Reflections on Study Abroad
(6/28) Itās been a little over a week since I left Florence and returned to the U.S. Though Iāve only been gone a month, it feels great to reconnect with my family and friends. Time seemed to exist in a parallel dimension while I was away, giving me the impression that everything here would still be the same when I returned. Ā
This, of course, is not true. Ā Life in Utah continued with little regard to my absence, leaving things different than I remember. Ā Still more shocking than the passage of time is how my perspective has changed. I feel as though Iām looking at the world through a tinted pair of glasses, and only I can see the colors. The streets, the people, the sunlight; all these aspects of the place Iāve grown up in suddenly feel a shade unfamiliar to me.
I suppose this is what re-adjusting to life at home feels like.
(7/5) One of the things I miss the most about Italy is how crowded the streets are. In all my time there, I never found an outdoor space that was entirely devoid of people. Here, that void is right outside my front door: on a quiet suburban road, on a deserted campus quad in the summertime. In America and especially the West, we are blessed with a great deal of empty space. This space makes it easier to distance oneself from those around you, but now I find myself missing that proximity. The places in the world are just that, if there is no one to inhabit them, and thatās what Italy has taught me.
(7/8) Something I wonāt miss is the grocery store. I never learned enough Italian to navigate them successfully, and while I didnāt starve to death, I never felt more like a foreigner than in there. With my large backpack, less-than-fashionable attire and poor grasp of the language, conspicuousness was unavoidable. No matter the circumstance it is human nature to desire to fit in, and I simply couldnāt do that there. Itās nice to be able to go into a store and know exactly what I want, and how to get it.
(7/9) I was in a bookstore today, and I stumbled across a book titled āFlorence: The Paintings and Frescoes.ā The cover was a detail from Botticelliās Birth of Venus, one of the paintings that I saw in the Uffizi gallery, so naturally I was drawn to it. I picked it up and started flipping through the pages, becoming more engrossed as I did so. Seeing those images printed in the book was like uncovering an old family photograph, a brief vignette of a time passed. I clung to that feeling for a while because I so desperately wanted to be back in Florenceās museums and churches, standing in the light of those great works of art. But in that same moment I realized that, for some people, these works would only ever be ink printed on a piece of paper. I have seen the physical pigment and plaster that comprises the frescoes, and felt the marble of the great churches. Iāve walked the same hallways as Michelangelo, smelled the incense burning in Santa Maria del Fiore, and existed in those spaces as flesh and bone, not as a camera lens.
If that is all I will have of Florence in my lifetime, then I will say that it is enough.