I thought I had at least one emergency hatch at the ready. Not so, apparently.

**

I could launch, in detail, into all that has come up for me lately because of my feelings for Dan: about my history of feeling like the least important person in the universe, the one perennially expected to sacrifice and keep a low profile and not complain about going without — essentially invisible — the Good Little Girl, who never harms a fly, or even upsets anyone. As Hamlet said, But break, my heart, for I must hold my tongue. One finds oneself with powerful, taboo desires that disturb absolutely everyone, and they all say My god, keep that monstrous business to yourself! For heaven’s sake!

But say one imagines oneself on one’s deathbed, or bleeding to death in the street, in five years or forty, one never knows. And the regrets come flooding in: Why did I tiptoe through life, fretting at every moment that the very act of my breathing might offend somebody, taking a poll before deciding what to have for breakfast? It has recently become very apparent to me that the cacophany of conflicting thoughts that fill my head about the best course of action, or what my priorities should be, nearly always arise in someone else’s voice, evoking the terror of What Everyone Might Think Of Me. The tireless local activist, shaming me for not being more selflessly involved in causes, for even thinking about my personal desires and dreams. The well-meaning friend, concerned about my underemployment, commanding me to dispatch a flood of resumes in every direction. The fearful buddy, certain catastrophe lurks just around the corner if I say or do the “wrong” thing. My frowning mother, whose shadow always hovers, even from two thousand miles away.

In the end, I decide and do very little; I am passive, immobilized by social pushes and pulls in every direction. None of which, I find, I can honestly own as mine. I live to please. And if not to please, to avoid offense.

Which is no way to live at all.

**

But I don’t feel like talking more about it, because that will only invite discussion and exacerbate things. Instead I thought I’d be lazy, and go back to Wallace Stevens, on whom I’ve riffed in the past — stealing once more from his “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.” It’s been done a million times, but I liked the way the post title sounded.

I did mimic Stevens’ stanzas and language to some extent, wherever possible, sometimes (hopefully) to comic effect, in case anyone wants to compare the two. It’s no great work of poesy, but like I said, I don’t feel much like talking. And sometimes a poem is worth a thousand words.

**

I

Among twenty single men,

The only moving thing

Was the married one.

II

I was of three minds,

And two of them

Were not of the mind at all.

III

The whorls of hair sweeping over his ear

Catch and dizzy me in the eddying.

IV

A man and his wife

Are one.

A man and his wife and his coworker

Are not.

V

I do not know which to attend,

The joy of proximity

Or the pain of departure,

The hand on the shoulder

Or just after.

VI

Ice streaks the sidewalks

With dangerous glass.

The shadows were longer

Before, when he came.

I knew

On that hot summer day

There’d be trouble.

VII

O ex-cons of The Fund,

Why do you imagine I can’t perform?

Do you not see how I flush,

Dropping my gaze to the feet

Of your buddy beside you?

VIII

I know the inflections

And the processes of fundraising;

But I know, too,

That a poverty

Creeps into my voice.

IX

When my friend walks out of sight,

It marks the end

And the beginning of my life.

X

At the sight of this big man

Grinning, beaming like a lamp

Even the sternest lesbians

Relent and are charmed.

XI

They flew to Chicago

On a Thursday morning.

Once relieved of that piercing

Reminder, I took

A total in afternoon pledges of

Sixteen hundred.

XII

The clouds are flowing.

My friend must be breathing.

XIII

It was evening all afternoon.

It was snowing

And it was going to snow.

Alone was more alone

Than alone was before.

You see, I dug in a entirely different variety of dirt this past week. My coach friend “regressed” me — he’s taking a past life regression course, and I was one of his test subjects.

You know by now, if you’ve been reading me for a while, that I walk a fine line sometimes between rationally skeptical and openly curious about “supernatural” phenomena. I’m of the opinion that we don’t necessarily even know what we don’t know. There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio…

I have to say I was surprised by what transpired. (But quite frankly I was surprised anything transpired.) There was definitely overwhelming emotion involved that lent the whole endeavor at the very least a sort of mythic or metaphorical aura of truth. If actually true, my “flashback” might illuminate a great deal about the way I experience my current life and its bizarrely recurrent disappointments. If wholly manufactured, it would still parallel this life in such a way that, had I encountered it as a movie or a novel, I would have shed a tear in identification with the protagonist.

But let me take you with me, in the order the images came.

**

What materializes first is a sort of bustling library, in what appears to be a converted church or chapel with a large stained glass window. There are different levels of books connected by wooden staircases. It feels very familiar, as if I’ve spent a lot of time there. The hair of the men is slicked back, as was the style in the ’20s and ’30s; the dress of both the men and the women is similarly retro. I stretch out my hand in front of me; it’s larger, with hair on it, and wears a decorative ring. A man’s hand. Holding up a mirror, as instructed by my guide, I see a man with shiny dark hair slicked back — not bad looking, but not particularly striking either.

Change of scene. A car pulls up, a sleek 1930s two-tone coupe. A good-looking, fair-haired young man, nattily dressed in a suit and long overcoat, gets out and greets me warmly with a handshake, calling me Milton (“old chap”). I am very happy to see him. He is a dear friend. But when my guide presses me about him, I am suddenly, spontaneously crying. Overwhelmed by that all too familiar sensation of hopeless, impotent longing and impossible desire, and shame at my perennially rejectable wrongness and freakishness. Fast, hot tears are wetting my hair at the temples as I tell my coach that I’m pretty sure I (Milton) love this man, and that he will repulse me violently before long, when I finally dare speak its name. My chest is sore with that ripped-open feeling I’ve often wondered about, that deep, acute pain like a knife wound. I’m quite helpless to stop weeping. I know this feeling so well.

My coach lets me cry for a while, and then moves me on to the day of my demise. How old am I? I let numbers spin like a slot machine in my mind several times and each time they settle on the number 54. Where am I? Driving in the countryside in a bumpy old car. It’s a beautiful summer day, with wildflowers blooming everywhere. But I’m grim and resigned. I don’t want to be here anymore. Wherever I’m headed, I sense it will be my final destination. Do I kill myself somewhere out there among the daisies? I don’t actually experience it, but I’m guessing so.

My coach asks me if I have any unfinished business before I leave that life, and I say (weeping again) that I’m sorry to those who were hurt by my leaving, but fortunately “there weren’t many.”

He brings me out of my reverie, and I’m emotionally drained and mentally spacey for the remainder of the day.

**

This week I’ve been listening to bouncy Depression-era big-band jazz on Last.fm and Pandora.com. I’ve always liked that music. Singer Annette Hanshaw comes on Eddie Cantor Radio after Ethel Waters, and I recall sitting next to Sonny in a darkened theater trying not to betray too much emotion as the Betty-Boop-esque character Sita mouths Hanshaw’s songs in the animated film “Sita Sings the Blues.” Hanshaw was partial to yearning torch songs, like her contemporary Billie Holiday, and a couple of songs that were hits for Holiday are on the “Sita” soundtrack. Every road I walk along/I walk along with you/ No wonder I’m lonely…Lover Come Back to Me.

It was the last time I’d spend any time with him, around Thanksgiving of last year. I was so happy to be sitting there beside him, I was giving thanks…and at the same time I couldn’t move. I was afraid I’d ruin everything, somehow, the way I always do.

**

The way I always do. There it is again: the absolute certainty, backed up by way too much experience, that things will go to hell in a handbasket no matter what — that either by reason of faulty constitution or faulty action, I am destined for abrupt and unequivocal rejection. Maybe because I don’t know what to do, or how to “be,” or maybe because I unconsciously emanate something that is the equivalent of Off! repellent for men. I have never been able to figure it out. But I literally beat my fists on any available surface and tear my hair out when some helpful dipshit refers to it as “my pattern.” As if I were some idiot fucktard willingly masterminding the very thing that (more than any other factor) makes me, at least at times, want to kill myself. My rage and despair at such moments is so intense that I could impulsively dash my brains out against the wall.

You may have noticed that I’m feeling some of that intense rage right now. It’s like this: imagine that I’m completely bloody from throwing myself for twenty-five years against the bars of the same barbed-wire cage, and some fucking know-it-all armchair Freud comes and says to me, “Why don’t you just get yourself out of there?”

**

A good friend of my best friend back home has been diagnosed with stage four cancer. I take a book out of the library by a professor of literature at Oxford who, given six months to live, opts out of the controlled poisoning of chemotherapy and instead adopts a regimen of raw food, supplements, acupuncture, and breathing exercises. (He lived eleven more years, at which point he died of a bacterial infection.) His book explores the limits of what we consider “rationalism” in medicine, which really just boils down to what has been arrived at by deductive reasoning (applying what are considered to be sufficiently established principles). Induction, which arrives at what works without necessarily understanding why, is largely derided within the Western tradition as “unscientific.”  It’s a delight to read the querulous musings of such a brilliant man, who gambles his life to swim against the current of conventional opinion. His “medical mutiny” is indeed Living Proof that we don’t even know what we don’t know.

I find the book in the inventory of a used book seller in a town near where my friend lives, and have it shipped directly to her house.

**

I am thinking about Milton, the gay Depression-era librarian, thwarted, heartbroken, and suicidal. Whether or not we ever shared a soul, he is nevertheless my soul brother. I feel his profound loneliness, his frustrated desire, his conviction of total un-acceptability. I am all wrong. The ones I want will never want me. Is it odd that I felt this inarticulate angst as early as the first grade (perhaps earlier)? Somehow I just knew it, when I gave my painstaking Lego sculpture to Daniel DuMont and he looked at me as if I were an alien. I knew, without having the words, that I would never win his heart, or anyone else’s for that matter. What came so easily to the rest of the world would require Herculean effort of me, and would most likely still be impossible. I felt this with total certitude.

I was six years old.

On the surface of things, and in the “objective” world of fact, or that-which-is-apparent, this just doesn’t compute. I was a cute kid, growing up, whom most everybody in my class liked. I went through a horribly awkward period in early adolescence when I was little more than a misshapen lump with dorky glasses, but I emerged from that into a teen girlhood that, judging from photos, was far more attractive than it felt from the inside at the time. I had the ability to relate to both the fringe Ally Sheedys and the popular-jock Emilio Estevezes among my peers. What’s more, I was attracted to the “right” gender in both Christian and mainstream expectation (even if I was a bit more enthusiastic than good girls were supposed to be). Yet no one I liked ever, ever liked me back — not when I was six, and not when I was sixteen. I never went on a single real “date.” Not until college, that is, and then a new paradigm emerged.

Which was not unlike what must have happened to brother Milton. You’re loved, all right (“old chap”), you’re the bees’ knees — until you’re in love — and then you’re vehemently spurned. Dropped like a hot potato. I would find out, time and time again over the years, that men would be overtly friendly and interested in me only until I really wanted them, whether that wanting was merely sexual or encompassed other longings as well. It didn’t matter; the outcome was the same. This latest escapade with Rick is nothing new — but somehow I always wind up proceeding as if this time will be different, as if this time I will be like “normal” people.

His desires made Milton an instant deviant, an abomination, at least to his beloved(s); my desires seem to make me an instant monster, a Medusa, to mine.

Driving in the countryside, Milton was weary. Weary of feeling like a social leper, weary of the burning thirsts and longings that smoldered unslaked all those years. He saw no way out of the barbed wire cage except for a gun, or a noose. I’ve felt that same despair. Is it the same despair?

**

Absence of proof is not proof of absence, the renegade cancer-surviving professor writes, quoting his unorthodox consultant Dr. Candace Pert. (She herself has placed herself outside of the mainstream by — among other things — appearing in the film “What the Bleep Do We Know?” as an expert talking head.)  There’s no way in Hades I can ever, using accepted scientific methods, confirm a connection between myself and a character who may or may not have ever existed in history. Even if I could somehow prove that he did in fact exist in history. But to the practical question Is this useful? or Can this help me? I may still be able to provide an answer.

I have spent most of my life digging for a reasonable cause of this seemingly fated solitude of mine, for the sexual kryptonite that, once excavated, might allow me to live and love “normally.” I exhausted ten years of weekly therapy, dozens of self-help and psychology texts, books on philosophy, sociology, and religion and that ever-nebulous field called “spirituality.” I meticulously dissected my relationships with my family members and peers, cross-examining my every need and motive and picking at various crusty old wounds. I have diagnosed myself variously as a narcissist, a neurotic, a love addict, a sex addict, an ambivalent-avoidant, a Woman Who Loves Too Much, a religious abuse survivor, an INFP, a typical egoic consciousness, and a Tragic Romantic (Four, in the Enneagram model). In the end I’ve found no ultimate internal “cause” powerful enough to have effected such an unequivocal and consistent legacy of abortive rejection and abandonment. I’ve speculated about external causes (men are X, women are Y), but inconclusively. The puzzle has remained unsolved.

I’ve searched the holy books
Tried to unravel the mystery of Jesus Christ the savior
I’ve read the poets and the analysts
Searched through the books on human behavior
I traveled this world round
For an answer that refused to be found
I don’t know why and I don’t know how
But she’s nobody’s baby now.

Milton gives me an unreasonable cause.

**

Let’s assume, just for the sake of argument, that I was Milton, and Milton is me. And that my psyche is imprinted indelibly with the endlessly painful experience of being attracted to members of the same sex –in this case, men — when such a thing was greater cause for censure and ostracism than it is in our still far-from-enlightened present. (While there was a brief “pansy craze” in urban clubs and entertainment in the 1920s, by the Depression-plagued 1930s a conservative backlash had taken over, which blamed society’s considerable ills on moral depravity — not unlike like today’s Jerry Falwells and their ilk.) A person would have to have had a very strong sense of self to trespass unapologetically, to persist, to find others of his kind, rather than just accept, like our contemporary Ted Haggard, that his innermost desires were aberrant and wrong in the eyes of God and man.

Not only that, but Milton was deeply, madly in love. With a man either straight or unwilling to embrace his feelings toward another man. I’d bet on the latter. It would add an element of complexity to the mix, of that confusion of subtle and mixed signals, of not knowing where one stands, or whether one should act. Let’s say, then, that Milton’s friend may have felt something reciprocal. But that he was constitutionally incapable of acknowledging or acting upon it. And when, one day, “after teas and cakes and ices,” Milton had the strength to force the moment to its crisis, said gentleman recoiled in horror, perhaps used epithets like nancy-boy or fairy, grabbed his coat, and fled. Don’t ring me. Don’t write me. I don’t ever want to see you again. You disgust me.

**

In the light of this hypothetical tale, my recurrent feelings and experiences do make more sense: the deep, deep shame about my fierce unmet longings that I felt even in childhood…the fear that my desires are somehow inordinate, or freakish, or wrong, and that I’m freakish and wrong (why else do I continuously repel the men I want most?)…the bewilderment and knife-twisting pain and humiliation of unexpected, often violent repulsion “when everything was going so well”…the bouts of resignation to lonely, masturbatory solitude (unless I just take what I can get, perhaps like Milton taking an eager female friend to dinner)…the suicidal rage and despair over my apparent barbed-wire cage.

Just imagine for a moment that Milton’s 21 grams of unhappy, aborted chi soon re-immerses itself in the river of embodied life as a little blonde girl in 1970s Massachusetts — but somehow retains the same set of experience-based assumptions it held as the person known as Milton. Without allowing for the fact that it is now an entirely different person in an entirely different situation (and body).

I know it sounds highly unlikely, or at least very odd, unless you believe wholeheartedly in this stuff.  But bear with me.

My question then would be, why wasn’t he pleasantly surprised in his new life?

I’m already way out on a limb about this past life business. I’ve certainly never been a card-carrying member of what I call the Omnipotence movement, which insists that you create everything that happens to you (so why’d you manifest those bombs at your wedding, Afghan villagers? ). Try telling that to a nine-year-old with bone cancer, incidentally. This (usually dogmatically delivered) assertion can wind up feeling the opposite of empowering  — which it’s actually meant to be, in its annoying New Agey way — and can often come off as just plain assholery.

I do, however, believe in that classic hippie concept, “vibes.” Do I think little AlienBaby had godlike control over which males came into her life when? No. Do I think that the ones that did may have responded to what she was unconsciously projecting about herself because of her assumptions? Now that’s a possibility.

So much of the fix-up work I’ve done on myself has been aimed at addressing these root shames I could never quite get to the bottom of, even with all the archaeological excavation and professional assistance. From what I’ve been able to tell, I really had no precedent for holding such dire beliefs about myself and my desires until experiencing negative reinforcement over and over and over again, from nursery school on. Which came first, chicken or egg? Statistically, it seems improbable I could have been so “unlucky” in love, a born failure, never getting a “break” even once growing up, when I liked so many boys. But how could I be projecting the internalized effects of something that had not yet happened, or was only just happening?

Unless I was truly a born failure.

Say whatever you want about reincarnation — Milton the librarian gives me a powerful precedent. My rational mind still doesn’t fully buy it…it seems crazy…but I wept hard during that session, and I felt what felt like the root of this old wound.

Milton gives me new hope, too: I can now tell myself, That was then, and this is now. You’re a different person, with a different life. You get a second chance. (I’m actually welling up a bit, irrationally, writing this.) For any scoffing materialists out there, you can ease your fretting mind by thinking of this exercise as a placebo experiment. Maybe, at long last, I can put my romantic and sexual failures behind me by putting them seventy years behind me. Maybe I can finally lay them to rest.

Lay them to rest. Yes. Perhaps with a visualization: me, in a pastoral cemetery, kneeling down to place a wreath against a headstone. Milton —, 1900-1954. The inscription reads Thus have I had thee, as a dream doth flatter/In sleep a king, but waking, no such matter. The wreath is made up of red roses, with lots of thorns.

Rest in peace, brother Milton. I’m sorry your life was so painful that you had to end it. We can do better this time…and we will.

I promise to at least get us some hot c*ck by Christmas.

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.

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

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

**

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

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

**

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

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

and “Do You Love Me” –

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

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

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

Part 6.1 ROMA (ROME)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then I was ready to move on to Vatican City.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I liked this place.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**

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

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

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

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

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

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

______________

PART FIVE: LEAVING OZ

I have stolen something from Centro d’Ompio.

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

This is one thing that appears to be universally human.

*

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Me-ow.

*

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

Probably not.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

You know how it goes. Shits happen.

But the expression of a well-made man appears not only in his face,

It is in his limbs and joints also, it is curiously in the joints of his hips and wrists,

It is in his walk, the carriage of his neck, the flex of his waist and knees, dress

does not hide him,

The strong sweet quality he has strikes through the cotton and broadcloth,

To see him pass conveys as much as the best poem, perhaps more,

You linger to see his back, and the back of his neck and shoulder-side.

– Walt Whitman, “I Sing the Body Electric”

Finding my amorous longings toward men most often reflected in the rhapsodizings of the great queer male writers, I have often wondered whether I’m a gay man who has been rather haplessly reincarnated into a woman’s body: still pronouncedly desirous in a visual and most unladylike fashion, still operating with a male-to-male directness that just doesn’t fly in the straight world.

I am in a sweet agony over the beauty of men.

I told my friend Russ that I feel as if I’m wading through a field of fresh daisies, longing to ‘pluck’ them all…yet I know that in my greed and artless haste I’m very likely to wind up with nothing but grass-stained empty hands. Already I seem to have alienated Rick. He’s pulled a literal and figurative disappearing act ever since I made my sexual feelings plain.

**

I still don’t quite understand how it is that I could be so fascinating and worthwhile to men when I’m benignly indifferent (as I was at two parties last weekend, where I was followed from room to room by doggedly unaware acquaintances) or mildly intrigued (as I was upon meeting this colorful character Rick), but then instantly become repellent the moment I exhibit overt, full-blooded desire. You’d think I was some alluring wood nymph that suddenly morphed into the gorgon Medusa, hair-snakes a-hiss, turning previously warm, living men to stone. That’s really not the kind of hardness I was hoping for.

I’m kicking myself for not taking advantage of Rick that first night, even though I was tired, and not as horny as I had been earlier, and up against a writing deadline. I didn’t know how much worse it would get, or that I wouldn’t have another opportunity. I didn’t know how a dark wisp of hair curling against his neck would pierce me through like a sword (my kingdom for the chance to kiss that sweet spot!), or how his briefly bared, muscular shoulder would make my ovaries ache, or how watching his battered, inelegant hands perform any task whatsoever would make the blood rush blaring from my head like fire engines to the site of a four-alarm blaze. I had no idea I wouldn’t be able to entertain even a passing thought about his more indisputably masculine attributes if I had any intention of maintaining brain function (or dry panties) at work. I want him, that hairy, disreputable, irresistible bastard, who overrode my current taste settings and time-warped me back to 1994.

Desire! — it consumes everything: your time, your concentration, your thoughts, your plans, your best intentions. Like a mirage, it keeps you stumbling across the desert, believing that if you just keep following it, your thirst will eventually be quenched. I find Ms. Johnson’s book is only helpful up to a point now: her thesis is mainly about the love aspect of eros, not the nitty-gritty sexual one. I may be able to court my inner Beloved and find the Divine or the Other or the Outlaw Pothead somewhere within myself, but I’m not about to sprout hair on my chest or face — nor do I want to. I can’t sprout certain other things, either, with which to then perform indecent acts upon myself. The literal, physical hunger for the sexual Other isn’t something you can DIY.

**

The fact that I’ve been spending my recent days as swollen and juicy as a ripe Georgia peach may, perhaps, be why so many other young men at work have been sniffing around me lately, their dog-sense telling them that there’s something to come and get. I can’t tell you how much I love the fact that the beautiful, intense, whip-smart doctoral candidate in history (the first person to actually catch my notice when I walked in the door) has taken to sitting next to me during the evening shift, chatting and joking with a barely detectable but winsome edge of nerdy awkwardness. (And where, as Eliot said, do I begin?) The newest trainee, a classic-heartthrob-looking pup who belongs in 1950s films alongside James Dean and Montgomery Clift, did a mutual triple take before we introduced ourselves, and he has also gravitated to the chair next to mine to play getting-to-know-you. Besides these two obvious beauties in my obvious type-category, there are a few lovely-boned African-American gentlemen who heap their satin-smooth attentions upon me on a daily basis, a stocky, adorable amateur astrologer who caresses me and calls me “sexy lady,” and two affable young supervisors who find excuses to hover around my cube like honeybees.

I love it all, and I love them all, and I am one hundred percent certain that if I tried to act upon any of this in my typical, straightforward, clumsy fashion, it would all go away. Because I have no idea what to do, and never have, as a woman who desires men the way men desire women. (As I said to my coach friend, “Why did God make men beautiful if he didn’t want me to have sex with them? And who do you have to sleep with to get laid around here?!!!!”)

Maybe there are no shortcuts. Maybe I’m looking for an easy way to home plate that doesn’t exist for me as a respectable female, or maybe I just say too g-damn much. Standing dumb in this field of daisies, I clench my hands impotently. How do I reach for Eli (the gorgeous grad student) in a way that doesn’t make him vanish like a vapor? Maybe I shouldn’t even try. Maybe I should just enjoy our sparkling rapport for what it is, and leave him to the nice marriageable girls his own age whose mothers would have paroxysms over him. Maybe out-of-the-box-fresh Mr. Dean doesn’t need to be put on the spot by a shameless cougar wannabe having a midlife crisis. Such lovely, earnest creatures they are. Maybe I should just wait and see if Rick comes around, because he is, after all, the sexy and not-so-nice outsider who triggered this human estrus. I just don’t have a clue. A clue is something I’ve never gotten.

The one thing I am confident of, given how intoxicated I became last Monday when Rick stood a little too close (I had to take a step back just to keep my wits about me), is that I can count on my own arousal, at least with him, and if I can count on my own arousal, the rest would take care of itself. There’s nothing worse than play that feels like work, especially that kind of play. But wanting a man — God! — with that delicious appetite…peeling him bare like an exotic fruit…feeling his rough and smooth textures…smelling him, tasting him…swallowing him deep in your belly…all with the lip-smacking relish you might reserve for a savory meal in a Roman trattoria…it requires no more effort than simple, hearty eating when you’re famished. And he wouldn’t have to work very hard, either. (He would have to let me enjoy him…one of my few complaints about the only truly wanted men I’ve ever had is that they rushed or truncated my slow and deliberate worship of their bodies, not realizing how central it was to my own pleasure.)

But I fear I’ve rambled on too long before the fourth installment (which I decided to post after being urged to continue by a Russian-born fan who likes me better than Elizabeth Gilbert!) — this post will be positively unmanageable. (Poor bluemorpho3, he’ll never catch up!) Here’s the first dispatch I sent from Centro d’Ompio post-James, still reeling from the loss. Of course in the meantime I have a couple of unwanted pursuers of both sexes…naturally!

__________________________

PART FOUR: TOMORROW AND TOMORROW AND TOMORROW

“…creeps its petty pace from day to day.”

This week’s diary is a day-by-day log, reflecting the way time trudges on when joy takes a holiday.

*

TUESDAY

This laptop is the best investment I have ever made. Last week I was sitting in a cafe in Orta writing this diary for hours — today I’m sitting on the top of Centro’s mountain, having hiked up to the wooden cross at its pinnacle, looking at the whole of Lake Orta. Diagonally across the lake I can see the red roofs of the town of Pella, and high above them, on a steep cliff, the chalk-white church to which James hiked one day, incredibly. It was a grueling journey, certainly more than I would ever have attempted on foot.

Today (my day off) I slept until eleven o’clock, fading in and out of consciousness, my twin futon like a little raft where I floated on a murky river of loss. There was nothing to propel me out of bed, neither duty nor anticipation. Life for the full-time staff at Centro may be a continuous exercise in nonattachment, but for me, experiencing this place for the first (and probably the last) time, there is now and will forever be a James-shaped hole that no one else can fill. We had only seventeen days together, but in that brief time he became like my best friend. And then he was like the best friend who teased me by coming into the kitchen in nothing but a towel. And then he was like the best friend I wanted to pull the towel off and touch in all manner of delightfully impertinent ways. And then…but you know what then.

Not that the soap opera does not continue. Oh, no. Now I find myself fending off a weathered Georgian war veteran and a nascent lesbian. Vaja, the pool man, who fought in Afghanistan and struts around Bisetti chest-out like its resident rooster, is frequently either trying to catch my eye or touching me in some uninvited way. James practically lionized the man — when I mentioned that Vaja had stroked my hair, he joked “I’ve been wanting him to do that since I got here!” — but his kind of aggressive machismo makes me uneasy. I don’t think he’s actually dangerous, but he really can’t take a hint, and now that my obvious love interest has flown the coop it’s as if it’s open season on yours truly. When all I want is to be left alone.

Then there’s Hanna.

We used to argue good-naturedly about her, the limey and I. Over time I became certain that she felt more than friendly toward me, and that that was the main reason why she regarded him through slitted eyes and spoke to him curtly (if at all). He said that she simply hated him, and that I was horribly conceited. But now that he’s gone, she follows me around and stares at me intensely as if I were a cross between Jesus Christ and a Belgian chocolate truffle. I don’t know what to do. I’ve never had anyone, not even a lesbian, look at me with such adoration and ferocious longing, and, as I told James, the chicks dig me! Also, she’s not “out.” For all I know, the young woman is at a delicate turning point in her life, and I certainly don’t want to give her a bad experience. So I’m not handling it well. Most of the time I’m simply in flight from her and Vaja. Any advice you queer friends of mine (or for that matter the straight ones) can give me is welcome. Aiuto! as they say in Italy. HELP.

Marjorie and Christian have become close. I never had a chance to tell you about Marjorie — there was just too much else going on. She’s a pretty, fairly uncomplicated but very sweet blonde account manager from Bolton, England (near Manchester), who is built, as they say, like a brick house. When she first arrived, my heart sank, but James had no interest in her whatsoever, preferring to spend even more time with me (which was more gratifying than I can tell you). In the meantime Alessandro and Christian attached themselves to her like barnacles. Ultimately, 19-year-old Christian seems to have won out (I think she has about ten years on him), and they are planning to leave early to go restore medieval houses together in San Remo. Their last day at Centro is Sunday. I’m just realizing how much I’ll miss them, and how much I envy them, those crazy kids.

Gina is still here, the voluptuous little Italian harlot (no, I’m sure she doesn’t deserve that) staying in Raffe’s room. When the hell is she leaving, for God’s sake?!! I see her coming and going, and we regard each other briefly, unsmilingly. I can’t help but wonder what, if anything, he said to her in parting. There’s that extremely petty, jealous and injured part of me that secretly hopes it was shattering, so that she knew at once and beyond a doubt that their little romance was all a lie. Gina happens to look a lot like my fourth grade best friend, Adriana Giametti. Adriana and I had an intense love/hate relationship — we were always competing for grades, attention, boys, you name it. I could never stand for Adriana to get the better of me, and I couldn’t stand for her lookalike to think she’d gotten the better of me now. Even if I know she meant nothing to him…I want her to know she meant nothing to him, too. Stupid cow.

Yeah, I know. So sue me. I’m not the Buddha.

At least I have a new friend I can actually talk to, without Raffe’s language barrier or conflict of interest. At the end of last week Finn arrived from Vienna. He’s a slender, easygoing young web designer with sensitive green eyes and a deep baritone voice who practices yoga and plays the guitar. His English is impeccable, honed by years of enjoying English-language films and books. He’s been to Centro before, and has known Robert and Mila for years, having lived with them in Australia. He has a serious girlfriend back in Vienna, so that’s not on the table, in case you were wondering. He’s a lovely person, inside and out, but I really couldn’t go there right now anyway. Almost immediately, just being in his company with others and hearing the way he expresses himself, I knew that I could trust him. He would feel at home at the yoga center (he practices Ashtanga for two hours in the morning) and comfortable at a party with my closest friends. He’s not put off by “girly” things. I wonder what James would have said about him. Would he have thought he was too much of a “pussy?” I’d certainly much rather hang out with Finn than with Vaja.

This morning, after finally dragging myself out of bed, I found Finn reading a book about globalization on the sort of mini-veranda on the second level of the house where the smokers go to smoke. He asked me how I was. “I’m kind of depressed,” I admitted. I would probably not have admitted this, at least so readily, to any of the others. Gina was in evidence just then, getting ready to depart for the day, and I waited for her to leave before I confessed, “I was in love with the Englishman.” It felt good to say it out loud, right there on the premises, and I gave Finn the bare bones of the story, including the reason why I can hardly look at the woman. A little later, after I had showered and dressed, he came to get me for lunch, and showed me the secret back way to hike up to Centro.

The others have seen us hanging out, and I know what they’ll conclude, but what I really need right now, more than anything, is a friend. I feel as if I’ve tumbled almost traumatically from my state of grace. Walking down from Centro after dinner, I felt the loneliness I hadn’t felt since my first night here, and the sudden emptiness of grief. I know that this too shall pass, but I wasn’t ready. Are we ever ready? You find a shimmering pearl, you hold it in your hand, and then you lose it again. Cosi e la vita. Such is life.

*

WEDNESDAY

Padma is a gift.

Her Sanskrit name was given to her by her spiritual master in Costa Rica, where she worked on a commune for several years. She’s probably around fifty, with long, thick, graying hair and an ample bosom, but she seems younger in spirit. Her room is next to mine and Elke’s; at night, I can often hear her picking her guitar and singing some soft Portuguese lullaby. Her room is cozy and inviting, and she has set out to beautify every single common area at Bisetti. She’ll be a full-time kitchen worker at Centro for four months, and explains her Bisetti project by saying “this is my home.” Last night I came into her room and sang along to a Sanskrit chant I recognized from a Krishna Das CD that gets frequent play at my yoga center.

Padma believes that people are healed through music. So I may be coming to her room quite a bit in the near future. Just now she came up to me from behind, and enfolded me in a mighty embrace that reminded me of being a small child in my grandmother’s lap. God bless Padma. I’m never one to push away a life preserver.

*

THURSDAY

My very first friend in Pettenasco is gone.

Mezza Coda, “half tail,” the blind, deaf and slightly lame cat who had resided at Bisetti for nineteen years, or the entriety of Christian’s lifespan, appears to have gone away to die. She’s been missing since yesterday. Finn found her hobbling down the road Monday, and brought her back to Bisetti, but she had probably been trying to go to her final resting place. She never strayed far from the kitchen steps, and countless times since that first night I picked up her small grubby body and held her cradled against my shoulder until she purred loudly and stuck her head under my chin. She loved to be held; she just couldn’t get enough affection. Even James picked her up and petted her, sometimes, although her copious drooling would cause him to utter a stream of hilarious curses worthy of the saltiest English sailor. (I told him that she couldn’t help herself — he had this effect on females.)

Earlier in the day it had hit me, hard, that Alessandro, Christian, and Marjorie are all leaving Monday morning, as is Cosmo (due to some sudden family problem or emergency). The losses are piling up like wrecks on a freeway. Alessandro and I have been spending less and less time together since he moved in with Christian, so I’ve lost him piecemeal. (I really must get a picture of him, so that you can see him.) He’s managed to become something of a sidekick to the comparatively more worldly Norwegian. I never fell under Christian’s spell the way Alessandro and Marjorie did, but he did walk with me all the way to Orta that day, and I decided that he was all right. At any rate, I’m losing most of my original cast, my companions in Oz, my witnesses.

Coming back to Bisetti, I saw the candle Padma had lit for Mezza Coda beside the cat dish, which was now filled with flowers. For the second time I sat down on the kitchen steps, put my head in my hands, and started to cry silently, my shoulders shaking. I had meant to take a picture of her. I had wanted to help clean her up. I never got to say goodbye. And now my little friend was gone, as surely and as suddenly as my other beloved friend was gone.

Marjorie came up behind me from the kitchen, reached down, and stroked my hair, which just made the tears come that much faster. Raffe came along, too, and took my hand (which was welcome), and Vaja crouched down and petted me a little (which I could have done without, but I suppose he means well). “This is life,” he said, a statement which is true, but absolutely never helps at all.

It was only partly about the cat, but her final gift to me, I suppose, was this opportunity to let go in front of the others.

Mercifully, Gina had packed up her things and was retrieving her luggage that night. What I found out from Raffe was that they had had a major falling-out, partially precipitated by the James episode, but not limited to it. Somehow this made me feel better about Raffe. “She has lots of problem,” Raffe explained. “I don’t know she will be back.”

All I have to say is — Ciao, Gina, won’t miss ya, don’t let the door hit your enormous Italian ass on the way out.

Mezza Coda may not have had any claws left, but I guess I still have a few. Me-ow. You may rightly say that I’m directing my anger at the wrong person…but in the end I realize there were no real winners here. Not Gina, and not James, except in that toxic macho bullshit sense of having scored, of having fucked one more anonymous chick. No, I’m just being hateful because of course I wanted to be the one up there, giggling in his room, releasing all that delectable sexual tension we created over time. It ain’t fair, is it? You cook up this tasty international treat, and then some random Maria comes along and dispenses with it in one gulp.

*

FRIDAY

Today I determined that, if it was the last thing I did, I was going to get to the waterfalls.

At the risk of boring you to death…it was one of those places to which a certain Englishman I knew loved to go, packing a lunch of bread and cheese with tomato. And I had not yet been there. He had spoken of bringing me along sometime, but we never made it.

So after lunch, I hiked up over Centro’s mountain and through a good deal of woods to the village of Agrano, and then followed the instructions Finn gave me, walking up a mountain road to a small co-op farm and restaurant called Alpe Selviana. The waterfalls were just a short distance beyond. It took me an hour and a half under a blazing sun.

I was incredibly sweaty and winded on the road up to Alpe Selviana, and stopped to pour water over my head at a freshwater spout by the side of the road. Just then a compact car sped past me, and the person in the driver’s seat looked an awful lot like Adriana Giametti. Her dog barked at me (almost viciously, I thought) out the window.

Of all the places in Lake Orta she could have been, she had to come to the waterfalls on that day, at that time. I had to laugh at the allegorical import of the situation — I had worked and sweated hard to get this far, and she just motored up in her neat little auto. Quality.

“Puttana,” I called after her, for no one’s benefit but my own.

Elke had started out ahead of me, in the morning, from Bisetti, and I found her sitting on a rock platform above one of the pools. I left my backpack with her and ventured down toward the water. These falls were more spectacular than our little waterfall at home. An algae-green river cut through a steep, plunging canyon of wrinkled metamorphic rock; there were myriad platforms and pools for swimming and sunbathing, accessible by climbing precariously over the rocks alongside the water. I had thought the place would be much more isolated and private, but there was one male nude sunbather up above, and another down below. Nearby was an old man in a Speedo. And then there was Gina, sunning herself naked, looking very fertile and National Geographic.

I staggered back from the edge of the rock where I stood, feeling nausea again. Seeing her au naturel was, for me, about as pleasant as seeing the neighborhood dog eat his own vomit. (I think I would rather watch that, actually.) She must have seen me see her, because promptly thereafter she passed by Elke and me, fully clothed, with her dog, uttering a cursory “Ciao” to which only Elke responded.

It was awful, running into her there, and it seemed like too much of a coincidence. I found myself wondering: did he bring her to the falls, his next to last day before he left? I even wondered, like a true paranoiac, if they’d met here before.

I knew I could torture myself with endless speculations (I’ve excelled at it in the past), but what’s the point? I’ll never see the man again, and I’ll be rid of her for good once the plane leaves the runway. Besides, someone had told me that she works in Omegna, the next town over, and none of the locals could be ignorant of the falls.

But some of you will no doubt remark on the synchronicity, regardless. And yes, perhaps the universe was trying to coax (coerce!) me into making some kind of peace with the one character in this story I simply cannot abide, but, as I said — I am not the Buddha. I’m just doing the best I can, dammit.

After Gina had gone I said to Elke with a sigh, “I wish you understood more English. Or I knew some German.” Elke agreed that this would have been a good thing, and haltingly expressed her frustrations with the language barriers she was encountering.

“Elke,” I said, “what’s the German word for ‘broken’?”

“Gebrochen,” she said.

“Gebrochen,” I repeated. Thanks to the Bach chorales I’d studied in college, I already knew the German word for ‘heart.’ “Mein Herze ist gebrochen,” I said.

That she understood. A sorrowful, compassionate expression passed over her open and kindly face. “Oh, oh,” she said, and moved to squat beside me and embrace me around the shoulders. No other words needed be sprachen.

Which was really nice. I think that’s the most significant communication she and I have ever had.

Soon after that, Elke departed for Pettenasco, and I went down to the pool by the elderly Speedo guy. He watched me most intently. I dipped my feet in the pool, and then had the idea to dunk myself fully clothed — a baptism, of sorts — which I proceeded to do. He motioned to me that I should take off my wet things, in response to which I thought — yeah, I don’t think so, Gramps. I climbed back up on the rocks and enjoyed the cool of my sopping clothes for a while. It was so hot that I was dry by the time I reached the Agrano town limits.

I look forward to Valentine’s Day about as eagerly as turkeys look forward to Thanksgiving.

No, that’s not quite right. The way I feel about this holiday is more like the way Charlie Bucket felt standing in the shop window watching all the regular middle-class kids with allowances buying up gluttonous amounts of candy. I loved Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory because the kid not only finds a golden ticket, but inherits the whole freaking factory in the end. I actually bought a replica of a 1971 Wonka bar, complete with golden ticket, from someone on eBay last week.

Call me nuts, but sometimes a girl just needs to feel lucky.

**

Another Sunday afternoon using the wireless at the coffeehouse. Brendan is at the register today. Brendan has worked here since the place opened, back in 2000 or 2001. Years ago, I had a huge crush on this pretty slackerboy that was as frustrating as it was futile. Latte-brewing Lothario that he is, he was more than happy to toy with me the way a cat bandies about a dazed little bird, until one day, when I must have decided (fear or no fear) that I’d had enough of his equivocal flirtations, and I followed him into the kitchen, seized him by the shoulders, and kissed him full on the mouth.

My life coach friend might call this “breaking the bonding pattern.” I simply called it liberating and exhilirating. Brendan, however, did not seem to appreciate it at all. He copped a sort of sullen resentment over the incident, like I had no business doing what I did, and we didn’t speak for a long time afterwards. But about a year ago he started sporadically attending the yoga studio where I worked, and now when I’m in here he acts like we’re the oldest and best of friends. He’ll sell me a tea for a dollar, and once in a while throw in a free cookie. I feel as if I have his (however grudging) respect, for what it’s worth.

You can’t tell me that men are simple creatures.

**

It seems like I really did arrive on the planet with a sweet tooth, so to speak. I’ve been trying to get my fingers in the metaphorical candy jar almost from day one. As I’ve mentioned before, one of my earliest memories is of chasing my cousin Nate around and around the coffee table (as well as the rest of the apartment my family lived in), trying to kiss him. (Some things don’t change, eh?) The adults laughed uproariously; Nate just squirmed.

He was the youngest son of my Southern preacher uncle, a few years older than my big brother, and I only met him maybe three times in my life — but in one of life’s uncanny little coincidences, he wound up attending the same university as Sonny, who grew up less than ten miles from my uncle’s big magnolia-flanked house. (They’re both fanatical about the university’s nationally respected football team, and Nate and my brother still have a long-distance NCAA pool going.) I guess I’m a sucker for a man with a languorous drawl.

When I went to my first preschool, in the high school where my father taught, I became passionately enamored of Roger, a quiet boy with shiny dark hair whom I distinctly remember in a bright red sweater. He was almost entirely impassive, but finally, at the picnic on the last day of school, he let me hold his hand, and we went running around together in the grass. That was a happy day. The next year, at a different preschool housed in a church, I longingly watched another adorable brunette named Bernard play, totally absorbed, with the church nursery’s collection of cars and trucks. I was too shy to say so much as boo to him, and would never have dreamed of trying to play with the cars and trucks to be close to him. He was scarcely aware of my existence, anyway…but his cherub-faced friend Jacob at least smiled at me, and came to my fourth birthday party. He let me kiss him on the cheek, the only part of my birthday I remember.

It went on from there, an inconsequential history of mostly fruitless yearning. The D’Angelo twins, beautiful olive-skinned Italian boys with big fawn eyes, regarded me with wary curiosity, but let me sit at their desk. I had a crush on most of the boys in my first grade class — including Daniel DuMont, to whom I presented a Snoopy I had lovingly and painstakingly fashioned out of Legos. He simply blinked at me with his long, dark eyelashes, looking mildly amused, as if I had just made some kind of lame joke. Then there was Peter Winters, one grade ahead of me, who stood by uncertainly when his squinty, straw-haired little punk of a friend Colin bullied me to tears on my walk home. And Dennis Noble, to whom I handed my autograph book with a thumping heart, who proceeded to write a cruel rhyme about my weight. (Not very noble.) That Luke Skywalker lookalike I once mentioned, in my youth group, to whom I could barely say hello. Most of my big brother’s buddies, to whom I may as well have been a gnat.

And that’s only a fraction of all that there were — in elementary school.

I had to have been born this way.

**

In a vivid dream I had, I have just been wed to an impossibly beautiful groom in an impossibly beautiful tuxedo (whom I will pretend doesn’t remotely resemble anyone I’ve ever met, because nothing scares a man like the mention of a wedding, even if it’s a symbol in a woman’s subconscious). I’m basking in the unbelievably thrilling and unfamiliar feeling of having captured the heart of such an unbelievably radiant and desirable creature, when I realize that he has suddenly disappeared. Without a word or a trace. I have been left standing in the austere, mostly empty sanctuary of the evangelical church I grew up in, with my mother and Jerry Baines. They’re making small talk about nothing, and I’m starting to panic. Where is he?

Jerry Baines was the low-key, serious boy in my youth group with whom my parents (and his) would have liked to see me. I did go to his senior prom as a sophomore (and to the movies once or twice after that), simply because he asked me. He was the only boy asking me to do anything in those days. I wasn’t the least bit attracted to him, and we didn’t have much in common besides Jesus, so our stilted conversations required a lot of effort. But his parents and mine seemed very excited about the whole idea of us. (I, of course, had other ideas — not to mention other crushes.)

Just remembering this dream makes me furious, with the irrational ire of a superstitious agnostic who has failed thus far to build a successful life of her own. Because I know that the internalized message my mother, and evangelical fundamentalists in general, would like me to retain is this: Everything else in this world will pass away, but we will still be here, waiting for our lost lamb to come home.

In other words, I can try to lead what I believe is my own life, independent of their smothering dogmas and treacly godliness — pursuing my doomed, “selfish” desires as long as I can, even almost getting there — but in the end I’ll be left, like the Prodigal, with nothing but the church, my blood family, and whatever Jerry Baines they want for me.

What I pursue wholeheartedly, like my cousin and so many others after him, will invariably flee me; what I flee wholeheartedly will inevitably catch up with me.

Not the happiest snapshot from my subconscious.

**

Our unapologetically potty-mouthed friend Russ the Librarian has told me that “p*ssy rules,” but I remain unconvinced that mine rules much of anything. Certainly not all mankind. No, I doubt it rules so much as a minor fiefdom. It’s actually probably more the power-equivalent of an aide to a junior member of City Council. In other words, it’s more likely to get sent off on a lackey’s errand to the post office than it is to ever make it to chambers. (Of course, I think I told you, in an earlier post, that when they were handing them out I got issued a defective model I had to try to hammer out myself.)

But seriously, folks…while I’m on this Rodney Dangerfield riff, I could tell you about the only Valentine’s Day in my 41 years that I actually spent with a significant other.

My much older suitor and I had gone to see a local production of Eve Ensler’s Vagina Monologues (for V-day, naturally) that evening after dinner. It was well acted and powerful, and, as anyone who has ever seen it knows, quite graphic in its imagery and language. He was visibly affected, saying that it was a play everyone needed to see.

Later on, however, back at his house, he informed me that he wasn’t in the mood to get amorous — my best lingerie be damned — and that we would be going to bed to sleep. “After spending two hours at the slaughterhouse,” he said, “the last thing a man wants is a big, juicy steak.”

You gotta hand it to him, Seamus was a funny guy.

So that was my one shot at a “romantic” Valentine’s Day.

I wasn’t hugely turned on by my boomer beau, to be honest, and I definitely wasn’t in love with him, but he smelled good, and it was nice (not to mention novel) to have access to some male anatomy on a regular basis. Seamus came along after I had been spurned repeatedly by a self-proclaimed hermit of my own generation who bore a passing resemblance to Al Pacino and wrote music columns for the local alternative weekly. (I credit him with turning me onto obscure, wacky bands like Critters Buggin as well as indie veterans like The Flaming Lips.) After Tony’s tetchy rejections, I was tired of feeling like a social and sexual leper. So at the time it didn’t matter as much that Seamus and I didn’t have any kind of deeper connection, or that I felt like averting my eyes when he undressed. For once in my life, I was like everybody else. For once in my life, I was normal.

We would go out to dinner or the movies on a Saturday night, and he would hold my hand, and I was a legitimate heterosexual female for a change. I felt like a little girl playing dress-up, playing at a grownup relationship that had little or no substance. (No one else had to know that, of course.)

Sometimes I can’t help but wonder how many people we see, out and about, are playing that way.

**

Yes, I know it’s not that hard for a relatively decent-looking female to have somebody. I’ve tolerated sexual contact on a number of occasions that left me feeling — to borrow an image from novelist Nathaniel West — like a bottle being filled with tepid, dirty water. That’s the perfect description for the sheer ickiness of allowing oneself to be pawed and poked and slobbered upon against the desires and preferences of one’s own keenly attuned body and senses. The experience reminded me of nothing so much as choking down the cold, greasy brussels sprouts my mother insisted I eat before I could leave the dinner table. (I should add that one of my girlfriends adores brussels sprouts. With people, as with food, it’s all a matter of taste.)

Overriding visceral physical aversion with the will is tantamount to a kind of self-rape. I imagine prostitutes do it every day. I wouldn’t do it again.

The difference between feeling this and feeling real desire and pleasure is the difference between a brussels sprouts experience and having the smooth cocoa-butter sweetness of a creamy truffle melt silkily over the tongue and slide, thick and rich, down the throat. I recall a recent controversy involving a leader in the British National Party comparing rape to force-feeding a woman chocolate cake. I thought at the time, wow, that guy really, really doesn’t get it.

Nor did Woody Allen, for that matter, when he famously quipped “Sex is like pizza. When it’s good, it’s really good, and when it’s bad, it’s still pretty good.” No, Woody, for some of us it’s like sushi: when it’s good, it’s really good, but when it’s bad, it may make us want to vomit. The most “skilled” lover I ever encountered in my less than legendary career, a one-night stand from a bar, was extremely sensuous, a virtuoso of a kisser, and did everything “right” — and I couldn’t wait to get away from him. I stood under a scalding hot shower for thirty minutes, trying to scrub the smell of him off my skin and spit the taste of him out of my mouth, shuddering.

I’m too much of an animal, perhaps — too sensitive to pheromones — but it works the other way as well. Once, I was with someone I could have eaten alive, with a spoon. He didn’t push any secret magic buttons, and he didn’t kiss me as much as I might have liked, but he was all smooth cocoa-butter sweetness and silky richness and I could have had that for dessert every damn day of my life for the rest of forever. When he held me against him, I melted into his body, as if I were made of chocolate too.

**

I wonder who’s kissing her now, the old song goes. Much of my holiday suffering has usually been due to that kind of wondering, on a day when the collective consensus is that we must all make googly-eyes and buy that special someone candy or roses and have mind-blowing sexual experiences, the complicated logistics of which we picked up from Glamour or Maxim in the checkout line. Most of this, I know, is nothing more than a cynical marketing ploy. Nevertheless, I always wondered where Brendan was, where Tony was, where whoever the object of my desire was, on that particular day…whether they were alone, or with some slender little slip of a thing who was wearing some slender little slip of a thing. (An active mind can be an exquisite instrument of self-torture.)

This year is no different. I know a man like Sonny won’t be alone; Facebook updates tease at goings-on I can only guess at. I don’t want to guess. It could be one woman, or ten. I can’t complain; I had my opportunity. The window cracked open, then closed. So I drag out my mental file box of coping recipes and stand picking through my closet of strategies, trying to find something that will remedy the restlessness and discomfort, the shiftless dread and the dull ache of one more disappointing year, in what seems — taken with all the disappointments that came before — to be becoming just a long, tedious slog toward an anticlimactic mound of dirt. Had we but world enough, and time…

Here’s a recipe for Gratitude, instructing that I begin by being glad that I still have a roof over my head, then add the fresh fruit in the crisper that was on sale this week, and blend with old friends who still call. It tastes good, but it’s not entirely filling. I pull Nonattachment out from the mothballs; it looked so attractively minimalist when I bought it, but it never did fit in the crotch, and now it feels tight across the chest. Creative Visualization, which I wore for a week straight last month, now looks like a tacky and ridiculous impracticality that will only lead to further humiliation (and possibly beatings) if I step outside my door. Maybe if I could just whip up some Presence…but you can’t whip up Presence. You have to use Surrender, and just sit with it.

This seems to involve the least amount of struggle, so I take the Presence card out of the recipe file and put it on the table. Set aside your expectations, it says. Separate what-is-now from what-was, and what you have no way of knowing. Sift through your perceptions until projection is at a minimum, and save only simple seeing. Add liberal amounts of Surrender…and let stand.

**

I walk slowly home in the purple twilight, practicing walking meditation, feeling my feet against the insoles of my shoes and my shoes against the pavement. The air is cold, and smells of dry leaves. Almost miraculously, the practice starts to work…

Gazing at the neon of a corner eatery glowing in the fading light, I feel my anxious, compulsive identity falling away, being shed like some 400-pound overcoat that perennially drags me down. All those stories — about cousin Nate and the D’Angelo twins and Jerry Baines and Seamus and Willy Wonka and brussels sprouts — they dissipate like phantoms in the immediate thus-ness of the winter dusk, and I remember how good it feels to forget who it is you think you are. This constructed and habitual entity we call the “self” can be such an endlessly worrisome, burdensome, and troublesome thing. I need a vacation from mine.

Maybe that’s what I’ll do, this Valentine’s Day — give myself a vacation from my self. Experience each moment as something wholly unique, the way newborns do, without prejudice. As for my once very close friend…if he, or anyone, is happy, is in love, that’s good — right? Maybe I’ll soak in the tub and have some Wonka bar. I’m not going to plan, or ruminate on the past, or even obsess about the present.

If nothing else, I’ll just sit still. And savor the sweet taste of freedom, of being no one.

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

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

**

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

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

**

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

**

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

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

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

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

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

**

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

**

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

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

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

**

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

I’d like to think that’s progress.