The Lagoon

Before:  

 Currently I am in too much of a whirlwind preparing for this trip to think about anything else besides what I need to pack. Half of my clothes are in the laundry and need to be turned over, my toiletries are floating around in a canvas trader joes bag on my bedroom floor. There are too many tiny bottle of liquids, pastes, and gels and they will not all fit in the TSA approved single quart bag size. I have hard decisions to make.

    I have been studying Italian since last June but still am not where I want to be with my speaking and recall abilities. I'm worrying about miscommunications in important situations like when buying a train ticket and going the wrong way, or ordering food and they bring me the wrong thing which I will still have to pay for. It wont be that bad. My Italian is better than most peoples'. As long as i don't keep mixing it with my Spanish they might be able to understand me fine.

    I am anticipating more grit than in the photos of Italy that you see online and in magazines. I am anticipating snow in Fontecchio and rain in Venice. I am anticipating authentic food like we were told we should expect, which means more than pasta all the time but i might choose to eat pasta most of the time. I am not as excited about the infinite access to gelato as my mom thinks I should be, nor than i think i should be considering how much i love ice cream. There's a difference between gelato and ice cream and i prefer the semi-hard packed cream to the soft swirls, i think it may just make me feel dissatisfied and miss Tacoma. 

         

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After:

          We have arrived, its been a day since arriving. I am tired. This is like going to your friend’s or your cousin’s pool in the summer when you were younger: you would arrive, it is warm but not as warm as it would be to make you want to get into the water immediately and so you start by changing into your swimsuit. Then maybe you take off your shoes, toes on cold concrete or tile that surrounds the pool’s edge. Your parents are near, saying you should get in. Your friend or cousins are in the pool, they beckon to you, splashing, having fun, maybe playing Marco polo (which is fitting because this is an analogy to arriving in Venice). So you dip your toes in, sitting on the ladder (it is an above ground pool, you don’t know anyone who could afford an in-ground). It is colder than you want to expose yourself to. Your friends or cousins jumped right in, you must go with ease. No one understands why, they say to just get it over with, you’ll feel better once you just jump in. But you can’t, not yet, you are not ready to jump into pools at whatever age you are when you imagine this memory taking place, but now you are. And so you are on a plane- the metaphorical jump into the cold water, a long, stretchy, slow motion jump via the plane that will skip you like a rock slowly over Paris to arrive in the metaphoric waters of Venice. I am in the stage after having jumped in, I am moving in the water, trying to generate heat to make space for myself, to make comfort so that I can adjust to the foreignness.