A Life Now

Have you ever watched the hands of a ticking clock, trying to observe the movement of the minute hand? Wasn't it subtle? What about the hour hand? If you thought that was slow, imagine that every day, Mid-Atlantic ridge spreads it's rocky thighs a further .007 centimeters. The Himalayas grow, swelling with pride from below at a rate of 2.4 inches every year and Mount Everest is moving about 27 millimeters northeast in the same time.

The point?

Mountains will move, but it's going to take awhile and you won't be able to watch.

And me. Me, well. I'm moving at a rate somewhere between the hour hand and Everest, waiting for someone, anyone to turn their head long enough to look back to see me gone...

Reach

I wait for you everywhere.
The underside of the cork
Beneath the stubborn lid
Behind the heavy door
and up
On the very top shelf

the end of a book
or a day
or a happy life
is where you'll find me.

the warm corner of the couch
asleep between the sheets
dreaming

but

there's a space
between me
and all this
where you exist

without you every space is empty.
unsurpassable.
nothing belongs to me.

Kenya - The Arrivals Terminal of Moi International Airport

"What happened to your passport?"

This wasn't the first time I had been asked this.

"I bring it with me everywhere, it's my only identification so it just got a little... ruined" I retorted, looking hopefully at the Immigrations officer holding my embarassingly frayed and battered Italian passport, with the picture page divided nearly in two.

"This is not valid. I can't stamp this."

I let this digest for a minute.

"I'm sorry -- what are you saying?"

"I can't let you in this country with this, this..." he said dramatically, holding my poor passport up in front of him between the tips of his thumb and index finger, to stress the fact that the state of my passport utterly disgusted him.

Then came the ringer.

"We have to send you back."

Panic sets in.

Back!? 8 hours of flight? My dream of going to Africa? The months of planning that went into this trip?

"No. That's impossible..." I state "I can't go back."

My eyes welled up with tears.

The immigrations officer looked unnerved.

"Step aside"

I was brought into the immigrations office and asked to sit.

The "Immigrations Office" at MOI international airport is two small, dingy, rooms, one inhabited by my disgusted immigrations officer, and the other by someone else, which must do the other half of the work involved here, because they looked awfully short staffed. But then again, I thought -- they only have one runway.

My immigrations officer is rummaging around the room for something and not paying much attention to me.

"There must be something we can do..." I plead, and try to convey through my eyes somehow that fact that I have many EURO notes in my pocket and he would be welcome to as many of them as he would like if he would just stamp my goddamn crappy passport and let me spend my 8 planned days in Kenya. I had never bribed someone in my life, and frankly, I was a little nervous as to how to go about it, as this man looked awfully proud.

He sat down and glanced at me, unconcerned -- then fiddled around his desk for a pen. In his hand I saw a piece of paper with the following line, written in English, across the top:

"NOTICE TO PROHIBITED IMMIGRANT"

I started to get desperate. I can't go home, I say. I can't -- I'd do anything.

I choked a little on the word "anything" -- and Jacopo, my boyfriend who was sitting next to me uncomfortably through all of this (his passport, of course, was brand new and perfectly valid) -- shot me a look of "What?" as well. Later Jacopo would tell me that he noticed the immigrations guy casting long glaring stares at the pair of mirrored Ray-Bans dangling from his shirt collar.

The officer considered us for a moment -- made a great show of comparing mine and Jacopo's passports -- then, with a grunt, began crossing out nearly half of the lines on the "Notice to Prohibited Immigrant" and writing in several lines of his own.

"They should have never given you an entrance visa, otherwise I would not be able to help you. Now I am obliged to help you."

A bit of backstory here. I had purchased my Kenyan entrance visa at the airport in Rome. The Kenyan Embassy had set up a desk in the departures terminal, right next to our tour operators desk -- and it just seemed more convenient to get it done there, before leaving.

Thank, GOD. I think. Thank God we purchased that Visa before leaving.

Jacopo and I were then escorted back to Customs, where we were informed the the passport-checker-guy would "do what he could" for us.

The guy looked me in the eye, stamped the NOTICE OF PROHIBITED IMMIGRANT sheet with an entrance stamp (my passport was too unacceptable to stamp) and said, rather authoritatively,

"Give me 20 euros".

And that's how I was able to pay my way onto Kenyan soil, and Jacopo was able to walk away from the mess with his Ray-Bans intact. Soon I would find out that to get just about anywhere in this country would involve paying, and that 8 days later I would leave this country with my pockets entirely empty.

As we walked out of the airport, two men offered to carry our bags to the bus. Thinking they worked for our tour operator, I gratefully obliged.

Ten feet later, one of the men turns to us, with the big, broad classic Kenyan smile, and asks (in italian, mind you):

"MANCIA?"
("TIP?")

2010

So.

1. We found a cleaning lady, and she started three days ago. I'm still trying to get over the fact that I believe she used our "cat shampoo wipes" to clean the dining room table, and have plans to hide them next time.
2. Kenya is booked, we leave the 16th at night are arrive back in Rome Christmas eve. Happy doesn't even begin to describe.

2010 is pending, arriving, creeping up. In these days where I feel like I spend much more time waiting for than doing -- i'm looking to the turn in year to begin a life more decided, more active, more foreward (make sense?).

So i'm going to plan trip B to exotic and less trodden location, i'm going to ask for a raise, i'm going to start looking for a bigger house, with a terrace, i'm going to become an auntie (jac's sister is pregnant), i'm going to cook more for jac (banana bread on the cooling rack as I type), i'm going to get my spanish (language) back, i'm going to live in Barcelona for a year, i'm going to go out more on the weekends.

But first of all, i'm going to Kenya.

Jac is on the couch with Yin and Yang (respectively, my nicknames for our white and black cats) watching a soccer game -- and it's not cold yet, and 2010 is almost here.

Pessime

Not to sound like a pessimist but:

1. There is still no cleaning lady.
2. Kenya isn't booked yet and may be postponed to December.

But i've got to look at the bright side, we may be back sailing this weekend, Nerone has learned to sleep in the bed at night without biting/kicking/scratching and otherwise damaging habits.

Now if only Jac would learn that when you arrive to work at 09:00, generally it's a good idea to be out by 06:00. It's 07:30 and i'm still waiting for him to finish.

6:30 PM

Orange labels on empty plastic tea bottles.
Cold cappuccino high from the late afternoon winding down.
My desk. And its many papers.
Start button. Shut Down. But not yet.
I would not like to Restart my System.
It's 6:23.
P.
M.
The shades are already down.
The server is down.
The air conditioner isn't down.
Yet.
7 minutes pass.
The number you have dialed cannot be reached.

I cannot be reached.

Adventure

Life got a little disturbing for awhile. My 9-6 was whittling away at me and when I got home the night there would be just enough time to get a set amount of home and personal maintenance things done before passing out for the night, amid our three cats, weary for that 7AM alarm.

Then there was when I starting pushing for Thailand, then Kenya... or when we decided to get a cleaning lady. Perhaps it was cat # 3 that looked at us with kitten eyes and we just couldn't say no and welcomed him into our tiny appartment, causing the number of cats to outnumber human inhabitants. Or when Jac's friend proposed a 20hour sailboat sea-crossing to Sardegna and we said Yes (we leave Thursday night)... well I guess that's when things started looking up. It was about the saying Yes and just being open to the next thing, however scary (20 hours at sea!, 3 cats!, 3rd world countries!) or unexpected.

And last night as we got whimsical off cheap white wine and ate raw melon off the rind in the garden, surrounded by citronella candle tiki lamps and cat-trampled flowers, I decided I was very happy with Yes.

Kenya

Mom & Sister left some days ago, and it's back to me, and Jac, and the cats and trying to think of where to get away to this summer.

I think we've got it. Kenya. Somewhere between reading about the tourist-assaulting monkeys that swing across highways on rope bridges and walking the film "My Africa" in Italian -- I fell in love. And decided that our next trip will be there.

And I need it, I really need it, because since Dublin (Which was like a three month funeral. My funeral, probably.) i've lost faith in the classic european city's ability to charm me with its alleyways, pretentious culture and peculier accents. I need something different. Really different. I want to be in that constant fix with my surroundings, constanting thinking -- why and how and what if and challenging the 'way things are' or have always been, what i've gotten too used to for at least three years that I have been living in Rome. Seriously. I'm forgetting how 'different' things can be.

I think, what i'm most afraid of, is that I won't want to come home.

But that's what return tickets are for.

She's got the whole world...

Tomorrow around 03.55PM GMT + 1 time Jac & I will arrive at Fiumicino airport in a Ford Fiesta to pick up my mother and sister from the airport.

Don't underestimate just how 'scoinvolgente' this is for me (or how often I now find myself substituting italian for english words that have escaped me) -- my Italian world, my Rome world was just for me, not many people from my where-I-grew-up world have stepped foot in it. It sort of makes me feel like i'm in a video game, and none of this is real. My New York reality was one thing, but my life here -- my jac life, my kitties life, my work life, my city life -- it's something that noone back in NYC knows much about or could possibly imagine. And maybe it's not just because I only call once a month or so, if that.

Maybe it's because I don't want them to.

But the world pushes on and so they are coming, and I will be truly happy to see them and show them the Italy that the Discovery Travel channel tapes. They will meet Nerone, our new kitten that was rescued from the motor of a car which Jacopo insists we cannot keep though he's been with us almost 3 weeks now -- they will see our wood, brass and marble house and old, cumbersone ivy garden that has been converted into a Kitty Alcatraz with poles and nets to keep them from entering the Big Bad World... they will see the Colosseum lit up rust and green at night while a bum plays the star spangled banner on his electric guitar below for euros, and the kids with Peroni beers sit on the old, broken and dented Ancient Roman cobblestones to listen. We will eat. By God we shall eat, pasta, lots of pasta, with fresh fish, fresh tomatoes, parsley and basil from the garden. We'll eat in the garden under the saffron tree. We will go to Ischia and ride motorboats into blue grottoes and gape at Vesuvius and think about all of the specials we've seen on TV about Pompeii.. and hope the damn mountain doesn't blow its top again -- and then it's to Florence and the Duomo and the (luscious) David and the wine country.

We'll get around.

Befana

Laying in bed with laptop perpendicular, waiting for Jac to finish working on his new website but liking the fact that since we've discovered we can hack internet from the elderly care home next door, we can be on the internet and working simultaneously, though that requires one person to use the bed as a desk (me, obviously). Alaska is sleeping on the sheep-rug at Jac's feet. Jolie is outside (the bedroom, not house) because if she comes in, she'll pee on any soft surface available. Ate polenta today at jac's mom's with Jac's family. Jac continues to insist that i'm 'aso' i.e. asocial. I don't agree.

Back to work tomorrow. Been sick for 5 days with something that involves constant fever. I'm still coughing.

I'll be happy for winter to be over.