Some days are easier than others. Thursday is a day to put my head down and just slog through. For the first time since arriving, I had insomnia Wednesday night, and Thursday I cannot seem to do anything right. Even Andrea seems taken aback with me and cannot joke about my abundant fuck-ups. I haven’t had a wi-fi signal to grab since Sunday and I am really feeling out of touch and, for the first time this trip, noticeably lonely. I am feeling worn down.
I have always felt a degree of foreignness wherever I find myself; the result, I suppose, of growing up between two cultures and languages. It is a particularly common American story, especially for first-generation children – plenty of people I know have gone through this – but each of us is shaped by it in unique ways. I’ve always felt a bit out-of-place. After five weeks in Italy, I am really noticing it – though I have friends here and people in the village store and coffeeshop are beginning to recognize me and even say hello – I will never be an insider here. This will NEVER be a place I can claim I am from. Nor anywhere else – even in Colorado, were I’ve lived in the same house for 21 years, I often feel like the outsider. There was a passage in Per Petterson’s “Out Stealing Horses” that really struck me when I read it a few weeks ago, because it is about being the new face in a town:
“People like it when you tell them things, in suitable portions, in a modest, intimate tone, and they think they know you, but they do not, they know about you, for what they are let in on are facts, not feelings, not what your opinion is about anything at all, not how what has happened to you and how all the decisions you have made have turned you into who you are. What they do is fill in with their own feelings and opinions and assumptions and they compose a new life which has precious little to do with yours, and that lets you off the hook. No-one can touch you unless you yourself want them to. You only have to be polite and smile and keep paranoid thoughts at bay, because they will talk about you no matter how much you squirm, it is inevitable, and you would do the same thing yourself.”
This sense of foreignness manifests itself as disconnectedness and loneliness – and though I may have absolutely no reason in the world to feel blue, I do. Luciano senses this and takes me on a drive to accompany him in the afternoon – he is very kind, asking me how I am feeling, he senses something is off. He is becoming a bit like a father figure for me. We talk. He listens, then I listen. It is a good thing to have good friends.
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