Sicily 8/17/24
An empty quiet has fallen over the island. The forest floor is a bed of ripe nuts and brown leaves. Thunder rolls in the distance from time to time, and it would be a huge relief if it actually rained instead of drizzling. I imagine this is a foretaste of Sicily in the winter, when the exuberance of summer is gone and everything lies half-dormant, but not dead.
All of my worries have faded, and what is left is solitude and tranquility for a little longer. I don’t know where the time has gone, and I don’t know how I did it, how I actually got myself out of the rut I came here to get myself out of. What did I do but live here quietly? But then, when I go back and read what I was writing even before I left in May, how prescient it all was. Maybe the answers are always right in front of our faces like that, but they’re usually easier to ignore or brush away. Maybe this will teach me that if I can accept being engulfed by the unknown for some time, not knowing what to do doesn’t really exist. What exists is only the avoidance of letting the answers you already know unfold.
Maybe life is less a series of ups and downs, and more a series of lights preceded by darkness. Day becomes night which becomes day again, but we resist when night falls on the mind or heart, as if we didn’t trust that the sun would rise again and that sleep had its purpose. That’s all that it is, and it only takes the wrong weather to bring on a day of night — but the darker it is, the more welcome dawn will be, because there is a balance to them and they are in equal measure.
The trepidation attached to returning home is that this peace might slip through my fingers. I don’t know why I have this fear, considering that the peace itself isn’t tied to the fact that I am here. Sicily brought about the changes that I wanted to see before I left, and I can take those with me, even if this is only the threshold. It’s nagging at me that some thought wants to break through before I leave, and it would, if only I let it.
I heard it said somewhere that little children and the elderly get along, even resemble each other, because they’re closest to the other side. So it is at the end of journey, and my thought patterns are starting to resemble my arrival, and this place that I embraced so wholly at the peak of the summer is losing its familiarity. I’ve started to pack up the things I’m not using, in the suitcase my ragazzo lent me at the Flatbush laundromat so long ago, and yet not that long ago. Little by little removing the traces of my ever having been here. My thoughts often wander to the yards of Indian cotton that should have arrived in Pennsylvania by now, and I’ve made the shirts over and over again in my mind.
The night itself is dark, the stars obscured, no breeze to rustle the leaves, not even the buzzing of insects, while a dog barks in the distance. Before nightfall I went down to the spring and arrived at the same time as someone else. He let me go first, then proceeded to collect handfuls of hazelnuts and break them open with a rock while he waited. We didn’t say anything to each other, I just filled my bottles and said good night, and ate purple grapes from the roadside on the way home.