As People Tend To Do

So I’ve changed my mind, as people tend to do. Originally my plan was to live in Perugia, Italy for the entirety of the academic year—hoping to expand my mind and subsequently my body (this not getting fat thing hasn’t really worked out.) But now that I’ve reached the end of the first semester, I’ve decided to return home, to a wintry and impossibly cold Maine and then venture onto a similar feeling Vermont.

I took a city bus tour of Perugia yesterday. With the weather somewhat frigid, the beer in my hand warm, the city of Perugia glistening in the pale December sunlight, I felt my heartstrings tug a little. Like some decisions in our life, I’ve almost come to regret making this choice a little too hastily, for if there were ever a place to live in Italy, Perugia would walk over all other competitors.

Four months isn’t enough time to get to know a city. It isn’t enough time to learn a language. It isn’t enough time to try every restaurant, every dance club, to visit every church, to see every play, to meet every handsome, single man. But it does seem to be just enough time to fall in love with a city.

I’ve been trying to process how I’m feeling lately—why at times I feel like Italy was the wrong choice for me, while at other times I’m completely sick to my stomach with despair about having to depart from her oily clutches. Maybe I just need a certain amount of time to find myself attached to a place—to find the café that always serves coffee the way I like it, the bookstore that smells like the old leather in our living room, the women who remind me of my mother.

It has been a fleeting last few weeks here in Perugia, the time waning with the convivial autumnal sunshine. Stores are closing earlier, the grocers and bar tenders seem to know that the students are all returning to their respective homes, stories of Italy tucked securely into their pockets. The streets seem emptier, eerily lit with the sparkling Christmas lights, the nippy winter evenings chasing everyone inside to their bottles of Montenegro.

Last night I woke up in the night, sometime around 4 AM. Our apartment was exceptionally cold, for the heater doesn’t turn on until around 8 AM, initiating the day’s activities. I left my bedroom and sat on the communal couch that is our living room and looked around our austere apartment, trying to place what it is that has changed about me over the past few months.

Could it be the language that I’ve improved on, the people I’ve met, the copious amounts of food that I’ve consumed, the bottles of wine that sit empty in the recycling bin? I imagine that it could be all of these factors, blending into one big mass of change. But I also think a part of this big new love for Italy comes from me and my childhood storybooks and Fra Angelico’s “Annunciation” and tastes of panetonne and everything that has imbued my life with it’s characteristics, flaws, advantages, etc.

I’ve made 20 pies during my stay in Italy—and one might say that my pie making skills have certainly changed for the better. I make a pie dough in less than 10 minutes and roll it out with a used wine bottle. There have been numerous different types: peach, chocolate, apple, pear, butterscotch, caramel and dried fruit. There is something about the chemistry for me, the conversion of bland to sweet, from mundane everyday products to impossibly delectable outcomes—it makes me feel like life has that kind of potential too—to miraculously change from simple and routine to something inexplicably good. God that sounds corny, but this conversion to goodness and hopefulness seems to fit Perugia—and consequently, me.

I started this blog with little or no goal. The people who read these words are mostly my family, my friends, maybe people who think they’ve stumbled upon a weight loss website. I didn’t know what I wanted to write about and I still don’t—my posts evident of the random thoughts that Italy provoked in me. But somehow this mixture of these arbitrary, these unsystematic writings make me feel better—sure they are therapeutic, helpful when wanting to vent—but there is something about seeing them all clumped together, like a little family of experience.

I fly out of Italy Saturday morning, very early. I’m sad and hopeful and nervous and extremely happy and already homesick for the stark walls of my apartment, Via Deliziosa 12.

But just for my own benefit I think I shall keep this blog thing going—maybe I’ll change the title to “I’m Not Getting Fat In College”. Not as romantic and lilting sounding as the other title, but I guess that’s just where I am now.

I recently read a quote by Elenora Duse and it says “If the sight of the blue skies fills you with joy, if a blade of grass springing up in the fields has power to move you, if the simple things in nature have a message you understand, Rejoice, for your soul is alive.” This is how I feel about Italy.