365 Attempts (At Life)

It’s so hot on this Roman balcony that my tears evaporate as they hit my cheeks. I’m in Italy. Beautiful, stinking hot Italy.  It’s dusk. It’s golden hour. It’s so perfect that it hurts.   In the last month of her life, as if knowing the end was nigh, my mother handed me a 5x7 white envelope with a handwritten letter and a cheque. Telling me “although I wish with all my soul that I could have had another trip with you, life had other plans. Please spend this money on memories. Go to Italy, toast to me and I will be with you.”  Cut to 1 year and two months after that letter was placed in my tear stained hands, and here I am - toasting her with prosecco, some fresh figs (which she adored) and listening to Renato Carosone.  It’s a cheerful Italian song from the 50’s. I can hear her singing along off-key, like she did in the hospital those last days, when I played it for her on my phone speaker. We were outside on the cafeteria terrace in the sun and she was in a wheelch...

I’m at the beach today. Not the sandy kind, the rugged, cliffside kind. We are in Polignano A Mare, laying on sunchairs under a yellow umbrella. It’s nice to hear Italian spoken by the other beach goers. Nice to finally assimilate.   I survey our sunchair neighbors. An elderly woman with silver hair and lean, golden limbs gets up in search of food. There’s a young couple beside her, both tanned and toned. The girl, in a revealing leopard print bikini, sunbathes with a blank expression. Her boyfriend surveys her body admiringly, making suggestive glances. She rolls her eyes and waves him away as he leans in for a kiss. He seems to enjoy this more than if she had complied.  Two chairs over is a man with three young children. He’s in very tight blue bikini briefs. His legs are matted with black curly hair, damp from his swim. I happen to catch his eye as he yells at his kids to stop running, and his stern expression quickly becomes a polite smile. He nods his head and calls me “s...

There’s something about being on the west coast that gives me a reprieve. A little more time to mull things over. To assess what I'm feeling. Time that the east coast might have already fumbled. A chance to catch my breath and see my thoughts accumulate above me like those cartoon bubbles. A chance to be an alter ego. A chance to be bolder. A chance - period.