Sometime on Friday morning things were spiralling around me. There was wide-eyed anxiety and visceral pain you could only feel and not describe. Throughout the day, images, mantras, fears, and hopes all flew through my mind. Finally, an eerie calmness settled in my brain. Quieting the maelstrom.
Control is slipping away. Everything seems wildly ironic; something I read before, but at the time thought was either weird or stupid, or both. But now it's all Fitzgerald, or Conrad, or Dostoyevsky.
Then sometime later I was in the Tuscan hills somewhere, looking forward towards narrow, curving roads, looking out into expanses of green, all shrubbery and tops of trees and red roofs. There was Pino Daniele, Morcheeba, Norah Jones, and Ligabue. I was wearing white and no sleeves and unaffected by the rain. I saw the city wall of Lucca and ascended two different campanili. I was in an oval piazza and stood in the middle and smiled and laughed and thought that I was in a drawing. And then there was a bridge, said to be from the devil, that had been there more than 1000 years, so when I stood atop it there was a combined age of 1023, at least. There were arches of green as we wound up the hill, and a room with a balcony, and someone who said, "Pero' quando c'e' sole, e' tutta un'altra cosa."
Pizza vegetariana e vino bianco, panna cotta, un caffè. There were shadows on the wall. There was a cherry tree and I ate a handful, even the rain-damaged berries. Sometime after that there was a cave of wind, older than the bridge, and I felt like I was inside a very damp and cold stomach. There was riveting eye contact that rattled me, although I was not a part of the exchange. Then there was the most breathtaking, sprawling vista that told of hundreds of years of the serene pace of life, at least for those in Montecatini. There was an ugly town with a fast crowd and aperitivos and prosecco, and then a seafood restaurant and my depression surging up, finally catching up with me. For some reason I thought of Grosseto. There was a whole fish sitting in front of me. Running through the streets of Pistoia, you could stop and pick up a babà , all soaked in rum. And then Piazza Goldoni, Ponte Vecchio, Palazzo Vecchio, Piazza della Signoria, Via dei Cerchi.
There were glimpses of experiences I already had but could never have to hold.
posted by Lucy Sloan @ 3:08 PM
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