I have written about this before, but I never wanted or planned on moving back to the United States. I saw Mexico as a launching point. Safe because it was close enough to home. Scary because I didn’t speak the language and had never lived outside the US or even traveled for more than a few weeks. But after almost 3 years in Mexico City, I was ready for my next adventure.
I wanted to move to Europe. I was working remotely for a US based company and tutoring part-time. But I didn’t want to teach again, and I couldn’t find anyone to hire me and sponsor my visa doing anything else. A not-so-small additional factor was my then boyfriend, now husband. He needed to be in the United States to deal with some visa issues. I offered to marry him so he wouldn’t have to worry about it. Like the foolish romantic he is, he refused. He told me he would only marry for love. So, like the foolish romantic I am, I followed him back to the United States.
As fate would have it, I managed to get a job in Atlanta. So we braved a new kind of adventure, the South. A few years later we were married, this time for love. And a little bit for tax benefits if I am being completely honest. He had the opportunity to attend a two-week job training in Portugal, so I hopped on a plane to join him. I wanted to live out my fantasy of having a sophisticated European lifestyle. The stone buildings, the more relaxed pace. And best of all, traveling. It was so easy to take a casual weekend trip to another country.
The weekend in between his training we caught an impossibly cheap flight to Rome. It all felt so romantic and different from our normal lives. Both of us are from giant, sprawling countries with only one official language. A culture that changed from one region to the next, for sure. But nothing like what we could hope to experience when traveling in this way. We boarded the flight and hopped off a short while later, greeting by a landscape completely transformed.
We rented a flat in a stone building in the historic center. So old that it felt sacrilege to stay there. The next day we wandered about, ticking off the must-see attractions. We visited the Trevi Fountain, the Colosseum, and the Vatican. Elbowing other tourists out of the way for our turn to take selfies. In between photo ops, we stuffed our faces with as much food and wine as we could manage. Dionysus (or Bacchus, as he would be known locally I suppose) himself would have been proud.
On Saturday night we took a taxi out of the city center to visit an old friend living in Rome. We passed through the Aurelian Walls and entered a completely different city. This part of town could have been anywhere in Europe for all I knew. Normal streets, generic apartment buildings. We went upstairs to join the house party.
The apartment was cozy and noisy. We danced and laughed and ate the potluck food everyone had brought. We caught each other up on our lives over the past 5 years. I couldn’t help but compare our different life choices. As she talked, I felt like I was seeing someone live a life that a part of me had anyways wanted. As long as I had known her this friend had passed breezily between relationships and situationships. She always had a few girlfriends or boyfriends in her orbit. This is so opposite of who I am, a staunch serial monogamist. I am prone to long-term relationships and fall hard and often despite my best efforts.
She was always studying archeology and living in cool places because of it. First her master’s and then her PhD. Eventually she would complete a post-doc. She didn’t make much money but she didn’t need it. Living cheaply and surrounding herself with interesting people. Her vibrant collection of local and international friends. By contrast, I barely made it out of academia with my undergraduate degree. I went straight into the workforce and have been trying to cobble together a career ever since.
The next morning my husband and I drank espresso standing up at the bar of the cafe at the train station. I felt very Italian and I’m sure did not look it at. In a scene straight out of Harry Potter, we wandered back and forth between platforms 19 and 20, looking for 19b and becoming increasingly frantic. We showed our ticket to a young woman attending a kiosk, who brusquely informed us that she worked for a different train company.
Despite the fact that she stood for hours on any given day directly in front of the platforms indicated on our ticket, there was apparently absolutely no information that she would be able to share with us regarding where we might find this mysterious train. After someone finally took pity on us we sprinted to 19b, which was just the very end of the very long platform 19 to accommodate the small local train.
We arrived at the quaint town of Frascati, about an hour outside of Rome and known for the wine produced there. Many of the houses had basements that led to an interconnected system of caves latticing the town which are used to store wine. Frascati had been completely flattened during World War II, and the caves doubled as bomb shelters. We took a cooking class in one such house. We shaped our pasta by hand and shared a bottle of shockingly delicious and cheap local wine.
After class, we hailed a cab and teetered onto the plane back to Portugal. And just a short while later, back to our real lives in the United States. I felt enlightened and enchanted with a small glimpse into this window. Satisfied for now with knowing what it would look like if life had turned out a little differently, and what could still be.
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