I suppose the only way to start this is by returning to where it ended. Which itself is something about which I’m not entirely certain. I still have many miles to cover, the alps poke through the clouds below me, but we have to make a choice somewhere. So let us say it ended when I opened this notebook (a gift) to finally start writing about this trip, on an airplane that intends to land just south of Paris a day later than I should be flying home. My plans after that are still somewhat uncertain, there is a train across the English channel at nine in the evening but that gives me several hours to navigate my way north and through the city to the station from which it departs. A city which I’ve been to once before, for a few hours as a child.

Though of course some part of me was quite glad I would get to see her one last time, as saying goodbye yesterday was a little rushed and rather sad, there was something quite unpleasant about having that moment invalidated. Painful as it was at the time, forcing myself to eat a whole pizza which I hadn’t had time to finish in the restaurant as fast as possible so I wouldn’t have a moment free to think or cry, as the train took me out of Rome to the airport, the moment had a certain melancholy beauty to it. In fact thinking about it now, it was very much like the scene from Cowboy Bebop where Ed leaves the crew, and Spike and Jet are eating eggs. I knew that a second farewell could never have the same importance.

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I was too tired to keep writing earlier, I spent the second half of the flight simply struggling to stay awake. Not much time for sightseeing, though the long night-time cab ride through Paris in the rain was very pretty. Notre Dame half ruined, cranes poking out through the broken rock. Warm yellow streetlights reflected in the deep navy blue of the Seine. Frogs in their fancy frocks on beautiful bridges, wide old streets, and everywhere else I looked. Aesthetically, Paris is somewhere inbetween Rome and London – it has the cobbled stone streets, the wide city squares, and the old apartment buildings which sometimes date as far back as the late middle ages, like the former; but the stone is heavier, the colours darker, which I found comfortingly familiar after a week away from home. The ride through the city was almost representative of a transition back from the new world I’ve been living in for the last week to the one I’ve always known.

This minor ordeal has overshadowed the whole trip, the many thoughts and feelings I held so tightly a day ago now scattered to the wind. Of course I can read some significance into recent events, in a certain way things ending like this does feel appropriate, I always feel like this though. I look for meaning in everything, yet never really find it. Relating to this, one of the things I was most upset about yesterday after finding out about being stranded in Italy was the fact that the first ending which I had also found to be very significant ended up meaning nothing. But more than this there is also something else, all the title ideas I have buzzing around in my mind revolve around this unexpected adventure.

Breakfast in Rome, Lunch in Paris, Dinner in London. A Tale of Three Cities (It was the best of times, it was the worst of times). The French Connection. Planes, Trains and Automobiles. They’re all pretty bad – one is literally just a famous movie title, not even a pun on one – but that’s always how it is. While I’m writing a new entry I’ll have many, sometimes dozens, of potential titles pop into my head. I tend to just go with the one that is least cringy, maybe I don’t always choose correctly but I think I do a good job most of the time. My point with sharing these ones is to make clear the thing which is dominating my thoughts. I have a whole long week’s worth of feels, and insights, and moments in time to talk about, but I feel them slipping away. I’m losing sight of it all.

I think I just need some time to reflect, a day or two to regather my thoughts, and certainly a good night’s sleep. Ah, we just came out of the tunnel. I’m in England, I’m home.

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Ok, it’s Thursday now. My first free day since getting back, as we are once again understaffed where I work. I have had some time to collect my thoughts again, and so I’ll try and get them out in this entry. It would be impossible to cover everything though, there’s probably even things I’ve forgotten about that at the time felt rather noteworthy. I tried to write while visiting this new city, but my mind was so awake and buzzing at all times that even when I had a quiet moment I found it impossible to maintain focus. That’s probably what will be a major theme running through this post actually, the bipolarity of emotion and circumstance that held from the day I arrived until the moment I got home. Even the journey home, it was one of the most stressful experiences of my life and yet it was an adventure which I will likely look back on somewhat fondly in years to come.

There’s a lot I intend to write, in fact there may even be six or seven separate posts planned. Not all relating to the trip, but several which may. One I already started work on before leaving actually, something much more experimental for this blog. It was something I was trying out to occupy my time while waiting around the week before I left, inspired by the style of my previous upload. It kind of ties in with a meme that started on /his/ around that time though, and so by the time I actually get back around to finishing it it’ll be horribly out of date. I also intend to change what I’m doing with this blog in a few ways, for various reasons which I will also write a separate post about probably. As well as talking about my general feelings, there was a specific day (exactly a week ago in fact, Thursday) which was quite an important one and I think might make for an interesting post.

There’s more, but I’m less sure about the validity of my other ideas at this point so I’ll leave them as a surprise. I want to talk about this holiday, it was a big deal. Possibly one of the most important weeks of my life, depending on what happens going forward, and certainly one of the happiest in years. It wasn’t all happy, in fact there were a fair few moments that were rather sad and while my time there was lovely for the most part there was this slight sadness that was ever-present. Very dim most of the time, but with the occasional flare up. The main reason I left in the first place was to get away from all my problems back home, and in one sense I did. I didn’t think about any of them once the entire time. Instead I found new things to be upset about, or old things maybe. These things were just as much help in distracting me from all the problems I left back home as the nice parts of the holiday, which I must stress did outnumber the negatives by a lot.

It was always going to be this way, as the saying goes “Wherever you go, there you are”, and I am someone who is prone to melancholy. No matter the situation, I will find something to lament. In the case of last week, it was a few things. I found myself feeling quite isolated on a few occasions, particularly during the first half of the visit before that Thursday where I was forced to get by entirely on my own the whole day. There was this moment when I was in the airport right after landing, and I asked a worker of some kind (a janitor/ cleaner I think) for directions and he didn’t understand a word I was saying. It was jarring, I had asked without even thinking. Of course I was aware that they speak a different language in Italy, I’m not a fool – although plenty of people in the city spoke some English – but I hadn’t actually thought about what it would be like in such an environment until I was there.

I very quickly realised that I would not be able to communicate with a lot of the people around me. I had to get the girl I was visiting, or her boyfriend, to order for me when we would go anywhere to eat. Well I didn’t have to, but it made things far easier, and that feeling of dependence was rather unpleasant. It made me feel small, like a child that had to be taken care of. There was a certain helplessness about me, but I’m glad for it because overcoming that was quite satisfying. I certainly didn’t feel so helpless any more after managing to get myself home the way I did, or on Thursday evening for that matter. It was an unpleasant experience though, and I found myself craving any small moments of familiarity I could find from the very first night I arrived. Any time I heard a native English speaker while walking around I felt an immediate sense of relief, safety even.

I remember the first full day I had there, the Tuesday, we went to see the Colosseum and all the ruins of the forums, temples and monuments right in the heart of the city and we came across a guided tour being given by an English guide. We weren’t part of the tour, and we’d been walking around for hours already and had seen almost everything in the area to be seen (pics below are photos of the area I took from this lookout point on a hill), but I just felt this need to stay and listen to him. I couldn’t pull myself away easily, even though we had been on our way out to go and get something to eat. I didn’t stay that long, the tour was coming to an end as we stumbled into it anyway, I was just surprised by my response. I realised that I had been ever so slightly on edge since landing in the country, and for a very brief moment I was no longer on guard

This photo doesn’t really do it justice by the way, from up there where those photos were taken you could see so much. There were also these gardens behind us also up on the hill, apparently intended to recreate what the imperial gardens would have looked like in ancient times, which I wish we had spent more in just relaxing. If I go back, I think I would like to return there for an afternoon. I do intend to return, despite how things ended, and some other things I’ll get into later. Not only because there is still much more to see, I think I saw most of the major touristy things and landmarks but I didn’t get to explore much of the city outside of the historical centre, but more because I know I have friends there. Or maybe just one, it was difficult to know what her boyfriend thought of me. At some points he seemed to want to chat and was very friendly, at others he seemed uninterested or even kind of pissed off that he was forced to be there.

He was clearly very suspicious about my intentions, insisting on being there at all times. He didn’t allow her to have a single day alone with me, which was a shame though I can understand given that there was something between us once. Or maybe there wasn’t, some part of me is unsure. Which is what was frustrating, I never had a chance to really ask quite a lot of questions that I wanted to put to her while there like that. I had all these questions, not specific ones but more general things I’ve wondered about for years, that I didn’t feel comfortable asking because there was this scrutinising presence there constantly. While it was not one of the main reasons for the visit I was still expecting to finally understand a lot about the way things went in the past and the truth of things, and even information that would help me in my own life after getting home, by the end of the trip.

I didn’t though, because so much of what I wanted to talk about could easily be misinterpreted as an attempt to hit on her or rekindle something – something that I’m not even sure ever existed – by either her boyfriend or her. I had to avoid the subject of how we first started talking, what was actually happening either of the first two times we used to talk, and whatever there was or wasn’t between us half a decade ago, entirely. I feel like not a soul will believe me, but I really did not have any intentions towards her. I’m really not interested, even though she is much prettier in person, but I was many years ago and I just wanted to find out what was happening back then exactly. There’s still a lot that is kind of hazy, a lot that I don’t know about.

It was just difficult to have a conversation, because I always had to be careful and I couldn’t talk about anything, like I’m used to with her. Yet at the same time, it was so much easier to talk about what we could talk about in person. I could never go back to the way things were, I want to hang out again (though after what I’m saying here, she might not want to anymore) and keep in touch from time to time, but I can’t do the long drawn out text conversations after finally getting to have a normal one. Returning would be easy, and if I planned a few months ahead rather than leaving it so last minute it would be very cheap to return. I would like to see her here though, it was fun being shown around a new city and there’s still a lot of it to explore, but it would be cool to be the one showing someone around next time.

It was very weird seeing her at first, after over half a decade of her being text on a screen essentially. Yes I’ve known what she looks like since 2014, but there’s always been this degree of separation. To me, until this trip, when I thought of her I thought of words on a screen. I was so nervous at the airport, my hands were shaking, and I missed them both at first because I was only expecting her. I noticed immediately when we did spot one another that she was as nervous as I was, if not more, which immediately put me at ease. By the time we got on to the train out of the airport, and had introduced ourselves, my initial anxiety had almost completely dissipated. We went to a place near the big central station in the city, a short walk from my hotel, Termini. We got these big deep fried balls of rice, mozzarella and meat, Arancini they’re called.

After this they took me to my hotel, and we agreed to meet back at the station the next morning. It was when her boyfriend said “see you tomorrow”, that I realised he would be there with us for the entirety of my visit. Which I was a bit annoyed about in that moment, because she had said several times when planning for the trip that she herself wanted time alone to chat and hang out, and then didn’t tell me that she changed her mind. I wasn’t so bothered by him being there, though not having a single day was a shame, just that I wasn’t ever really told about the change. By the end of the trip I wasn’t even thinking about it anymore, when she told me he insisted on coming along with her the morning after my flight was delayed to help me plan out how to get home from Paris, I was surprised she even felt it worth mentioning.

Of course he was, whenever one of them is there so is the other, like conjoined twins. That’s how normal it was after a couple days, I kind of forgot that before I arrived I was ever even expecting to spend time with her only. Her tone in the message implied she did find it annoying though. “He insists on coming even though it’s only for a few hours” I think she said, or something like that. Which did make me realise, actually it is a little odd that he insists on being there. If even after a whole week, he’s still convinced I’m secretly only there to steal his girlfriend, then he won’t ever not think that. It’s just a shame, that there was this subtle implication hovering over us all the entire holiday that made things slightly tense.

Now some points during the week were probably more fun or went more easily thanks to him being there. He knew the city very well, which made getting around easily, as well as finding good places to eat and drink. It was also a lot of fun going drinking as a group of three, in a way that maybe going with just her wouldn’t have been. It felt like what it must feel to have a group of friends as an adult, something I’ve never had. I have two friends, and the three of us very occasionally go out together, but going out multiple times a week and joking and chatting is something I’ve never had. We went out three times during my stay at night, the first full evening they left me to go home fairly early and I stupidly decided to try and walk home despite having no experience of the city yet.

That led to a little adventure of it’s own, we said goodbye near the Colosseum which is where the day had started and they went to the station while I walked back to the bronze statue of Augustus which I had seen earlier that day and wanted to look at again. It was built during the Fascist regime, but a replica of a stone sculpture that dates back to ancient times. Augustus is one of the most impressive figures in human history, and I found the statue pretty cool, so I wanted another look. It was sunset, and a street band were playing a cover of Californication by the Red Hot Chili Peppers as I stood there staring up at the larger than life representation of this larger than life individual.

I carried on back the way we’d gone that morning, heading around past Trajan’s column intending to go up some stairs and onto the road back to my hotel, but standing at the bottom of the steps was an African man with many bracelets. He spotted me, and somehow could tell I was from England. “London? London!” he called out at me. I told him which city I’m from, he replied that he had a brother there. “I love England, such a good country, no racist there, no racist”. “Hm, don’t be so sure” I muttered with a slight smile. “Me, I’m from Sierra Leone. You come to Africa one day yes?”. He put his arm next to mine, “see, you white, me black, but same”. He took one of the bracelets off and put it around my wrist faster than I could pull it away. “Oh no, I really can’t” I said, trying to remove it, but he had tied it on quite well.

“It’s fine, it’s for you no charge because you England. No racist”. I said ok, and began to leave but before I went he asked for me to wait, he had his phone out. “I like you England, let me get photo for my family in Senegal” he laughed quite heartily, and putting his arm around my shoulder he took a selfie of us both. I smiled for the camera. I have to be honest, his English was not great but it was better than nothing at all which most people around me seemed to have, and I was actually quite enjoying the interaction. Then his voice became a little more serious, and he told me that he was very poor and he had kids to feed. “A donation brother, some euros for my children?”. I wasn’t about to go into my bag and pull out my notes, but I had a couple of coins in my pocket and offered them to him. He told me to keep them though, “only if you want brother, that is useless, ten euro only if you want”.

I didn’t want, and so began to head up the stairs. “It’s alright brother, you going to Termini? Is down that way” he pointed down a side street which went led in a very different direction from where the stairs I had been heading did. I didn’t know where I was meant to go though, so I waved goodbye and went down the street, and after about 30 seconds I spotted him following me in a car window. I got a bit worried, thinking he might try to bash me over the head with a rock or something, and so I turned around. He stopped dead in his tracks, and slowly his rather serious expression became a grin. “Ha ha haa, brother! Just a few euros for my family ok, very poor”. I took one of the euro coins out of my pocket, placed it on a stone bench and said that was all I had. Then I walked as fast as I fucking could out onto the main street at the other end of the alley from where we entered.

I then spent about two hours getting very lost, surrounded by people speaking a language that was total gibberish to me. Beautiful gibberish, but gibberish nonetheless, I didn’t know where each word ended or started when trying to listen in on people’s conversations. Luckily, I found two businessmen smoking cigars outside a restaurant – a sight that was much more common than back home, the only man I’ve known who smoked cigars was my granddad – who spoke pretty good English and managed to direct me back to the station, from where I easily found my way back to the hotel. It was a very unpleasant evening, probably the worst though the first night wasn’t too much fun either. I had a pretty similar experience that first night actually, after getting through the rather (and I don’t use this word lightly) kafkaesque experience of actually getting inside my hotel room.

See when we first got to my hotel entrance on Monday night, instead of a reception we found a plaque near the door telling us to go to a different building just around the corner. We went there, and found a reception to a different hotel,  with a very strange looking man behind the counter. He looked like a man from a nightmare I had many years ago, when I was younger than ten. In the dream I was with two friends, two brother I haven’t seen in years, and this man lived in a huge gypsy tent on a hill. The man, tanned skin with a large smile and a big bald head (the guy behind the reception had his hair, but still bore a striking likeness to the dream man), invited us to come in, but only one at a time. After some time, the second friend was invited in, and I remember this creeping fear begin to build. Then, lastly I was allowed in also, but when I entered neither of my friends were anywhere to be found. I woke up after this if I remember correctly.

Anyway, it’s a silly dream but I saw him and was instantly reminded of it. He explained that there were three keys, one for the door onto the street, one for the entrance onto the floor owned by the “hotel”, and one to my room. We went back to the original building, “see you tomorrow”, I headed inside. The front area was pretty big, but empty. Just a wide open room, with no decoration at all. No plants, no chairs or tables, nothing on the walls, just a big room with a cold marble floor. I headed up the steps and found the specific hallway that was “my hotel”, from what I understand the different floors of this building are owned separately. So some floors just had normal apartments, but my floor was a hotel. I walked along to my door, you could hear people in their rooms but again not a word of English. I went to try my door, but I couldn’t get it open.

I spent maybe ten minutes trying the key both ways as hard as I could, even trying the other keys, to no avail. Eventually I just gave up, I carried my suitcase and backpack back downstairs and around the corner to the other hotel with the reception desk and the nightmare man. I told him about the key, and he insisted that it must work because they had used it earlier that day to clean the room. All he would say was that I should try “more strong”, and so I went back. I climbed the steps, got to the door to my floor, and tried the key. Of course, now this one wasn’t working, even though I’d had no trouble at all earlier. I did get it open after a while, but in doing so I cut my thumb just below the knuckle and it bled for a good half hour. I got to my room, tried the key again, and somehow it worked without any difficulty. After relaxing for an hour I went back out, thinking a night walk would be nice.

It wasn’t though, it was quite unpleasant, I tried to listen to music but I couldn’t do it for some reason. There was just nothing I felt like listening to, it all felt wrong. So I listened to the people around me, they were my music. Which is a bit like something David Foster Wallace said in an interview I watched later that night (or perhaps on Tuesday night) on my phone during a visit to Italy. Lately I’ve been watching other interviews and speeches of his, I’m not sure why but I find them quite comforting, and this one was no exception. He quite articulately expressed almost the very same feelings I was having, about losing independence, about the shame you feel when you can’t talk to someone in their own language when you’re a visitor to their country. Again, by the end of the holiday I was far less bothered by this, but those first couple days were difficult.

Of course, I also had much more time alone those first two days. In fact on Wednesday morning when we met again I immediately asked if we could go somewhere that evening so I wouldn’t have another evening stuck in my hotel room feeling alone and hungry. Because I didn’t eat dinner on Tuesday night, after spending two hours completely lost in a foreign city the last thing I wanted to do was go back out and attempt to order food somewhere. So on Wednesday we went to this really nice park, had a fantastic pizza at this place near to a children’s museum, and then I went back to my hotel for a few hours while they went home to relax for a few hours, before meeting back up that evening for drinks. I tried writing a bit, but I couldn’t get anything coherent written, and after that I didn’t bother trying again the whole trip.

We went out drinking every night I was in the city after that, other than Thursday, and I think if I’d have only asked we would have done so on Tuesday and even possibly Monday as well. As soon as I mentioned the idea she was very enthusiastic, and after that night on the other days she was the one asking to do it again and told me she had checked the train times and everything. The first night was lovely, we went to a cocktail bar for one drink, then an “Irish pub”, which was really just a normal british pub. The guy behind the bar was English, which immediately put me at ease the same way the tour guy had the day before, and I had a pint of Guinness and actually felt at home. Then we went to a pub right in front of the Colosseum, I had this really good beer called Leffe (which is unusual, because I don’t usually like light beer), and pic below was the view when we left to get the train home.

The second night wasn’t particularly interesting, though it was still really nice. We didn’t go to a pub really, just a small restaurant that also had a bar. I had a huge plate of pasta, one of the biggest portions I’ve ever been served in a restaurant, and we chatted. We talked a lot while drinking, obviously, which was really nice. With inhibitions slightly lowered by alcohol, conversation of course could flow much more easily, not as much on the second night but certainly on the first and third. Really those nights out were the only time I think any of us felt fully comfortable, her boyfriend and her both being kind of awkward people like myself. We went to this late night pastry shop after the restaurant which was interesting, it had a funny double entendre in the name that didn’t translate perfectly into English.

The third night we went out was my favourite I think, though it was kind of a surreal one. The whole day was actually, because we went to the area where my friend actually lives. It’s a little further out than my hotel, just under an hour on the train from where I was staying, by the sea. I guess like a suburb, or connected town. We went to see the seaside, walked along the beach and watched the sunset, and had dinner at this place on the way back to the station that night. The weird part though, was seeing the inside of her apartment. After all, this is a place I’ve only seen in pictures at various points over the last six years on a laptop screen. It was very weird for me to actually be there, almost like I’d stepped through a portal. Her pets which I’ve seen loads of photos of, and her room, I even met her mother. The dog was lovely, though a little fat, it would stand over the cat watching it eat after finishing it’s own food, which I found quite amusing.

So that night we found another pub, and so began a rather strange evening. First of all, we sat down and there was this television show on in the back where we were sat which was very odd. It was some kind of national music competition, like Eurovision but only within Italy, but as the night went on the contestants became more and more bizarre. The first couple of performers were very boring, a middle aged man in a shiny suit singing a very emotive ballad, a woman in a long ballgown crooning into the microphone, but later there was boy band (penguin squad or something like that) dressed in black and white jumping around all over the stage, a guy dressed in orange who stole a purse from a woman in the crowd, a transvestite dancing around with a twink while barely bothering to actually sing.

The staff of the place we were at were themselves more interested in the show than doing their job, at one point I think there were four or five of them sitting in the back with us. It was a very small place as well, no idea why so many staff were needed, and there were more who weren’t working that day because I was told they were gossiping about another girl woman who worked there a few times. There was this very strange little dog, more like something between a rat and dog actually, very slim. Short brown fur, a skinny little neck with large round head. It was on a lead, but it was allowed to just roam around the place pretty freely.

I tried various cocktails, a Pina Colada, a Long Island Iced Tea, some others which I forget the name of now. I remember going back to the bar at one point to order one and Friday I’m In Love by The Cure was playing. Towards the end of the evening, she took out her bag and told me she had a gift. Three small notebooks, one of which I’ve already started using, and a key ring with some artwork from the Little Prince and a quote in the original French. It was lovely, I felt bad for not getting her a gift myself, especially because I had considered trying to find one to bring from England but forgot about. Next time maybe, if there is a next time.

It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye

There’s still so many things I haven’t been able to mention, some of my favourite moments of the trip I’ve had to leave out. I probably walked more in that week than any other week of my life. I had great food every day, and saw so many wonderful pieces of history, but most importantly of all – despite the few issues lurking beneath the surface – I felt what it was like to actually have someone who really wants to spend time with me. I have my friends yes, and when we do get together we get on incredibly well, but it’s difficult to actually make that happen. Last week, there was someone who actually really wanted to and was consistently making the effort to spend time with me. For that I am forever grateful, and it has really helped my confidence. I’ve only been back a week, but I’m having a far easier time talking to my co-workers or the customers. I feel like I’m speaking more clearly, that people are understanding me more easily.

It’s odd, because while I got along pretty well with the girl I was visiting I was still pretty shy and quiet the whole time. She misheard me or had to ask me to repeat myself a few times, and I had the same issue with her, but that did happen less and less as the week wore on. I don’t know if this is something temporary, if I will gradually return to my usual meek and lifeless way of life, but for now I feel a vigour I haven’t felt in a while. Since before I first was introduced to this girl actually. I will have to wait and see if it continues beyond a week, it may just be nothing more than a feeling of refreshment after getting away from things that will pass shortly. Either way, I’m back.