WANDERING THROUGH EUROPE // PART 1

I am a cliché, but that's okay.

The past weeks I spent in and around Rome and traveling through Tuscany. It wasn't a conscious decision I made, going to Rome, but perhaps the lifelong dream of one day having a villa near the Mediterranean Sea, writing endless songs about it, planning to build tree houses by the river and watching To Rome With Love or Roman Holiday played their respective parts. The moment I set foot on the train that took me from Fiumicino Airport to Termini station I started smiling, and I guess I didn't stop until the plane lifted off the runway weeks later. During my first night, I walked up the Spanish Steps at midnight and made my way up to the Pincio, where I gazed over the city, purple skies behind the pines of Rome and the happiest tears making their way down my cheeks. Breathing in, tasting my own tears. I've come for a reason, I've come to discover beauty and peace, to become more balanced and find romance in solitude. 

I was in love with this city. I made it.

    

      Beauty is like remembrance, cast

        From Time long past.

                                                                  - P.B. Shelley 

It took a few days to figure out where I was, to realize that I had changed my habitat, that this was something completely new and undiscovered. I kept thinking about all the things that had happened in the past few months. I had finished a bunch of years in New York. I had moved away from Amsterdam. I made new memories, remember? I felt like writing and figured that inspiration would be something not hard to find in a city like Rome. What I didn't foresee, was the impact that this inspiration would have on me.  

During my first week, friends of mine invited me to visit the city of Tivoli. It was a place that presented itself in strange ambivalence, yet once I started taking in the pretty things around me, I fell into a deep, irrelevant hole of nothingness. How did I get here? Gazing off the balconies of the Villa D'Este, I realized that I would no longer talk to people, neither would I share my impressions and instead walk behind my friends, so I could stop, ponder and take in more of the things that we passed. So many balconies, so many views. But why? Why do people come here? I wondered. My friends knew the history of the place, they read all the brochures and discussed the love life of Lucrezia Borgia during our train ride. I had to look out the train window, into the quaint mountains. They were clear and mighty up close, but intangible and blurry afar, blending in with the sky, softly. I felt like climbing one of them, to get to the top, to be blurry and soft and to blend in with heaven, to feel like heaven. 

Then I started to realize: I could only take in beauty, if I got rid of all abiding ill-emotions beforehand. Simple concept, hard to put into practice. Was I really this disconnected from myself? C., poised and calm, walked through the villa gardens with no worry, seemed at peace and content. I wanted what he had. In a hidden corner of the garden, we found an arched hole, with view over the Roman Campagna, and that's when I had my moment, perhaps. It was romantic because life does that to you, it gives you chances, it gives you stuff to work with. There they were again, the mountains all blurry, and I started to feel empty no more. "This is beautiful!" I said. C. nodded, then ran to chase some of the stray cats through the garden.

I stood there for a while. Once that I had captured all the beauty, I immediately figured out a way to compress it and also how to filter out the best parts to keep. What a system, I thought. How come this never came to my mind before? -- The train ride home was full of energy. I had started to process this day in a way I never experienced anything before in my entire life. There was regret, for a moment; perhaps I had lived my life the wrong way until now. Never had I just sat there, really just sat there, and closed my eyes to listen to the sounds of a waterfall in the afternoon sun. 

We made amazing memories. 

 

(All photos taken in Tivoli, Italy)

DON'T STOP CREEPING IN MY DREAMS, MELANCHOLY

Melancholy is a good thing.

I woke up freezing. The heater didn't turn on last night and now I have this pain in my throat as if I had smoked a pack of cigarettes before I went to sleep. I was unsure of how much longer I could wake up like this, and wished for the late winter to faster turn into spring to turn into summer. I know that time is precious but how am I going to cherish time, if it's doing a bad job at giving me anything to work with?

Melancholy is a good thing.

Last night in my dream, a strange man came up to me at the corner of a small Via Italia, probably in Rome, and he asked me for some money so he could buy flowers for his girlfriend. I gave him 50 US Dollars. "Puttana!" he yelled, and ripped the $50 bill apart. I saw the little pieces of that bank note falling from the sky and it turned into rain. I was standing there for a few seconds, until I was soaking wet.

Melancholy is a good thing.

I need to keep dreaming. I sometimes feel disconnected from reality in the most peculiar ways. I recently built a whole treehouse somewhere in the southwest of Italy and moved all my things into it. I have flowers growing on the walls. And the bed sheets are so white, that when the sun shines through the little skylight above it, the whole room glows like glitter markers, and in the near distance I can hear cowbells.

Melancholy is a good thing.

I woke up in a movie theater. I had been staying there for a few nights, because I lost my apartment. I would wake up early, before the film projectionists would come in and set up the movies in their little cabin above the last row. I would creep around under the seats and eat stale popcorn. One day I didn't wake up in time, and people were storming inside the hall to see "La Boum". Someone kicked me off my seat and I watched the first five minutes of the movie standing by the door. Then I woke up again and I was in my bed.

Melancholy is a good thing.