I Fell In Love With Italy, But It Didn’t Love Me Back

Have you ever encountered a person, place, or thing, that you instantly fell in love with? Have you ever sat back and thought to yourself, “maybe this world is not so dark and scary, with this (noun) that exists”? Do you ever imagine yourself getting to spend the rest of your life in that state of love and adoration; do you plan your life and ambitions around it?

Have you ever stared in the face of a person, place, or thing that you love and been told, “I don’t love you. Go back to where you came from”?

Has this ever happened consecutively to you?

Odds are yes.

We had to cut our trip to Italy short. Our initial ten days of roaming through the major cities of a beautiful country was changed to five days that ended in stress and tragedy. For the sake of not making this an op-ed piece on current events, I will refrain from naming the reason and assume that you beautiful readers have turned on an electronic recently.

Italian people are some of the nicest people I have ever come into contact with. I suppose that’s what happens when you get to live in eternal sunshine and artwork, eating pasta and drinking limoncello. With a lifestyle like that, there’s no reason not to treat every person you see with kindness. The hours that were not passed in peaceful eating or roaming colorful streets, were spent travelling to museums and stores that somehow possessed equal beauty and comfort. Church bells told you good morning, and the laughter of tourists and families wished you good night. Our travels were tiring, but entirely worth the wide eyes and hitched breath that came when we all discovered a new destination here. 

Then, only a few days after we began our journey, we got the news. Again, I’m not going to name what The News is, for two reasons. First, if you are reading this and you know what it is, then you are hearing about it constantly, and I want this to be about me, not that. Second, if you are reading this and don’t know what I’m talking about, maybe this will prompt you to get out of the rock you’re living under and find out what’s happening to the world. It’s a win-win situation for me. 

Anyways, yes, we got The News. We were told that it might be best to leave. And us, being a group of young, reckless individuals who had deposits to keep and gelato to eat, said no. The News and its cause spread like wildfire, until we were being woken up every day by church bells and phones ringing and telling us to leave before we regret it. If I’m being completely honest, we still didn’t even consider leaving until our moms told us to. Always listen when your mom tells you to flee.

On our last day, as we cried and bought our plane tickets and lamented over having to leave such beauty and friendliness, it began to hail, as though Italy just got a call from our moms telling it to tell us to leave, like a parent getting a call from another parent saying that it was our curfew and we better be running home at this point.

We bought ourselves masks and gloves for our return. We dried our hands out from the amount of times we washed them, and in no time at all we were home (that’s a stone cold lie, but this is not supposed to be an itinerary of my travels). 

As I sat on the plane that I was not supposed to be on, wearing a mask and gloves and reading a book and listening to a song that makes me think of the eternal optimism of mankind, I realized something. In every place, in every emergency, throughout whatever trial or judgement we face, we remain completely ourselves. I am in quarantine, in the middle of a panic that spans continents and languages, and yet I’m listening to a song simply because I think the lyrics are nice. Over my surgical mask I can see the book that I talk to my friends about. In the eyes of my friends who know we are going back to more stress, we laugh at all the wonderful times we had. 

Sometimes, it is not always about who or what or where loves you back. Sometimes it is simply the act of loving and being yourself that is so beautiful. Maybe, just maybe, we should not be looking to love to reap the rewards, but to give our hearts the chance to breathe.

There is a quote from the book I’m reading right now, that makes me think of this: “And there is nothing else to spiritualize, nothing else to renew but this multicolored and concrete works with its weight, its opaqueness, its zones of generalization, and its swarm of anecdotes, and that invincible Evil which gnaws at it without ever being able to destroy it.”

As long as we are in this world, there will be pain that will slip into our lives. But there is more gentleness in this world than any pain can cover. It does not matter what it is that you are fighting; what matters is whether you have decided to fight it with itself, or with the unmatched power of selfless love. Italy did not love me this time, but that doesn’t mean I should not love it all the same.

I will be going back, once The News dies down. But before then, I will love myself enough to not be quite that stupid.