I cannot remember with clarity my last memory of Duino. The last night I slept too little and at some point, I stopped feeling.
I just have fragmented images. An empty room, that used to be mine. Panic trying to grasp last meaningful moments. A sunny sunrise in Piazza, nothing poetic about it.
And then I was sitting on a bus seeing kilometres and kilometres of streets passing in front of my eyes.
I was heading home, although home was getting further and further away.
I didn’t take the time to mourn or grieve it. I had lost the first and only place where I had ever truly belonged, and I never said goodbye.
Now home was no longer home, so I tried to make of my own self my house and carry it with me.
I moved to a new country, to a new city, to a new room that I decorated in a rush to convince myself that it felt like home. But those smiling people on the walls were no one to me. I saw myself in pictures and I couldn’t recognize me. Did it ever happen? Was it even real?
I closed all my feelings and my memories in a remote place of my heart. I got busy, I pushed myself in a tangle of streets and people. I couldn’t feel anything.
Everything reached me as the distant echo of my own life. I couldn’t draw, I couldn’t dream.
I blacked out every night and woke up in the morning every day with more faded memories of my past.
But it wasn’t a conscious choice, I was broken-hearted for the first time in my life and the grief for Duino was covered by the grief of letting go of someone I loved.
But somehow, these two griefs, of emotional and physical displacement, merged and everything grew blurry. In two months time, I was physically and emotionally pushed to leave someone and somewhere I loved.
I found myself unable to remember that it had been my life and not a distant tale that someone was telling me about.
It sounds horrible, but that numbness probably saved my life.
Acknowledging that in Duino I was the happiest me I had ever known and letting it go without diminishing it. This conflictual process pushed me in a state of anaesthesia towards my past self in an attempt to save that happiness in a never-ending bubble of light and joy that nobody could have taken away from me. (Because as in any displacement the worst part is feeling powerless about your own life).
Meanwhile, I was coming to term with the fact that I no longer liked the person I loved. But I still tried somehow to save the memories shared with him in Duino, surgically carving him out of the picture like in a real-life version of The Endless Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
It just got worse. In the process, Duino grew further and further away and it came back to me like a drunk vision of shiny people and endless nights. A magical place that had been the setting for my happiest moments which no longer existed. And I still believe Duino does no longer exist, so for me, there is no place to go back to, and mourn the end of it.
But then Duino found its way back to me. Denaturalized, torn apart, psychoanalyzed too much- I reduced Duino to its core: people.
People one step at a time fought their way out of that remote spot of my heart and came to find me. Pictures reacquired their colourful joy, as proofs that happiness was possible, love was still real and that maybe the concept of home was no longer a place.
My dried flowers no longer sadden me, reminding me of my silly attempts to stop things from changing. They showed me that some things, some moments- if handled with care and taking care of them- can remain as beautiful and meaningful. (Some of them- although I did my best to save them- lost their colours but now I am learning that is also okay and I am forgiving myself for the anger and the frustration of seeing something beautiful getting ruined).
So, I allowed myself to remember and to caress my nostalgia for all the things that have been and that no longer will be.
I remembered the shower parties with my friends and I allowed myself to smile realizing that I miss Mickey’s, although it is pretty lame as a club (but I never danced again as I danced there).
And I allowed myself to miss sharing a room with someone and having absolutely no privacy.
And miss that surreal feeling that every sunset brought in a small village by the sea.
Then the last piece came to me this week: I am lost.
I have no longer or not yet a place to call home, I have roots everywhere but I am not rooted anywhere.
I lost some of the things and people on which I built myself, certain that they would have stayed.
The house that I used to own with concrete foundations and certainty has crumbled.
However, some of the greatest experiences I had, came from being scared and lost and keeping on walking on an unknown road no matter what. Even if sometimes I couldn’t breathe, like when you get caught by Bora while crossing piazza, and the wind is so strong that you lose your breath, but you keep on walking.
I thought of all the late-night wandering which made me discover people and places.
I thought of all those moments in which I was lost and then suddenly something magnificent surprised me.
So, I decided to have faith in that magnificent moment that has always found its way to me, making up for the fear and the darkness.
Even though my life in the past two months went completely upside-down, I have faith and I am curious to see what the world has in mind for me. I don’t think I will want to build a robust and stable house for some time, but I will let myself wonder and be surprised by the universe.
So, on the ruins of what used to be the certainty of my past, I will open all the windows to the incoming tornado and I won’t build any more concrete walls, but only plant dandelions and pinwheels.
~~~
UWC Adriatic
Alumni