Rome

Still playing catch-up, while also working on two research papers, a presentation, and studying for end of semester exams. It has become inescapably clear to me that I won't be caught up by the time I leave, so you're going to get a few posts out of chronological order as I muse on the depressingly few days I have left in Rome, because they won't mean nearly as much if I'm writing them when I get back to the United States.

I think before coming here I never really knew what it was like to fall head over heels in love with a city. I’m (grudgingly) able to admit that a lot of my passion for San Jose and California in general has more to do with nostalgia and a dislike for Texas than it has to do with anything specific to the state. I don’t have any particular love for Double Oak, other than the fact that I have family and friends there. I like Austin, and it feels comfortably like home to me, but I don’t pine for it. Rome on the other hand...Rome is the city where I can stop on top of a hill at 1:00 in the morning in 40 degree weather to stare out over the city for half an hour and consider it time well-spent. Rome is the city where I can walk out of a coffee shop on a perfectly ordinary Sunday morning and have my breath taken away and tears come to my eyes at the simple sight of a street lit with the hazy morning light while the Italians pass by with their dogs and shopkeepers start to open their doors. Even now, at the end of the semester, I walk out onto our boring dirty little street and want to spin around, dance wildly, sing with the pure joy of being. I still randomly pause to think “holy shit, I’m in Rome”, and it makes me as irrationally gleeful now as it did three months ago. As the time when I have to go home creeps inexorably closer, I want more and more to just throw down my books, forget about grades and schoolwork, and get out into the city just to see it.

I can say with some certainty that I may never love a place as much as I love Rome. I will bawl like a baby when I have to leave, and I suspect getting back to a “normal” life in the US will be very difficult for me for some time. But I also know that I’ll be back—how could I not? No matter what happens in my life, I will find a way to come back again, because no place has ever spoken to me in such a way before. It’s not just about the monuments and tourist traps, although they’re fun too. I’ve seen the Colosseum, the Vatican, Saint Peter’s Basilica, the Sistine Chapel, the Trevi Fountain, the Roman Forum, the Pantheon, and more museums than I can count. I’ve seen all of the places people come to Rome to see, and more, and I would come back even if I could never visit any of them again, because the city itself is special. Rome is a wild tangle of passion and confusion and learning and love and beauty and life.

And for a brief and wonderful amount of time, I have been blessed to call it mine.