rule that applies at campsites shall be applicable to you: you must leave them in at least as good a state (physically and emotionally) as you found them in. That means no STDs, no unwanted pregnancy, not overburdening them with your emotional or sexual baggage, and so on. Younger partners and particularly virgins will often take everything given to them by an older, more experienced partner as being “written in stone,” and will carry around everything they learn from them for the rest of their life: so treat them right!

My young friend had, at the time I met him, only recently lost nearly half his body weight. He had had considerable social difficulties all of his life because of his extraordinary but differently-abled brain. I was, all things considered, writing on a fairly blank slate, one belonging to a boy of twenty-one who was far more vulnerable with me than any “grown man” had ever been.

I thought of all the positive reinforcement I gave him almost continuously, all the many ways in which I told him he was wonderful and beautiful and amazing, how sincerely I enthused about his marvelous natural abilities as a lover. I showered him with well-deserved praise. The feeling comes overwhelmingly back – that enormous, grateful love I could scarcely contain at the time, which overflowed in words as well as in kisses and caresses. I wanted to offer him anything and everything for everything he offered me. Our lovemaking was more deeply satisfying than anything else I’d ever experienced, nourishing both my body and soul. I loved it, and I loved him, and I told him so at every opportunity.

In the end, what Sam gave me even he couldn’t take away. And perhaps my loving words overwrote some of the noxious messages, some of the neglect and cruelty of his own past.

After all, here he is, two years on, in a longer and more serious relationship than I’ve ever had in my life, with a young woman who posts adoring messages on his Facebook wall even though she’ll see him at home later. Sam looks happy. She looks happy. They look happy together.

I’d like to say it’s a campsite rule epic win.

**

The kicker comes when I go back and read the emails I wrote to Sam in those months after he left, when his silence drove me to speculate wildly and to drink. I had expected them to be more oppressive and scolding than they were; I was startled to find some beautiful, heartfelt words that expressed sentiments even I’d forgotten expressing. I’ll leave most of it between Sam and me, but here’s the passage that contained the words (italicized for your benefit) that caused me to burst into tears one more time.

I thought: Whatever (Sam) has to do to reclaim, or save, his life, I’m all for it. I don’t even know if that’s what you’re doing. You once told me you didn’t care to get well. But so help me God, I would give anything, I would give you my blood, baby, I would give you up entirely, I would give you to another woman…if it meant you could be well and whole and healed and happy.

I guess I said it first, didn’t I.

I had no idea I was predicting the future.

**

One door closes. And then another. This week I learn that a girlfriend of mine is engaged to a widower who had caught my eye more than once. I hadn’t even known they were an item. Well, bully for her. One more possibility bites the dust.

Matador is, I suppose, my way of prying open a window – not quite far enough to escape, yet, but at least to let the air in.

Escape does not seem to be in the cards.

**

Escape from what, you ask?

Look here, people: I have tried to be good (even though Mary Oliver tells me in “Wild Geese” that I don’t have to be). I have not indulged thoughts that could easily have taken over my idle hours. For well over a week, I did a decent (at times excellent) job at work while Dan was absent, and I took the aforementioned steps toward my future as a writer. I didn’t wallow. I didn’t obsess. My sexual fantasies consisted of syndicated reruns of The Best of Sam — at least until Christmas Eve. I flirted with the Asian Adonis, who returned to the call center a few months ago. I tried fantasizing about him instead.

None of this seemed to matter when Dan came back. Nor did it matter that he’d cut off his beautiful thick hair, or that he told a lame poop joke, or that he has a paunch in lieu of Adonis’s veiny arms and tight little body. My struggle doesn’t stem from lust for his physical attributes; it’s not made more difficult by intellectual accord; it’s not even quite such a matter of emotional attachment, at this point, because I prevent myself from confiding too much in him. Seriously, I’m clutching the reins so tight, I’m drawing blood.

No, it’s as if there were a magnet inside of each of us, some kind of subtle gravitational force that keeps drawing us back together. If I stay away from him, he finds me (and so help me God, I’m happy to see him). Break time the other day found us standing together in the hallway by the credenza, munching on our respective apples, through absolutely no effort of my own. I had actually deliberately gone somewhere he was not. But when he came toward me, grinning affably in his way, something in me rejoiced in spite of myself.

Don’t think it’s Dan being “bad,” either. He’s not seductive or a flirt like Ted. He’s not seductive at all. That’s not his modus operandi. He just apparently really likes being around me, probably without even knowing why. I really like being around him, too. At the time, it just seems to flow so easily. It’s no big deal. He treats me like a good friend, a buddy, telling me about what he and Mai did over the holidays…but I know we can both feel the magnet. Don’t ask me how I know that. It sounds insane, even to me. But I understand now what people mean when they say “It was bigger than both of us.”

**

I could always write off married men before, no matter how charismatic or handsome. A ring on a man’s finger was tantamount to an electrified fence as far as my crushes were concerned. (My fondness for my friend Ben paled in comparison to my grand Greg Schulz obsession, anyhow.) How harshly I judged people who couldn’t restrain themselves! I thought they were being willfully stupid. All of that drama, it seemed so avoidable.

“The heart wants what it wants,” said a disgraced Woody Allen by way of explanation, after breaking an even stronger taboo. “What you resist persists,” cautioned Dr. Jung, who failed to resist his troubled patient Sabina Spielrein. In the Whole Foods restroom, I happen to hear my old buddy Melissa Etheridge, who wrote the soundtrack to my agonized twenties, growling and howling over the sound system

Now we make our choices

Doing what we think is good

We deny our own dreams

‘Cause we think we’ve been told we should…

She looks up to heaven

And wonders why love is so cruel…

Can’t stop the wanting of you

Even Sonny weighs in, quoting Kierkegaard in his Facebook status: “To cheat oneself out of love is the most terrible deception; it is an eternal loss for which there is no reparation, either in time or in eternity.” I can’t help but wonder what it was like for Sonny to meet Elyse, his on-again off-again girlfriend of almost seven years, the willowy, stunning kids’ yoga teacher who precipitated the end of his fourteen-year marriage.

Personally, I think I summed things up best in a comment on my last post: “All of my malaise of the past several months can be attributed to the bitter realization that someone else has married my husband.”

**

Soon after writing that comment, I dream that I am wearing a gorgeous white wedding dress. There is a wedding happening, and it’s Dan’s, in a facility that looks less like a church or government building than Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory (of the 1971 musical). A setting I’ve associated since early childhood with wishes and dreams, with finding that mythical golden ticket. (The song “Pure Imagination” puts a tear in my eye to this day.)

Even though I’m in a wedding dress, I am nevertheless aware that my job is to walk Dan down the aisle and give him away. The bride-to-be is nowhere to be seen at this point, and I’m passing time with Dan outside before the ceremony. The one person who is around is a woman from work who I’m certain (given some barbed offhand comments) has grasped what’s going on between Dan and me. She can be a bit catty, and seems jealous of him at times, in that competitive alpha-female way former homecoming queens can have about them (despite being married, with a baby), but (unlike me) she’s not one to be shy to speak her mind.

For my part, I am suffering tremendously and at length over the concept of “speak now or forever hold your peace.” Oblivious, Dan is talking to me like I’m his best friend. Maybe I’m the Best Woman? Liz, the coworker who can tell how I feel, gives me a tight hug of support in passing. In contrast to waking life, I feel like she’s the one person on my side. But still I wait, and say nothing.

At what seems like the last minute, I blurt out to Dan that this joyous occasion will, in fact, go down in history as the worst fucking day of my life. Dan looks stunned. I flee.

I run right into Liz, and tell her that I’ll be drinking a bottle of wine by myself tonight and crying my eyes out. She shocks me then by telling me, very sharply, how disappointed she is in me – she had thought I had more ‘fight’ in me than that – and stalks off in disgust. Dan has still not walked down the aisle. I start to meander tentatively back toward the wedding, but at that point I wake up.

**

Don’t ask me to interpret that in detail. I will point out that it’s the first dream I can remember having in which I’m wearing a full white wedding dress. It was strapless, as I recall. An elegantly simple, satiny, form-fitting thing. Quite lovely, really. I felt like Audrey Hepburn.

I do think it all points back to my lack of a sense of entitlement, and the fact that I’ve always felt forced to “give away” the men that I love…whether the man was León in my teens or Sam in my forties. Liz probably represents the part of me that’s disgusted by the way I just lie down and roll over. There’s no ‘fight’ in me at all. I don’t believe I’m deserving…and even if I could believe that, I still wouldn’t believe I could do anything but lose in the most humiliating manner imaginable. I’m not the kind who would ever stand up in church and stop a wedding. Easier for me to buy a bottle of wine and go home, get drunk alone, and cry.

**

Not that I don’t believe I did right by Sam. At least I have one thing I can be proud of. If nothing else, I seem to have left his “campsite” in such primo condition the next visitor decided to stay permanently. In general, I try to leave people better off than I found them, although the Jeannies and the Elis of the world, who are probably off somewhere right now feeling aggrieved, sometimes can’t be helped.

León used to claim that I saved his life, even as my experience with him left me licking the stab wounds for years. I let Jeannie tear me down mercilessly without even putting up a hand, despite the cruel words I could have thrown in her face like acid. Somehow it’s always me who winds up in the worst sort of pain, regardless of whether I did the “right” thing. I wonder if I shouldn’t do the crime, once in a while, if I’m going to do the time.

Bold words from a coward. No matter how much Dan may like me, he has a nice, comfortable life he probably likes a whole lot better. I’m not the woman men want to run away with, anyway; I’m the one who gets left behind without a backward look. I’m Jen, not Angelina. Or is that just what I believe?

**

But here’s an interesting exercise: read my dream again, just as it happened, and ask – what if the bride is actually me?

My first official boyfriend, and first halfway reciprocated love, was killed by a massive heart attack on the 9^th of September. I found about it through Russ and other Facebook friends in the wee hours of the following Tuesday.

I’ve told some damning tales about León, the first man (outside my family) to truly break my heart, and at one point I even believed he didn’t wish to be in contact with me. I was decidedly wrong about that. He found and friended me on Facebook, and for the past year and a half we had gotten to know each other again, exchanging private messages and interacting almost daily in the more public forum of news links, photographs, and statuses. León had a so-called “bleeding heart” and a finally tuned sense of outrage, so we were nearly always in agreement politically. In private, he was warm and affectionate, reiterating how glad he was to have reconnected with me. I felt the same way. He had only in the past couple of years finished a doctorate in Art History, and gotten married.

At long last, he told me, he was happy.

**

It took a few hours for the shock to subside and the exposed nerves to begin screaming. I wept in my bed nearly all night long, falling into an exhausted sleep just as pale light began to show behind the curtains. When I resurfaced into consciousness, and into the terrible realization of what had happened, the feeling of awfulness returned in the form of that giant jagged wound in the chest I had only recently been rid of, that feeling that someone was trying to cut out my heart with a rusty saw.

I cried on and off uncontrollably all day, calling in sick to work and staying glued to Facebook, where many of us had virtually come together to mourn and reminisce. I spent an hour and a half on the phone with Nathan Roth, who had been one of my closest friends freshman year, and who had also been the boyfriend of my “close friend” Cheyenne. She was the girlfriend who, for about a week during our sophomore year, believed that she and León were meant to be together. (Never trust a California-bred woman with a precious name.)

**

Yes, that’s an old and tired story: girl meets boy, girl falls hard for boy, girl loses boy to friend who, it turns out, didn’t really want him anyway. It all played out in a particularly painful way – and not just for me – with Cheyenne breaking up with León over the phone (to go back to Nathan) while León was home in Nebraska at his disabled brother’s funeral. He returned to school a shattered man, and in the midst of my own reeling betrayal and emotional disintegration I hovered by his side, trying to gather up the pieces. Our band of friends had fallen apart, splintered into hostile factions. León just couldn’t cope with all the loss. He packed up and left school; I took to my bed with a gallon jug of cheap wine, skipping classes and contemplating a fatal jump into the Chesapeake. Life seemed over. I never spoke to Cheyenne again.

(What was it about her? I asked Nathan the other day. What was it about this liberal-arts-school Helen of Troy that caused such a destructive war? “I don’t know,” he answered. “She was stupid…and not very attractive…I guess I just wanted to be in a relationship.”)

**

But before all that, before all that…there was just León and I.

In my post about destroying my old notebooks, I shared my first impression of him as some pretentious class clown, some egotistical attention whore. Avoid At All Costs! That was at freshman assembly. He wound up in my seminar (evening philosophy class), where he failed to disabuse me of my negative preconceptions by holding forth windily without saying much. Then one day, not long after that, this annoying character sat down at my table in the dining hall, across from me…unavoidable.

In person, he turned out to be disconcertingly warm and personable, even down-to-earth. Everything about him up close seemed to belie the impression he gave at a distance. Not only that, but he had the most beautiful almond-shaped green eyes I had ever seen, transparent and vulnerable-looking, with a glimmer of sadness in them. I felt a weakening flush when he met my eye. Uh oh.

At a weekend “coffeeshop party” (a rock dance party in the basement café for students) we wound up dancing together into the wee hours. I specifically remember grooving to “Play That Funky Music” with him, stealing his felt top hat and putting it on my head. He walked me back to my dorm room and kissed me briefly on the mouth before bidding me goodnight. I stood there watching him go, still wearing the hat, a smile spreading slowly across my astonished lips. No one but a friend’s mother had ever kissed me on the mouth before, and that obviously didn’t count.

Interestingly, in the days to come, I completely freaked out. I already had a terrible crush on someone utterly unobtainable, an exquisite little prude of an upperclassman named Titus who ran around with the all the pretty (if closeted) gay boys on campus. Titus was impossibly beautiful, and clearly not interested in me…and I had another golden opportunity to fall into one more hopeless obsession with an idealized god-man, which was familiar, or to start something with this far less perfect oddball of a fellow who might actually be interested in me.

The latter was unfamiliar — uncomfortable — an actual risk.

León took me out to dinner at a Mexican restaurant in town. My ambivalence was snowballing by that point. In brief, I blew it that night. I turned León down, pre-emptively, in a way that he found utterly insulting. When he was good and mad and not speaking to me, then suddenly I was filled with panic and regret. But of course.

It took some doing — apologies, tears, virtual prostrations — before he was willing to so much as spend time with me again. When he finally did, we wound up staying up most of the night in one of the campus common rooms by its huge stone fireplace, talking about our pasts and our worldviews and our fears and our dreams…the kind of Before Sunrise conversation I’d had with Jonathan on the tour bus. Nothing else happened that night, but on a subsequent evening in my dorm room, I confessed to having growing feelings for him, and he confessed to the same — and then he kissed me. Really kissed me. I had had no idea up until that point what exactly could happen in the body when lips met lips. I was innocent to the point of retarded. León had this incredibly sensuous mouth with soft, full pink lips, and he knew exactly what he was doing. He was the PhD of kissing. He flipped my switch. He turned the oven on. It’s all his fault, really. He awoke the slumbering beast.

After that, he pretty much owned me.

**

Before long I found out why León’s eyes looked sad, and why his humor tended to be of the gallows variety. His family’s secret burden was a mentally ill brother so miserable and self-destructive he had jumped in front of a truck to kill himself, but had succeeded only in needing 24/7 care in a hospital bed for the rest of his life. León’s was not a family that processed trauma together or openly; his cultured, old-country doctor father coped by making bleak existential jokes of the Woody Allen variety, and his mother was all brisk pragmatism.

In addition, I wasn’t León’s first love – that honor belonged to his high school girlfriend Michelle, with whom he had had a very passionate and volatile relationship. Their parting had been difficult. He still pined for her. I was jealous.

Nevertheless, we had a couple of happy months of relative reciprocity, although it pains me to think of the times, out walking in a group of friends, when I dropped or avoided his hand simply out of acute self-consciousness. He took it personally, but I was simply clueless about how to act, how to be a couple in public. I had never done it before. For his part, he would sometimes wound me with offhand but barbed jokes about women when we were hanging out with “the guys.” Typical adolescent posturing and inexperience, but I was tremendously vulnerable. It was, after all, my first relationship.

We did attend the college dances together, the formal “waltz parties” in the Great Hall, and I was seldom happier than when we were doing a breezy swing while Frank Sinatra crooned a tune like “Witchcraft.” The only time I was happier was when we were alone together in his messy, undecorated dorm room, on sheets that smelled of him, listening to Depeche Mode or Kate Bush and continuing my remedial tutorial on the birds and the bees. Thanksgiving week I could barely wait to get back to him after the break, hungry for the taste of him, running down the hall of his dormitory and waking him up from a nap. He was tousled and unshowered and redolent of his own skin. I wanted to eat him alive. I thought he was so beautiful, this skinny Argentinean boy from Omaha, with his wispy dark hair and sad eyes. I had forgotten all about Titus.

Everything changed after winter break. He had seen Michelle, and what had happened between them confused, angered, and upset him to the point that he didn’t think he could continue with me. He was violently jealous of Michelle, and furious with her for moving on, even though he appeared to have done exactly the same thing with me. In the following months, we would come together and apart several times. His flirtations with other women were excruciating for me to watch, but he seemed to feel I was unentitled to my own jealousy and was angered by it. León’s double standard! Doggedly I courted him, wrote him poems, pined away, listening to “our” music.

By the end of the school year, however, we, had kissed and made up. I was loath to go home for the summer.

**

The rest of the story has essentially been told already: girl loses boy.

Now girl has lost boy for good.

**

The grief has been complicated and intense. Complicated because the experience with Cheyenne scarred me deeply, intense because I was so young and impressionable and full of desperate longing. I loved León; I saw things about him he hid from others, and I hungered so hard to take away his pain that my ribs ached. I would listen to the gorgeous Depeche Mode song “Somebody,” a song to which he had introduced me, and yearn to be León’s Somebody. That Somebody with whom he shared his innermost thoughts and his intimate details, who helped him see things in a different light. I didn’t want him to turn into the bitter, lonely old man he fully expected to become.

What I understand now, at forty-three, is that only time and experience would temper and mellow the suffering he was grappling with when we were barely more than kids. I tried to make things better for him…and he chose someone who made him feel powerful (his explanation) instead. Who, after all, doesn’t want to be the rescuer? It’s always easier to see the other person as the needy one. It might have behooved me back then to need help more openly and often, and let León be the hero once in a while.

But back in the day, I believed I was ready to endure any amount of pain if it meant León wouldn’t have to. (I probably endured a lot of pain unnecessarily that didn’t do either of us a bit of good.) In the end, León survived all his youthful turbulence and tragedy, and got to leave the earth at the point of arrival at fulfillment in work and love, at actual contentment. Whereas I’m the one left struggling with vocation, singlehood, and this terrible grief, weeping at my kitchen table alone.

That fiercely loyal (and probably unhealthily selfless) nineteen-year-old would cry: So be it!

I’d been so worried about León. My worry, as it turns out, was unwarranted.

**

Unable to return to the brutality of fundraising calling for a week (don’t ask me how I’m going to pay next month’s rent), I took a long walk in the early autumn rain to the art-house theatre to see Midnight in Paris. It was a spirited, funny, and entertaining film not unlike Allen’s earlier work, free of the lethargy and dark redundancy I’d found in more recent films where he seemed to play the same one-note, never-satisfied protagonist.

What struck me most about the film’s time-traveling aspect was that it underscored how incredibly quickly time passes. I couldn’t help but think of how these once-vibrant partygoers and artists of 1920s Paris had long since grown old and died. In the present moment, here was the young Ernest Hemingway sitting before Owen Wilson’s Gil, drinking whisky and dispensing manly advice; the cessation of his existence seemed an unthinkable distance away. But in the morning, Gil would be in 2011, and Papa would be dust. Everything was so ephemeral.

It seems to me that my vivid memories of León could have happened yesterday, the intervening years have slipped by with such alarming speed. That first night after the news came, as I lay in bed sobbing, I said out loud, over and over, “I have got to change my life.”

**

Moving out of the late summer of young adulthood into the early autumn of middle age, I want to do so many things I haven’t done. And I don’t know how. Still living on the periphery like a nineteen-year-old student, I am always just few hundred dollars away from getting kicked out on the street. I send out inquiries and feelers this way and that toward the dreams that I have, and I tell myself that my small actions are baby steps toward the life I envision. But León’s death makes me wonder: am I doing enough? Am I stuck? Am I a coward? What would I do if I knew I had a week to live?

I know that at heart – my Canadian coach Lisa Lane Brown helped make this very clear to me – I don’t believe that I’m qualified, that I have what it takes to “make it.” I don’t have the requisite self-confidence or belief in myself to trust that I can make things happen. In a world increasingly framed as full of ferocious competition, the only thing I’m certain of is failure. I want to change this. I have to change this.

I have a stack of library books on my kitchen table right now about how to change the core negative beliefs you carry around about yourself that sabotage you. Even if they can’t help, I don’t imagine they’ll hurt. And maybe I’ll learn something.

Because if I’m going to keel over at the age of fifty from a massive brain aneurysm, I’d like to do it by the shores of the Mediterranean with my beloved husband by my side, and be mourned by the hundreds or even thousands of people who were helped by something I wrote.

The horror of death, said Norman Brown, is the horror of dying with unlived lives in our bodies.

I suppose that’s the bottom line.

___________________________

Note: the post title was taken from a poem by George Gordon, Lord Byron, one of León’s favorite poets. The full text can be found here.

I realize I haven’t published anything in well over two months. I had my best friend from college visit me in July, and in the midst of that my little Mac iBook, the one I bought in 2006 with my grandmother’s money and took to Italy, finally bit the dust. With any luck (and some money I don’t currently have) I’ll be able to retrieve the hard drive data at some point. I lost the entirety of the post I’d been working on in June/July, but now I’m back in business with a Powerbook G4 (the same vintage as my iBook), which I obtained from our old coffeehouse buddy Dex for a hundred bucks.

The good news is that he left a whole cornucopia of music in the iTunes library for me, from classic jazz, salsa, and soul to newly minted alt-rock bands — including all kinds of indie hipster music I’d never even heard of. (I’m listening to Arthur & Yu as I write.) Dex may just make me cool yet. What’s more, I finally have MS Office, which means that creating documents (like resumes and cover letters) in my computer’s word processing program will no longer create obstacles or present major compatibility issues when it comes to prospective employers and writing gigs.

So at the end of the day I’m essentially better off than when I started.

Some adversities are blessings in disguise.

**

That statement could apply to all kinds of situations, as a matter of fact.

Oh, where to start? Anyone who took the time to read the comments thread on my May post knows that that cute little artist guy Nick turned out to be disconcertingly paranoid. Whether it was because of being alone in the studio all day to obsess upon his neighbor troubles, or because of the quantity of weed he was smoking every day, I have no idea, but I didn’t stick around to find out. He backed out of our dinner date, amid some rambling about being busy (did I mention that he also called himself “fucked up” and “out of my mind?”) – which I found to be an actual relief. I was sorry to see those sinewy arms go, but even I’m not willing to deal with a whole lotta crazy anymore. I’ve got my hands full maintaining my own mental health.

That’s the new policy: no more blank checks, no more extending limitless credit, no matter how tasty a guy is. (Or how smart or talented, for that matter.)

But that brings me to our old friend Eli.

**

Eli texted me right on schedule, wanting to get together for a drink. I was happy to hear from him after the letdown over Nick. After all this time, Eli was a free agent again. What might happen with us now?

In my last post, I framed Eli as a possible Mr. Darcy figure, someone who had caused me to revisit my initial impression of him as a curmudgeonly misanthrope and intellectual snob. I had become impressed, over time, with his attentiveness to his ailing mother and grandmother, and had been pleasantly surprised to hear that he had read Eckhart Tolle (without derision or irony). More recently, I had wondered if his renewed interest in world travel had been in any way prompted by my divulgence a while back that his commitment to staying in-state with his family had been something of a crush-deterrent.

So I was primed to explore the possibilities with Eli – short or long-term. I felt ready for anything. I arrived at the neighborhood bar (our favorite meeting place, owned by the same couple who owns my neighborhood coffeehouse), snagged us an outside table, and waited.

And waited. The tables filled up with the chattering happy-hour crowd. I began to wonder if Eli had forgotten. It wouldn’t be the first time – although the first time it happened, I reasoned that any busy person could forget a single date. (Not that I would ever forget about a drink with anyone who even remotely interested me romantically.)

Finally, after twenty-five minutes, I called him.

Indeed, he had forgotten. He was there within the half hour and was apologetic; I made his penance my second glass of wine. But I couldn’t shake the knawing thought that he found me so forgettable. So I drowned it in alcohol. Under the table, our knees were touching; looking at Eli’s model-worthy face in the fading twilight, I found myself thinking that even at his current heft, he was a damned handsome man. I was purring uninhibitedly about how I had often managed to “get my needs met” outside of relationships, and referring to how his ex had “starved” him. He was regarding me with an inscrutable (but what I thought was an interested) look. When he walked me home, he declined my offer to “see my apartment,” but I felt hopeful nonetheless. He had, at one point during the evening, proposed taking a day trip to the mountains next week, so I emailed him the following afternoon with my work schedule.

His reply, several days later, was brief to the point of curt, and seemed more like an evasion than a genuine excuse. He’d hit a curb, supposedly, and didn’t want to go anywhere until he got the car looked at. “Bummer,” he appended unconvincingly.

Disappointed by his anemic response, I replied: Well heck, Eli, if you changed your mind and don’t want to go, just say so! You don’t have to go and hurt your car!

I didn’t hear anything from him for three weeks.

**

At this point I guess I had to have been pretty clued in that I couldn’t (and shouldn’t) expect more than lukewarm ambivalence – at best – from Mr. Eli. (Whooee! More ambivalence! Be still my beating heart!) So why did I consent to go on a hike with him when he finally emailed me back? Well, for one thing, I was just so darn surprised that he got back to me at all. Two, I like going for hikes in the mountains. And three, I was still willing to extend him some credit, because of our two-year relationship, because I thought I might be wrong – like Elizabeth was about Darcy – and because, let’s face it, he’s a damned handsome man.

Without a real destination, we meandered along the mountain highway, through a number of old mining towns. Eli found it necessary to point out the old mine building, now a museum, where he and a girlfriend had had a quickie in the gift shop restroom. I didn’t know what to say to that. I certainly had no comparable bragging story. The precious little sexual intimacy I’ve enjoyed in my lifetime has generally taken place in the standard private locations. (Later I would remember a drunken handjob administered to Seamus while he drove down a major city boulevard, but at the moment, no such misadventure came to mind.)

Here I must observe that there’s something fundamentally unsexy about the way Eli talks about sex. It’s so detached and cerebral, he may as well be talking about a surgical procedure. I’ve encountered this phenomenon before among extremely well educated men; Erica Jong made no small fortune writing about it. The more these guys talk, the less you want to actually do anything with them; you sense that you’d feel like a bacterium under a glass slide, subject to only the most scientific scrutiny and analysis. Any shadow, any sparkle or sizzle conjured by the erotic imagination dissipates like a vapor under the bright fluorescent light of their droll and sophisticated reductionism. I didn’t have the words to name this at the time, I just knew I was the opposite of turned on.

But I digress. We finally arrived at the large lake adjacent to a popular ski resort and took the exit, driving along the lake’s edge until we found a trailhead. It was here, at the outset of our hike along a service road, that Eli decided to treat me to descriptive tales of all the fascinating women he’d been dating lately.

**

First he brought up the ever-so-interesting hipster chick with tattoos and piercings that he’s apparently been out with several times. And then there was the friend of his friend’s girlfriend, whom he was apparently successfully “vibe-ing off of” when they all went out together. But he still didn’t think either of these excellent ladies could hold a candle to the PhD in Economics from Italy (yes, you heard me right) who had given him “butterflies…for the first time in a long time.”

Oh. Is that so?

He definitely wanted to see this femme fatale again (“this could really BE something”) but couldn’t figure out what or how much he should tell Tattoo Girl. What should he do? Any advice?

Such a dilemma. I feel for you, pal. Fuck you very much.

I could feel the tips of my ears burning, the way they had so many times before when it dawned upon me, terribly, how low my status actually was in a romantic or sexual interest’s romantic or sexual ranking. I was being given the buddy treatment, yet again. As if there were nothing of any interest to him whatsoever between my legs. As if I were some benign, neutered being — a maiden aunt, an elderly nun.

That’s surely the coward’s answer to unwelcome sexual interest from a friend: waxing enthusiastic, passive-aggressively, about the people who actually excite you. I know, because I used it myself in high school on the unfortunate Jerry Baines. I don’t use it anymore. It’s really an adolescent tactic, as disrespectful as it is immature. And disappointing to see in adults.

But it did show me, once again, and very starkly, that side of Eli I had glimpsed in the beginning that had turned me away: that ruthless ranking of people on a narrow worthiness scale of his own invention, the personal vanity that brings with it a sense of entitlement to minor offhand cruelties. I had been here before. Déjà vu.

I feigned nonchalance for the rest of the hike, refusing to betray any inkling of humiliation. But my balloon had burst. The rage would come later.

**

It’s been difficult not to slide back into the depression that dogged me for years: that helpless, hopeless feeling that the relationship I’ve longed for my whole life is out of reach, that I am constitutionally incapable of drawing in or holding onto mutual love and attraction.

It was hard to get out of bed the week following my excursion with Eli. Not because I missed him personally and wanted to be with him – he had shown me some true colors, and they weren’t pretty – but because I’d invested (and wasted) so much time believing there might be something, someday, between us. In retrospect I don’t know if I’d have met him for drinks so often if he weren’t so bloody good-looking and clever – an “objective” catch. To be honest, I get ten times more enjoyment and emotional sustenance out of coffee with Greg or even just an email conversation with my best friend from college.

I picked up Calling In The One again, to find I had bookmarked a certain page:

Our fantasy is that, once we see our pattern clearly and make a definite decision to do things differently, our external world will begin to change immediately. In lieu of meeting yet another unavailable person, we will suddenly begin meeting only available people who are ready to make a commitment. Instead of meeting more mean and abusive people, we will suddenly begin attracting kind and gentle souls who offer nothing but love and encouragement. This is rarely the case. What is more likely to happen is that, instead of immediately attracting a whole new kind of person into our lives, we find ourselves attracting exactly the same kind of person, or a person who at first appears to be different but isn’t really. (Emphasis mine.) We are challenged with temptations that are similar to the ones we have faced in the past. Only this time we’re wiser. This time we know exactly where a particular path will lead. We must make the more difficult choice by saying no to the enticement of doing the exact same thing while hoping for different results. We must choose to remain empty-handed rather than settle for repeating past mistakes. This temptation will generally happen not just once, not just twice, but usually several times. It’s as though the universe is testing us –are you truly finished replicating the familiar and known? Have you really given up the need to prove that you aren’t worthy of love? Are you willing to stand in the void rather than compromise yourself again?

Now there’s the million-dollar question. It’s not exactly my choice to remain empty-handed (the choice seems to have been made for me), but my usual M.O. is to go running after the person who has thrown all manner of ambivalence and even humiliation in my direction, in the misguided belief that I can somehow win him over this time. “Doing the exact same thing while hoping for different results.”

Part of the pattern is, of course, to put the most generous possible spin on everything, no matter how unlikely it is. Eli is a busy guy…so busy that he forgets dates (would he ever forget Miss Italy 2011?) and is incommunicado for weeks at a time. He really was worried about the effect bumping into a curb would have on the car. His boast about the gift shop was actually an ill-conceived attempt to seduce me. And he talked about all those other women to…to…well, to impress me, of course – in some weird, counterintuitive way – or perhaps to make me jealous. Yeah. Because that’s just how clueless Eli is when it comes to women. Sure, that’s it. Gee, poor Eli. I’d better give him another chance

The difference now is that I can actually step back and ask myself: Why the hell do I even want Eli? Why would I want someone who thought it necessary to communicate with me in such an indirect and potentially hurtful manner, for whatever reason? Why would I want to be an easily forgotten item on his to-do list? Why would I want to subject myself to further comparisons to ostensibly more accomplished, exotic, attractive women?

Eli and I had talked in the car about Obama’s “framing” problem – that he accepts uncritically the terms the Republicans set out for him when it comes to the debt, taxes, government spending, etc. I could add here that I don’t want to be continually subject to Eli’s ways of framing things: his hierarchical ranking of people according to their surface merits, his emphasis on intellect and academic achievement, his cerebral de-eroticizing of sex. I find his “frames” quite frankly depressing. This is not what I want. This is what I thought I wanted in 1986.

**

Those origami love-cranes still hang from the “love and relationships” corner of my apartment. I lay across my bed for a while on Sunday afternoon, watching them twirl in the apartment’s cross-breeze, searching for some handle on the sadness I felt.

The choice not to do the same thing over again: surely that’s the beginning of change. What Katherine Woodward Thomas called “standing in the void” is simply refusing to repeat history, and waiting, unoccupied, in the quiet faith that there will be something else. Faith is hard for me – for obvious reasons – but I do already have one experience of “something else.”

What I can’t help but wonder is whether it would behoove me to broaden my search parameters – not just beyond the borders of city or state, but beyond the borders of country. I just found out from a mutual friend that Tony DeRocca (the surly music critic about whom I obsessed for three years) wound up in Sweden after meeting his mate online.

I wonder which site he used? Internet dating got me 50 first dates and an unstable Pole. I’ve been thinking that perhaps I should turn my efforts toward pursuing my secondary dream in order to facilitate my primary one.

**

Here are some interesting recent synchronicities, to that end:

I run into the ex of an old bookstore friend at my neighborhood coffeehouse. He urges me to get in touch with Melanie, who now lives elsewhere, via Facebook. I locate her easily, and we exchange a number of affectionate catch-up messages. I happen to mention my dream of living in Europe, and how much I miss Italy. She turns me on to the United World Colleges, whose pre-university program teaches its students socially conscious, ecologically minded, hands-on engagement with the world around them. At one time she had explored teaching there. The program sounds like something I could definitely get behind. What’s more, the UWC has a Duino campus – where Rilke wrote his famous Elegies – and when I view its campus on the Web site, perched on a high cliff overlooking the Adriatic Sea, I gasp audibly. I ask Melanie for more information about her experience, and she puts me in touch with an Italian alum she worked with in DC.

Yesterday I’m at a different neighborhood coffee bar using their Internet. The owner has donated some tattered books from his personal library to a bookshelf beside my table. I notice that the one on top is a beginning Italian (college-level) textbook. Excited, I ask the barista if I can borrow it, and she can see no reason why not since I live nearby. I bring it home immediately and am inordinately delighted to sit in my kitchen re-learning Italian vocabulary over dinner and pronouncing the lilting words out loud. Ah-bah-STAN-zah BEH-neh. Pretty good. The language itself makes me happy. It fills my tongue, to borrow from Rilke, like a beautiful fruit. I’ve missed speaking it.

Once more I feel as if, in some small way, I am taking steps toward the life I envision. And you know how I love those swarthy brown-eyed brunets.

I began my last post writing about the news of Iris’s passing and the course-altering impact it had on me. It was only because of her that I began working my way through the book at all. This month I was confronted with the untimely deaths of not one but two wonderful young men under the age of thirty. One was the son of my friend Peg from work. He and I had never met, but she always spoke of him with glowing pride, and as if they were best friends. Kirby was an accomplished exhibition skydiver, killed when a practice landing went wrong. He was all of 27.

The other was the son of Lynn, a woman from whom I rented a room eight years ago when I needed to escape from my apartment (situated over two ex-cons who fought loudly and violently). I lived for a year with Lynn and her then-teenage son in a small two-story 1930s house in West City Park. Lynn ran an almost entirely sustainable household: we recycled everything, flushed sparingly, composted, and hung our wash out to dry. Her son Mike was a tousle-haired, good-looking blue-eyed boy with an easygoing and affable manner. He provided a welcome counterpoint to his mom, who could be anxious and high-strung. Unfailingly polite and even-tempered, at sixteen he looked and acted years older. When we met for the first time, I think we were both a little taken aback and even a touch infatuated; there was a shyness and a subtle embarrassment between us as we shook hands and made conversation. Later we would become familiar and comfortable with each other, watching DVDs and eating our respective dinners on the living room couch. We both became addicted to the first season of 24, making dates to watch this or that episode together when he was home.

So it was a cold shock to hear that Mike, now 23 (the same age as Sam, I realized with an odd feeling), had suffered a massive asthma attack while working on a remote farm in New Mexico, miles from a hospital, and had not reached adequate help in time. It can’t be, I thought. Not Mike. Not Lynn’s beautiful blue-eyed boy.

**

But it was true. It was all true. And I attended two memorial services in the span of just two weeks.

Both of which were strikingly similar — and unexpectedly celebratory. Both featured slide shows set to music and abundant anecdotes supplied by friends and relatives. More impressively, what emerged about both Kirby and Mike was that they were tremendously admired by their friends, family, and peers as leaders who pursued their passions courageously and encouraged others to do the same. Kirby jumped out of airplanes on a weekly basis; Mike rode rapids, hiked mountains, and traveled out of the country alone at the age of eighteen. Laughter competed with tears as participants told hilarious tales of one-liners and pranks perpetrated by each of these mischievous boys. It occurred to me that Kirby and Mike would probably have liked each other very much.

More than ever, I was reminded of the old carpe diem, seize the day. “I’d rather die in the pursuit of my dreams than live without them,” I told a work friend after Kirby’s service. Even if I never get where I want to go, I have to believe that I’m moving toward it. I have to keep taking small steps every day, or at least every week. The black cloud of depression that used to engulf me held within it a sense of just biding time until the end, of having given up hope. It was while living with Lynn and Mike, full of despair one night about my poverty and my lack of achievement  — feeling stuck in my dead-end job, living in someone else’s house — that I very nearly downed a cocktail of painkillers and muscle relaxants. It may have been my lowest point in a twenty-five-year period of low points. (Mike was a bright spot in that dark time.)

Cynics would say I’m fooling myself in order to feel better…but which is preferable, honestly?

**

Self-belief and courage are more than half the battle, or so saith Julia Cameron. Through The Artist’s Way (and thanks to another departed friend with a zest for life, Iris) I am in the process of recovering both. As our astute friend from Down Under predicted I might, I have been further distancing myself from my family of origin in an act of (artistic) self-preservation. My “morning pages” — the three pages I now write every morning without fail — have revealed the extent to which I’ve let the dread of their inevitable disapproval thwart my every aspiration. (A mock article in The Onion perfectly encapsulated my adult life rather pathetically with the headline “Man Waiting Until Parents Die Before Doing A Single Thing That Makes Him Happy.” It may sound like a gross exaggeration, but it was one more harsh wake-up call. My chronic underachievement and chronic singlehood do keep me under their radar.)

Another thing that has come up again and again in my morning pages is rage toward my mother, much of it having to do with the shame I inherited from her regarding my sexuality, particularly my decidedly robust appetite for men. Watching Black Swan, I both laughed and shuddered with recognition at Nina’s frilly little-girly bedroom, full of dolls and stuffed animals. My mother, like the unhinged Barbara Hershey character, would have loved to keep me in that room, metaphorically speaking, for the rest of my natural life. “What happened to my sweet girl?” I will love Darren Aronofsky forever for understanding the infantilizing that young women endure at the hands of overprotective and/or religious mothers, the parental (and sometimes cultural) mandate to remain thin-blooded Virgins at the expense of their vital, juicy Whores.

**

Now that I’ve mentioned both the phrase carpe diem and my robust appetites, I suppose it’s only natural that I should arrive at one of my favorite subjects: men, and my ongoing quest for The One. Because a great deal has been happening there as well.

I might start off by mentioning that one of my Artist’s Way activities (and quite possibly my favorite to date) was to make a “dream collage.” Using travel and lifestyle magazines purchased from a nearby thrift store, I cut out dozens of photos, including pictures of gorgeous sunny places in Europe and on the Mediterranean, happy couples (including an appealing man feeding a normal-sized woman in a disheveled bed), a woman meditating by the sea, another woman riding a bicycle in France, and of course some seriously tasty men (including a wryly smiling Johnny Depp). Most of the men were anonymous models from the pages of a Details fashion spread; I didn’t recognize them. When they were all arranged in a visually pleasing manner on a black posterboard, I sighed contentedly. The images gave me joy. And hope.

Around that same time I found myself wondering how my old friend Eli, the beautiful doctoral grad student, was doing — and whether he was still with that visually impaired girlfriend of his or not. Things had not been going well for them when I’d seen him several months ago. They were fighting; she wasn’t meeting his needs, if you know what I mean; he had gained quite a bit of weight in his lower body. He was wearing his straight brown hair long and pulled into a slick ponytail, which with the added bootyliciousness made him decidedly less attractive to me (although he still had “such a pretty face,” as they often say about heavier women patronizingly). Thinking of him now, I considered whether, even in his more hefty state, I might possibly offer him some relief…if Jessica had finally driven him away by continuing to starve him of what he was really hungry for. I did care about him, after all, and he was still far from unattractive. Even if he weren’t the One, I might be okay with some good old-fashioned friendly tomfoolery. I had needs, too. I proceeded to entertain a few possible scenarios in my head.

Exactly two days later I got a text from Eli out of the blue. “I was just wondering how you were. Want to meet for lunch this week?”

He always does this. I don’t know how he knows.

**

We set a date for Friday noon. On Monday, for my weekly “artist date,” I dressed up in a special-occasion velvet top and matching scarf just for the hell of it, and walked down to my old neighborhood to check out an art gallery I’d never visited. When I tried the door, it was locked. Walking away down the street, I heard someone call out after me. “Hey!”

A wiry brunet with disheveled hair, roughly my age, was grinning at me from the doorway. He had big sleepy brown eyes and a scruffy beard and was dressed in a holey, paint-spattered sweatshirt and jeans. His look fell somewhere between “homeless” and “adorable.” I turned back and came into the gallery.

The artist’s name was Nick, and he was clearly a gifted painter. His large acrylic canvases were abstract and expressionistic, layering a variety of brushstrokes in a skilled interplay of color and form reminiscent of de Kooning. I knew Greg, my GBF (gay boyfriend), a talented abstract painter himself, would love them. I wound up talking to Nick for almost two hours. He had been living very much on the edge lately, having no other means of income, but seemed utterly confident that he was going to make it. He mentioned that he was also a writer, so I wound up divulging my own artistic aspirations. He showed me some of the paintings he had in back, and was floored when I mentioned Jesus at the wedding in Cana while viewing a painting he hadn’t yet told me featured the Sangre de Christo (Blood of Christ) mountains.

The whole space was practically vibrating with a sort of breathless and intoxicated energy. I found myself giggling a lot. Nick kept apologizing for talking too much, and said that I had a way of drawing him out. My eyes darted surreptitiously over his spare, compact frame when he looked away; he was just the sort of lean, hard, and veiny that makes my mouth water. I wanted to just sink my teeth into him, devour him on the spot. (My “scenarios” that night certainly didn’t lack for excitement.)

When I brought Greg back with me the following week (and yes, he did love those paintings), he was abruptly called away by a friend with a broken leg who needed assistance. Nick and I were left alone for about an hour. “Is he your boyfriend?” Nick asked, as if he dreaded the answer.

I could have danced for joy at the tone and the nature of the question. For once in my life, I could tell a guy I actually liked was interested! I was more than happy to inform him that Greg was gay and my best friend.

Greg called me from the car while Nick and I were talking — I didn’t hear the phone ring — and left me a message that made me laugh uproariously in front of Nick. “I’m on my way back now,” he said, “unless you two are having sex.” I didn’t tell Nick why I was doubled over. He looked a little crestfallen.

I haven’t been back to see Nick since that night, but I friended him on Facebook. I don’t think either he or the gallery has a phone; he’s that poor. If I want to see him, I have to go over there. And as I mentioned, I’ve had other things going on…

**

Eli and I met at my favorite nearby Thai restaurant. Walking in the door, I spotted him — his fine hair shorn to a far more flattering length, a day’s stubble on his face. He looked a lot sexier than last time, if still uncharacteristically thick.

Eli had two big pieces of news: first, that he had given up on his history Ph.D, and quit his ten-year amended and revised (and at this point loathed) dissertation. Second, that he was finished with Jessica. The relationship was good and dead. The love was gone, and they both knew it. He hadn’t officially ended it yet, however, because he still had “a lot of projects to finish around the house.”

Eli didn’t understand why this made me erupt into helpless laughter. He looked almost wounded until I explained that I found his sense of responsibility unbelievable. He had already filled me in on his current “job” taking care of his elderly grandmother, for which his family offered to pay — offending him in the process. He didn’t see why he should be paid for doing something he was already glad to do for his family. (Do you recall my mentioning that he also looks after his disabled mother?) Honestly, Eli is like no man I’ve ever met. He’s a caretaker, effortlessly assuming the role traditionally expected of the women in a family (on pain of being considered “selfish” otherwise). Of course I didn’t know any of this about him last year, when I jumped to conclude that he was exactly the kind of arrogant misanthrope I knew all too well.

Over Pad Thai and Panang curry, I listened while Eli further unburdened himself. He was having a crisis about having to enter the “real world” job market now and find some soul-crushing administrative or customer service position he really didn’t want. I argued on behalf of creative entrepreneurship and unconventional vocations; Eli felt he had to make decent money “because I want to travel.” This revelation made me pause for a second. No, he still wants to live here, I told myself. His family is here. He was very clear about that. Aloud, I maintained that there were all kinds of ways to travel on the cheap, and reminded him about my stay at Centro.

Toward the end of the meal I started talking more about my own life, actually gushing a bit (as is my wont these days) about my sunnier lease on life since the twenty-five-year cloud cover lifted — how learning to practice the art of simple presence and silence the torturous mental chatter had been so instrumental to my healing.

“Now you sound like Eckhart Tolle,” said Eli with a smile.

“You’ve read Tolle?” I gasped.

He had. In Cairo, during grad school. He had been in the midst of a painful breakup and undergoing chemotherapy (did I mention Eli successfully fought cancer, in his 20s, in a foreign country?) when he picked up a copy of Practicing the Power of Now at an English-language bookstore. And he began to try to practice it. “I got to the point where I did have these moments of incredibly vivid perception and clarity,” he recalled. “I remember gazing at something purple, and having nothing in mind but this really amazing…purple.” He chuckled. “It was like being on drugs or something.”

Privately picking my jaw up off the floor, I mused that I was beginning to feel like a Jane Austen character. Could this diffident skeptic who seemed so prickly and elitist at first blush (and whom I had written off a year ago, for all of Elizabeth Bennet’s reasons) be my Mr. Darcy, after all?

**

We parted ways with a customary noncommittal and platonic hug that gave no intimation of what more intimate contact might feel like. Shortly thereafter, I met up with Greg at our favorite coffeehouse for an impromptu debrief, and he came up with a brilliant unconventional career for Eli: leading history tours abroad. Greg’s roommate had gone on such a tour; apparently there was good money to be made at it. It sounded perfect: what a great way to combine Eli’s love of history, travel, and teaching with his foreign language skills! “And you could go along, of course,” Greg joked with an implicit wink and a nudge. Probably already envisioning our wedding. How I do love Greg. He’ll say out loud things I haven’t yet dared to think. It’s wonderful to have a friend who can both read your mind and be one hundred percent on your side. (Not to mention switch gears on short notice.)

A few days later I finally got around to buying a glue stick to affix those magazine images to the posterboard permanently. As I was pasting up photos of Rome and Sardinia and Athos and couples strolling in the surf, I reached for one of the male models, an intense-looking brunet with penetrating blue eyes and seductively parted lips. Looking at him again as if for the first time, I stopped dead. And then erupted into incredulous laughter.

Who do you suppose he looked like?

**

Eli and I exchanged a few emails in the days after that. In my last message, I informed him of Greg’s brilliant idea, and added, “If you like that, wait’ll you hear about my foolproof fitness plan.”

It was a teaser, and I feared he might have taken it the wrong way when I hadn’t heard back from him in almost three weeks. Was he affronted by my suggestion that he needed a fitness plan, or did he grasp the hidden innuendo and decide not to pursue it? Did he even think of me that way?

**

The morning after I finished writing all of this, I received an email from Eli. He had just unearthed an earlier message from me that had gotten buried in his spam folder. He apologized for not responding and asked me how I was doing. He must never have gotten the email about Greg’s Wonderful Plan For His Life either.

I don’t know what to do now, especially now that my schedule has settled down and I have time to visit Nick or turn more attention to Eli. I guess the risk you take with every choice or action — the risk I try to avoid — is making a mistake. But what’s the alternative? Stay in my room like a hermit? I’ve been there and done that. I have the spirits of two bold, adventurous young men haunting me with carpe diems…and two men who are very much alive prompting me to step out.

Contemplating my years of solitude and monastic simplicity, I was reminded of a Rumi poem I love, which reads very differently to me at this particular moment:

Someone who goes with a half a loaf of bread
to a small place that fits like a nest around him,
someone who wants no more, who’s not himself
longed for by anyone else.

He is a letter to everyone. You open it.
It says, Live.

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.

(I do want to observe, based on my unfolding friendship with the increasingly complex and sometimes volatile character known as “Rick,” that sometimes our passing attractions to people turn out to be unlikely opportunities to develop underdeveloped aspects of ourselves, and to exchange strengths. I don’t think it’s sentimental to say that nearly everyone — even the ex-felons and the chemically challenged — has something to teach us, if we’re open to listen and learn and not make everything about us.)

At any rate, upon my faithful German reader’s encouragement, I thought I would perform an exercise in self-reminder. That is, I thought I would remind myself of what I recently acknowledged as my Big Dream by sharing with you fine readers some, if not all, of my Italy diaries. Because I feel a little as if I’ve lost my way…

As I mentioned, I felt then as if I had finally found my place in the world, living these experiences and writing about them. I hope they don’t disappoint…some of my friends at home, Sonny included, were hooked, as if on a TV series. They do start off on the factual side, as I get acclimated, and become more introspective over time.

Most of the names have been changed, as is my custom on this blog.

**

PART ONE: CULTURE SHOCK

So: I’ve realized that I’m no Elizabeth Gilbert.

The delightful and funny woman who wrote “The Last American Man” and “Eat Pray Love” has a genius for travel. She can land anywhere without a plan or a knowledge of the language, and by the weekend she’’ll be staying in someone’s house being toasted by a table full of locals. She makes it sound so easy.

Maybe it is…for her.

Sometimes you’re just a beginner. And I haven’t felt like such a rank beginner in quite some time.

1. Mi Dispiace, Non Parlo L’Inglese

The flights were uneventful, although I wasn’t able to get much sleep on either leg, not even the eight-hour transatlantic flight. (Both flights somehow managed to show “Big Momma’s House.” One viewing may be more than it deserves.) When I reached the tiny airport in Milan I exchanged my dollars for Euros, incurring more than $15 in service charges. Outright theft (!), but I suppose you could consider it the fee one pays for being a greenhorn. The bus was easy enough to locate — I spoke a few words in Italian to the driver and felt so very proud of myself — and the ride to Novara gave me a chance to check out the landscape. I was struck by how much the quality of the light is like the American West’s — bright and direct, shining down out of an expansive blue sky. But it’s much greener here. On the highway, you think you could be anywhere (it resembled the American Northeast) but the inhabited areas are full of palms and other more exotic Mediterranean flora, even this far north.

We drove through a few small towns, after which some American resort towns seem to model themselves, with familiar red tile roofs and beige facades — some of them crumbling picturesquely. Everywhere I saw old women riding bicycles. The motor traffic seemed to regard the many bicyclists as legitimate vehicles, even on these narrow streets. In Novara, traffic slowed to a halt near the stazione, but it seemed to have been the natural order of things. No one so much as honked a horn.

Inside the station I managed to buy a train ticket to Pettenasco (in Italiano), but once outside I had no idea which track I needed. The direction I had been told was Domodossola, but there was no ‘Domodossola’ on the signs. This is when I first found out that, generally speaking, no one in the smaller towns speaks English. The people at Centro confirmed this later. (Thank God I know how to ask where the restrooms are in Italian, it was the first thing I taught myself! I could go off on an ugly American’s tangent here about my experiences with Italian public restrooms, and how the station’s was barely a Port-o, but I’m sure you don’t want to hear it.)

My anxiety mounting, I approached a fiftyish gentleman who had come to look at the schedule of destinations and track numbers. In the United States, fifysomething gentlemen are nearly always favorably disposed toward me, even when no one else is, and I hoped that the rule might apply internationally. Mi scusi, I said, Me scusi, non capisco. Sono Americana. Dov’e…? and I pointed at my ticket. He peered at my ticket and at the schedule and seemed to be as flummoxed as I was. He told me (as best as I could understand) to follow him, taking my suitcase, and I trotted after him up the underground walkway steps to a uniformed man by one of the tracks. They conversed rapidly in Italian and the uniformed man consulted a map, pointing out (quite serendipitously) the train behind us that was about to leave. Mille grazie! I cried to them both, and ran with my bags to the train. My Samaritan followed, sitting across the aisle with another middle-aged man in a baseball cap and sunglasses. He only rode three stops, but I heard him tell the other man that I was an Americana.

At the next major train station the train stopped, and everyone, including the conductors, began to deboard. I looked in confusion at the man in the baseball cap. Che stazione? I asked, and he said “Borgomanero.” I must have looked crestfallen. He reached out for my ticket. “Pettenasco,” he murmured, and then said something that sounded like Ven conmigo, which means “come with me” in Spanish, along with a string of words I didn’t understand. I followed him out of the station, and around what appeared to be a major construction project. Maybe that’s why the train stopped there? At any rate I was becoming nervous. Perhaps I should find a phone and call Centro. Where was this guy taking me? “But the train was supposed to go all the way there,” I said, and he turned around. Mi dispiace, signora, non capisco…non parlo l’inglese. Sorry, ma’am, I don’t understand, I don’t speak English. For all I knew, he was leading me to his den of iniquity, or into some international slavery ring…

But instead he led me to a bus that said “Trenitalia” across the front of its window, whereupon he spoke more rapid Italian with the driver, apparently asking if he went to Pettenasco. The driver nodded. Si, si, Pettenasco, he said, motioning to me to board. I didn’t have to pay — apparently this was some sort of extension of the train service. We both got on the bus, and I sat up front behind my second graying savior, who proceeded to engage in a long, animated conversation with the driver and a sweet-looking puckered old woman who was sitting behind the driver.

The bus wound its way up into the mountains, on impossibly narrow streets, through Orta (which shares its name with the lake) and into Pettenasco. Signore Baseball-cap helped me with my luggage and I told him and the driver Mille grazie, siete molti gentili. Thanks a million, you guys are very kind.

There was a phone kiosk just across the street, and I went over to it only to find that it took neither coins nor my credit card. Well, I’d made it that far…maybe I could use someone else’s phone? I pulled my luggage up the street and noticed a sign on a building that said something about an ufficio and turismo so I went behind the building as directed and found a small office full of pamphlets — but no people. I had just gone behind the desk there to inspect an old, non-working telephone when a woman with a name tag hurried in looking purposeful. I came toward her gratefully, full of explanations, but she shook her head and raised a hand to halt me.

Non parlo l’inglese, she said.

It seems they don’t speak English in the tourism office here either. I managed to communicate my needs with telefono and Centro d’Ompio. She led me into a small, much more modern back office where I was able to call Centro, and they were able to send Günter (who is from Germany) down with a car.

2. Centro d’Ompio, Bisetti, e la ‘Meltdown’

Günter is a full-time employee at Centro, a cheerful but serious taskmaster whose chosen mode of leisure dress could be described as heavy-metal-musician-meets-bondage-master. He likes to go shirtless, and is so hirsute as to qualify as furry. Günter oversees the center’s groundskeeping, and manages the working guests’ residence, Bisetti, a half mile down the mountain from Centro.

Günter drove me at breakneck speed up a slender road full of hairpin turns, honking his horn to alert pedestrians or other cars. There was hardly room for one car to pass, so I’m not sure what happens when there are two going in opposite directions. We arrived in the gravel parking lot at Centro and went up to the office on the second floor of the main building, where I was introduced to Paola, the pleasant young Italian woman who helps run the office. Paola took me downstairs, whereupon I met several of the other working guests immediately — Christian, from Norway, Stefan, from Switzerland, Hanna, from Finland, and Alessandro, from Canada. I also met Cosmo and Mila, full-time kitchen workers who are native Italians. Stefan was leaving in a day, but the rest will be my companions for the majority of my stay here.

Christian is bearded, lanky, and ponytailed, and smokes expensive cigarettes. He works in a clothing shop back home in a small Norwegian town, and speaks English fairly well. He makes me a little nervous, however, with his lingering, sultry looks…such unabashed boldness strikes me as a marked cultural difference, something tres European, along the lines of nude beaches and legalized weed. I meet his gaze and smile…but not for too long.

Hanna is a sweet, shy young slip of a thing still in university, with scholarly glasses and delicately pale skin. Her English is decent, if limited, but it’s all we have to work with as I don’t know a word of Finnish. She looks at me with an almost awestruck expression, which I doubt I deserve, and speaks to me with the utmost fondness. What did I do, sweetheart?? Please tell me so that I can repeat it everywhere I go.

Alessandro is (in my humble opinion) the resident beauty, dark and stunning, the child of Italian parents who reside in Canada. The poor fellow has dual citizenship in Canada and Italy — can you imagine a worse fate?! — and ultimately wants to move here. He would rather be a waiter in Italy than an accountant (as is his training) in Canada. Six months ago I would have surely and rapidly alienated him with a clumsy and singleminded pursuit, but at this point I’m content with just talking and looking. To be honest, we don’t have a whole lot in common, but he’s good-hearted and sincere, with an almost childlike quality. Our conversations actually remind me of the sort I have with my nine-year-old nephew.

Cosmo recalls to mind some character actor from the 1970s I just can’t place. He has frizzy graying hair and sly dark eyes that suggest to me that if I understood what he was saying half the time, I’d find him hysterically funny. Mila is slim, fortysomething, no-nonsense, but good-natured.

Centro d’Ompio stands on the side of a mountain overlooking Lake Orta, with the little island of San Giulio, on which sits a medieval monastery, visible from the pool terrace. The lake itself is surrounded by steep green mountains. It’s a dramatic view. At the moment I’m unable to download pictures from my bargain-basement digital camera onto my computer and I’m not sure why. Otherwise, I would show you. Centro has several peacocks — one of them completely white – wandering the grounds and emitting haunting, catlike cries. They have no fear of people, and weave amid the outside tables at mealtimes. Seeing them after so many hours of not sleeping was a completely surreal experience.

What’s odd to me is how much less infatuated I am with it all than I expected to be, how unreal the scenery feels, almost like a photographed backdrop. I can’t explain why this is. I half anticipated feeling Frances Mayes’ instant sense of belonging.

But belonging is the opposite of what I felt my first evening…

After lunch, Günter drove me and my luggage down the hill to Bisetti, the guest worker house. He showed me my room, which was private (at least I didn’t have to share), located up two flights of outside stairs and then up a sort of ladder. (All of the rooms, toilets and kitchen included, let only onto the outside, like motel rooms.)

The sky had by this point clouded over and it had grown quite cold. I noticed that there was only one thin quilt in the chilly and unheated little room, and I wondered whether, with my tendency to get cold under the best of circumstances, I might in fact freeze to death.

The closet-sized toilets, shared by all, were on the ground level, and both contained a small cold-water sink. Then Günter showed me the showers. Two coed, communal showers, off of a room with a hot water trough-style sink for washing up and brushing teeth. One of the stalls wasn’t even in use, due to a leaky pipe that had flooded the adjacent laundry room. I looked at it all in a sort of despair. Was I a completely square American prude that the thought of showering within sight of the Norwegian, or for that matter anywhere where absolutely anyone could come and have a lookyloo, completely creeped me out? Was this how they did it in Europe?!! And what of the infernal swamp in the next room? Would laundering my dirty clothes be out of the question? I thought, I’m sure all my little anarchist friends with their communal housing and free love and unflushed toilets could cope with all of this just fine, but I’m an old broad who craves a few basic creature comforts, like a little bathing privacy and a warm bed. I said something to Günter about whether there was a protocol for the showers. He looked at me as if I were a completely square American prude, and said that there was not.

Of course all I wanted to do at that point was take a hot shower and go to sleep.

I opted to try for a nap. Layering up, I curled into a little ball under the white (yes, white) scrap of quilt and shivered. Eventually, after some yogic breathing and a Buddhist exercise in surrendering to “absolute cold,” I dozed off. I woke just in time to hike up the hill to dinner. At least the hike warmed me up. I ate with some of the Italian kitchen staff and Bettina, one of the people who worked in the office. I told Bettina about being cold, and she told me she could give me another blanket. I asked her about the showers, and her response was, more or less: you’ll deal with it.

She left the table, and I tried to have a halting conversation with the others, but both sides lacked crucial vocabulary and I wound up feeling even more like a stranger in a strange land. Mila did understand somewhat about the showers, and she said that maybe I could come up to Centro and use theirs. Her tiny bit of sympathy made me feel dangerously close to tears.

But she left the table, too, and I left Centro for Bisetti, feeling more profoundly lonely than I have in years. Sometimes being surrounded by a hundred people is lonelier than being alone, when language and culture prevent some sorely needed understanding.

But I was also trying to suck up and buck up and not appear needy, square, or uncool. I wasn’t going to be the whiny, high-maintenance American. No, no one was gonna see me sweat. I wouldn’t give them any more chances to judge me. I was afraid Günter and Bettina already had.

These efforts, however, were about to go straight to hell.

Bisetti is home to a number of small stray cats, about which I had been repeatedly cautioned. Don’t let them in any of the rooms, they’ll shit everywhere! They seemed to be regarded like pests, including the small, rather dirty 19-year-old deaf and blind cat that spends most of its day on the kitchen steps. One of the residents had kicked the poor thing out of the way before. This cat was on the steps when I arrived back. I bent to pet it, and it began to purr like a tiny motor.

Suddenly I saw myself in this helpless, despised, affection-starved little creature, and I sat down on the step beside it and started to weep quietly, stroking its bowed head. A small black cat (drawn, no doubt, by the purring) came running and jumped up in my lap. This second cat couldn’t get enough love either, and that’s when I really lost it, wetting its silky back with hot tears.

Just then Bettina came through the gate, and stopped.

She came over to me and sat down beside me and pulled me into a fierce embrace. It was no use hiding it anymore; I sobbed. She clucked sympathetically and said — You’re tired, and overwhelmed, and it’s your first day, and I know it’s all a bit much. We’ll get you a blanket, and if you like you can take a shower up the road at Leibich, our house. (The full-time year-round employees live in another, more traditional house a few doors down.) I can even give you a hot water bottle, if you wish.

And that’s exactly what she did. She gave me a wool blanket and a hot water bottle and showed me the perfectly lovely accommodations (complete with bathtub) at Leibich. We went into Bisetti’s rustic kitchen to heat water, and there I met Raffe, short for Raffaella, Centro’s cleaning woman. She is of indeterminate age, my height, pleasantly round, with large, kind green eyes and dark burgundy-tinted hair. I love the name Raffaella — it’s the name of the angel, played by Natassja Kinski, who watches over Karl (the angel who falls to earth) in Wim Wenders’ “Faraway, So Close,” one of my favorite films.

And yea verily, Raffe immediately sensed the state of my soul and began to minister unto me, that very evening, and from thence. Her English is not great (still much better than my Italian) but we manage to communicate in other ways. She felt the shower situation was undesirable too, and encouraged me to lock the door (as she does) when I went in. She heated the water for my water bottle and stroked my hair and kissed me and called me “Bella,” something she has done ever since. She always greets me with an Italian-style kiss on both cheeks, and it gives me a greater sense of belonging than just about any other thing or person here.

That night I locked the door and took a hot shower, right there in Bisetti. Afterwards I sat in the kitchen and drank tea with Cosmo, Mila, and the soon-departing Swiss. And later, I crawled under a warm blanket with a hot water bottle, lovingly prepared by my angel Raffaella.

**

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.

**

Even though I’ve lived here for almost nineteen years, I never exactly put down roots or committed to one narrow career path. Nor did I make it my goal to marry and have children simply for the sake of marrying and having children. But in my little teapot rebellion against middle-class expectations, I also never dared to do much of anything that involved serious risk, the way some of my backpacking, globe-trotting, adventurous, entrepreneurial contemporaries did in their twenties and thirties.

Now here I am, at 41, every day reading the jaded, overeducated souls on Salon.com letter threads expounding upon what a tremendous disappointment life is, and how rarely dreams come true…and I wonder if it’s truly harder for very smart people to be happy. They think of absolutely everything, after all, that can go wrong, and then use those worst-case scenarios as an excuse to stay in their safe or uninvolved zones (and convince you to do the same).

I think of Great Dead White Dudes like Pascal and Nietzsche, among the most brilliant men who ever lived, who seem to me at least to have also been rather miserable up-their-hole sonsabitches. (To be fair, they were both ill for much of their adult lives, and died quite wretchedly…though advocates of mind-body medicine might have an opinion about that.) Their contempt, including for the female sex and for anything they considered “soft,” knew no bounds, and they were forever deriding everyone and everything around them from their lofty perches like doctoral-level Holden Caulfields. (As you might imagine, I greatly admired them in college.) What a burden it is, to be smarter and better than everyone else!! Anyway, those rejecting attitudes that may have once been a daring assault on a complacent bourgeoisie are now more of just a yawn to postmodern millennial intellectuals who can tell you the price of everything and the value of nothing, and why it’s stupid to care.

Given the choice, I’d rather be relatively square and make a fool of myself once in a while. One nice thing about being out of certain circles now is that I no longer have to worry about being “cool,” about whether my views or my tastes are hip enough among the liberal intelligentsia, or the college-radio crowd, or the technologically savvy. I can go back to being a classicist dork, listening to my bleeding-heart Irish homeboy on a ten-year-old boom box and reading Rilke from an actual book.

**

Ever since I left the evangelical church (and had one wonderful English teacher who exposed us to the beautiful exhortations of writers like Saint-Exupéry and Thomas Merton to remain genuine into numbing adulthood), “keeping it real” has been a top priority and a core value for me. The commitment to be authentic in all areas of life has trumped things like money or success (at the price of conscience), acceptance by various groups or people, and superficial if convenient relationships. (If I hadn’t kept this commitment to myself, I’d probably still be at my old job.)

At the risk of sounding like a tweener who can’t stop gushing about Zac Efron…this is yet another reason why I’m so grateful to my latest inspiration, that folky Celt whose full-throated call jerked me back from the brink of self-abandonment. He’s one unapologetic poster child for emotional frankness and what I referred to before as “ragged authenticity.” I must mention that the cynical hipsters at pitchfork.com (who apparently have no appreciation for traditional Irish music either) naturally ripped him a new one for being such an sincere, touchy-feely girly-man. He dared, after all, to write lines like the ticking of the Western man’s need to cry. Which I found fucking brilliant, and which is what I’m talking about when I say that the so-called “patriarchy” harms men as well as women.

But my admiration goes far beyond that, now that I’m floating in space. I was thinking about how he broke with his early band, Juniper, just as they were picked up by a major label. The record company started pressuring them, as record companies are wont to do, to compromise their artistic integrity for a more “radio-friendly” sound. Disillusioned with the music business, Damien turned his back on possible fame and fortune and escaped to rural Tuscany to try his hand at growing tomatoes (which sounds like heaven on earth to me)…and then, when the money ran out, went busking around Europe like some traveling minstrel. Now, of course, years later and on his own terms, he’s an internationally renowned musician who gets to perform coveted gigs like the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony and Leonard Cohen’s induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

What I find most inspirational here is that “lilies of the field” attitude, that optimistic willingness to throw oneself upon the mercy of the world and make choices that sound insane to more “sensible” people. My friend Talia Rosenberg landed in Paris after college with a few words of French in her mouth and a few dollars in her pocket, and went on to get her doctorate there and have a love child with an acclaimed Hungarian novelist. I love stories like that. That’s what I call balls. That’s what I call courage. That’s what I call living the dream. And I want to be more like that. Before it’s too late.

**

In his book The Bridge Across Forever, New Age guru Richard Bach astutely wrote “Anyone desperate enough for suicide…should be desperate enough to go to creative extremes to solve problems: elope at midnight, stow away on the boat to New Zealand and start over, do what they always wanted to do but were afraid to try.” Floating ‘round my tin can, far above the world, I’m just about that desperate.

I’m almost out of money, with no promising prospects, no home community. I had been clinging, fiercely and for dear life, to a dream I dreamed up years ago, to which I was attached on an almost cellular level — there was such beauty and such depth of passion in it, and moments touching on agape — but my grip has finally loosened. For months, I quietly if irrationally hoped I’d somehow be restored to my former “household” like the Bible’s biggest loser, Job…or that my avoidant friend might call me and confess how confused and upset he is, and that he isn’t sure what he wants, but that he still cares about me, and wants to see me.

No, I’ve done enough fruitless, fruitless pursuing in this lifetime. For the first time, I accept, however intolerably, that it’s all gone…the way one accepts with that awful bottomless hole in the heart that someone has really died. I let go of it all, and at times it feels like the vise grip, the iron claws of agony clenched like a fist in my chest, will kill me, and maybe they will, mercifully — but I accept that I’ve lost.

In that acceptance, I feel like I’ve died, too, or that at least some version of me has…and what’s left is practically screaming at me about wasted time. What the hell is this, AlienBaby? You don’t have that many more years to be readily employable, or fuckable, or to start over. As Dylan sang, it’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there.

**

Most of the people I know around here talk conservativism and scarcity without even considering a different paradigm. I have an unemployed friend with a debilitating autoimmune disease who calls me up regularly to chew over alarmist economic scenarios and fret about her diminishing funds. She lives on a cocktail of pharmaceuticals, along with Coca-Cola and crackers, and laughs at the idea of alternative medicine and nutrition therapy — which have, in some cases, restored other people with her condition. A septagenarian friend of mine shot down my tentative musings about a radical geographical move the other day by saying “The ‘geographic cure’ doesn’t work: wherever you go, you’re still there”…as if adventure played no role in making such a change, as if we don’t alter ourselves at all by altering our habitual and safe modus operandi.

But chatting with some Dutch students at the coffeehouse last weekend reminded me of the personal expansion a person can experience upon discovering other landscapes, other systems, and other customs in the world, as well as untapped capacities in oneself. I know for sure that while I was in Italy, my perspective was enlarged by the multiplicity of cultures I encountered among my fellow travelers, and my self-confidence grew exponentially with each successful navigation of foreign trains and towns and streets. Frankly, I kind of miss the feeling of being a global (not just an American) citizen.

Pessimism is, of course, the path of least resistance when risk appears stupid (which it probably does for most Americans right now), when the assumption is that we’re completely on our own and that it’s all too easy to fall through the cracks of society and perish (which it probably is for most Americans right now).

Scarcity and peril as the paradigm: this is so familiar. This is how I was raised, to fear the world like a minefield, and to pinch whatever limited pennies might come my way. I felt the fear even more keenly when I lost my home church and my interventionist Daddy-God. It was all on me, suddenly…I felt the terrifying burden of sole and solitary responsibility for my life, responsibility for struggling to eke out a survival in a random, indifferent, perhaps even cruel universe, and I wasn’t at all sure I was up to the task.

If every last one of the dreary assumptions above is inarguably true, then it’s no wonder. I’m not sure I’m up to it today.

**

Cold, cold water surrounds me now…and all I’ve got is your hand.

I was walking down the street toward downtown the other day, feeling nothing but the ache of the blasted-out cavern in my ribs where my heart used to be, when those lines popped into my head. Hot tears blurred my eyes as I realized what the song means to me now. Namely, that I’m going through this lonely, painful, scary ordeal I’m not even sure I can survive, and I’m grasping like a life preserver the hand extended to me from another creator’s body — of work. Yea, I could say, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil, for Damo art with me.

I may sound like I’ve gone off the superfan deep end, but I’m talking about an intensely personal experience even hyper-rationalist David Foster Wallace discussed in the context of how an author can affect a reader. In my case, I have been, in a sense, “rescued” by another artist’s emotional courage, sensitivity, and uncompromising integrity — as well as encouraged by his example to take more chances, perhaps even to trust more in the ultimate benevolence of the universe.

What some snarky (dare I say cowardly?) critics have called self-indulgent and embarrassing earnestness, I currently call my lifeline. Maybe one day I’ll be that “hand,” that lifeline, for someone else in crisis, because of what I’ve been through and choose to write about. Maybe I, like some gifted songwriters, can also help someone feel a little less alone, and a little better understood.

**

When I got downtown that same day, I went to check out the vegetarian expo at the Marriott, and promptly ran into Annemarie.

Annemarie is a ceramics artist and yoga instructor who worked with me many years ago at the bookstore, and who was once seriously involved with Tony the Surly Music Critic (from my Valentine’s Day post). She greeted me with great warmth and kindness, which nearly made me, in my shaky condition, crumble as I divulged my general state of fear and heartbreak. Hugging me impulsively, she proceeded to tell me — a trace of her own pain knitting her brows — about how she had just kicked her out-of-control teenage son out of the house. (Talk about tough love…and I had said nothing!) Tolerating disrespect benefits no one, I think she said. She encouraged me to stay in uncertainty, reminding me that life is more open when we sit patiently with our unknowing. We embraced tightly as I choked back tears of gratitude. I felt heartened by this exchange — shown another unbidden example of hardass caring, and recognizing the gentle wisdom of Annemarie’s advice. It’s not hard to grow, when you know that you just don’t know.

One of the speakers I went to hear there was a former gangbanger who founded a conservation nonprofit in Texas that teaches inner-city kids about taking care of animals and the environment. He was a beautiful, inspirational man (if a rambling and somewhat incoherent speaker), and I talked with him afterwards, trying to pry from him the secret of how his thug-life despair morphed into creative empowerment. If sheltered middle-class white people are too scared to try to substantially change their lives (and change the world), how is it possible that an impoverished Latino surrounded by scarcity and hopelessness could become a visionary leader?

He merely repeated his presentation point that in rejecting the culture of violence by feeding only plant-based foods to his body (restoring his “bodily integrity”), he got healthy, got clarity about refusing to perpetuate suffering, and became empowered to change the way he lived.

I quit eating animals thirteen years ago, but I’m still a chicken. I guess there’s no one-size-fits-all formula for busting out of your own cage.

**

I dream of closing up my old bookstore with Samira. We straighten furniture and sweep the floors. I think about how she and Ken prepared for their departure by getting rid of most of their belongings, and wonder if my psyche is telling me to close up shop myself. (The night before, in a sort of trance, I dreamt I was listening to a long voice message from Sonny. He wasn’t angry, defensive, or accusing…he was simply telling me where he was in his life, with a trace of regret. It made me sad; it made me miss him.)

Over and over again I’ve heard stories about how doors magically open for people once they decide to make a major change, but that generally hasn’t been my experience. Against my own experience and common sense, then, I’m hoping for some serendipitous opportunities now. I’m practically praying for a miracle.

Because I don’t know what to do. All I know is that I want to start living, at my advanced age, instead of just barely existing — more like dying — in this sunbaked little desert town where I can’t hear the sea, and no one can hear me. I want to eat tomatoes off the vine in Tuscany. I want to drink a toast to Damo in Dublin. I want to live in a place where they actually consider it necessary, not “cosmetic,” to treat your lady problems and your painful leg veins in their socialist medicine clinics. I want to hang out with people who know how to live like lilies of the field, and I want to write like a fiend and get paid for it. I want to make excessive orgasmic love with men I find irresistible without the use of topical analgesics.

Am I dreaming too big? Can you hear me, universe? Do you take special orders, like those Secret people say you do? Because I don’t know the first thing about how to make any of it happen.

Surprise me. Prove the naysaying bastards wrong.