Sicily 7/5/24
I’m not one to pour my heart out publicly, though having this travel diary is teaching me to prune my thoughts for an audience. For five years, I recorded every day of my life in private, often in great detail, until I came here and decided to write for others. Sicily is less personal, it’s an adventure of sorts, which I don’t mind sharing.
It was cold and cloudy, and then rained for two days. Nobody went outside, the hills were quiet, and I even had to light the stove for warmth. Unfortunately, I ran through all of my wood, and the wood in the forest is wet. How am I going to cook today?
But I was out of food, so I decided to walk to the next village to the butcher shop. I’ve been wanting to go there, but was afraid that it would be less welcoming than the shop in town, less understanding of a foreigner coming around, although I have yet to meet an unfriendly Sicilian. Coming around the first turn out of the village, I was greeted by a man up on his porch, high above the road. I often see him there, and the other day he was listening while Giro’s sister in law yelled down to me from her balcony several floors up, introducing herself, asking me about myself. He asked if I was going to town, but I said, No, just to the village to go to the butcher.
I continued on my way, a little edgy because I’m always afraid a beast is going to jump out of nowhere now. Ten minutes down the road, the neighbor I had just spoken to pulled over. He had come down to give me a lift. We went to the snack where they have some dried goods and a bar, and then to the butcher. When he got out of the car, I noticed that he has a very badly curved spine and walks hunched over. This must be why he is often out on his porch, sitting. His name is Francesco.
The butcher grew up in Australia, of all places, so I was able to order in English, a steak and two lamb chops. She pulled a fresh lamb carcass out of the fridge, hung it up, hacked off a leg, and cut off the chops for me. If I ever need to go to town, she said, just come to the butcher shop and she'll find me a lift the rest of the way, she knows everyone. I imagine the lamb comes from the farm down the road from the spring, where I often hear sheep bleating.
Back at home, I was sitting in my windowsill when there was a car horn and a whistle downstairs, my old friend Giro, saying hello. Yes, the island is coming back to life after the rain. The sky is hazy today, but last night I saw every star in the sky. I sat in the window looking up at them as the odor of smoldering cherry wood billowed from the stovepipe above my head.
On my table with the bright yellow tablecloth, a Sicilian folk pattern, sits an unfinished letter, the latest draft of the nine or so I burned, and my heart sank when I walked in from the shopping trip and remembered that I had been up all night, writing, tearing off the sheets and crumbling them into the stove, over and over. But I didn’t weep until long after the sun was up, when I went back and read the last paragraph I had written to him, the one who is far away.
I’m a little disturbed by my own defense mechanisms, that I can be so engrossed in my surroundings that I won’t shed a tear for two or three weeks, and then out of nowhere, his voice, and his eyes, and the grasp of his hand while we sat weeping on a fire escape the night before I left, that neither of us could pinpoint why being together was impossible when neither of us wanted to leave the other, blots out everything around me. Where am I? How did I get here? When we first separated in May and I returned home, I woke up every night in the dark, confused, flailing my arms, grasping for him, not knowing where I was. It’s a similar feeling, except in the daylight.
But something has shifted and is moving into its rightful place, because the music has started to come to me too. All of the reasons that I am here, to embrace chaos, to not know what tomorrow will bring, to be in the land that my spirit longs for, to understand the place of this great love in my life, to live a life that is worth writing about, to see if the muse can be summoned by enough silence, to collect wood and water, to eat lamb, and to mourn what I may never have returned to me, all of these reasons are absolutely real and I must bow down to them, I must be guided by them.
I am lucky, I know that. I have nothing, and yet I have everything I could wish for. Perhaps someday, everything I have will be under the same roof.
The church bells chime noon.