i cannot hold on. i am tired of holding onto things. the moments are falling around me. i watch them drop. i am a part of them. i am not. i am somewhere outside of time and sense and normalcy.
i feel good. i feel solitary and strong.
i am in rome. thomas decided to come along. we took a 16 hour train ride from paris to get here. i loved every minute of it. crammed into a tiny car with four italian women and an english girl. sleeping in bunks with maybe two a half feet above me to move. lolling along with the movement of the stuffy, old train. at dinner we chatted with a man named richard from kentucky. his words escaped frantically through his thick southern accent, his forehead beaded with sweat, his enormous hands clutching a bottle of red wine to keep it from spilling over with the jerky movements of the car. he wanted to say everything. we talked about baseball and hiking. we talked about paris and amsterdam and prague. we talked about travel, fantasy football, pastries, hotels. he did not care what was said as long as something was being said. i did not feel like he liked or disliked us. we were simply there. something to witness in the scenery of his trip. the train rumbled along and i watched the sun turn into a burning poppy on the horizon, only to be swallowed suddenly by the mountains, leaving us in the dark grumbling of the train. i felt both ecstatic and totally removed. richard made me happy. he was traveling 45 days alone and having "the fucking time of his life."
the fucking time of his life.
now i am in rome and it has been some days and i am having the fucking time of my life. rome is weathered and ancient and crammed. it is narrow sidewalks, where you have to watch each step so as to not trip on some uneven cobblestone. it is wooden shutters and endless rows of dirty scooters and people thronging in every direction and it is heat and it is noise and it is beauty. we have walked for hours. we visited the trevi fountain, the roman forum, the pantheon, the villa borghese, the spanish steps, the colosseum. we stuffed ourselves with pasta and pizza and wine and tiramisu and pastries. we rented a surrey and biked around the park and waved at people and were ridiculous. we laid by fountains and read. tonight we have reservations at some restaurant, where we will have 6 course meals. i will wear my blue dress that thomas likes. the italian men read my arm and look at him and then at us and in those moments i am thomas' wife again. i am his wife when we check into the hotel and at dinner when the server loves me and wants to be loved by a girl who will write those words on her arm. he asks me to write them down so he can remember them.
tomorrow i take a ferry to sicily. when i arrive, i will see kate striano, and if i think about it too much, i feel like throwing up out of excitement.
and so the minutes keep going. filled with food and sights and love.
i rarely feel anxious anymore. i feel anticipation and i feel expectant and i feel hope. i sometimes feel unsure. i feel still. i feel alone. i feel happy. i feel full. i feel sad. i feel alive. they are all feelings i've had before, but suddenly in a context that makes sense. like everything came unscrambled and i can finally see how it fits.
i look back at the beginning of this blog-- the words i wrote then, the feelings i remember so strongly, how lost i felt when i imagined myself in any other context than the one to which i was accustomed. i never left divisadero street and now i have been so many places. enough places to know i will never see everything or know everything or have everything and that is okay. i look back and i feel a million miles away from that girl and i also feel just like her. i think i've realized the best part was not in forgetting myself or escaping myself or leaving myself somewhere, but instead going to meet that self. i suppose i had to travel across the world to be able to see what i had and was all along, but i feel good about what i've found. i am beth. i have said that so many many times. i am beth! i feel like i need a button. it's an assertion. i am pleased with it. i am beth and i am happy and sad, smart and foolish, thoughtful and careless, loving and needy, calm and frenetic, and many many other contradictions, but i am complete. i am whole. i am a whole person. i always was. i will be forever.
i am a silly girl.
i am at a desk in rome, wrapped in a towel, fresh out of the shower. i smell like lavender. i am soft. i am smiling. i am crying. i am waiting for thomas and for dinner and for nothing at all really, because i'm here and this is what i need.
i am crying because i'm happy and i always knew i could be, but never really imagined it would happen. that i could make it happen myself. that i have the capacity to do whatever it is that needs to be done. that i'm a whole person. a whole person. it feels like my birthday. this is the first day of my life. i am complete.
