007. where or what you come from/blogtember 001

Hi

I came across the Blogtember challenge on As Always, Kara and thought it might be good for me. I am participating as a way to clear my head, to get all my thoughts down on "paper," and to share a little more of myself with you. Here goes.

Yesterday's prompt is 'Where or what you come from. The people, the places, and/or the factors that make up who you are.'

me and my nonno berto. 1989ish.

Where do I come from? I come from gaudy apartments in brick buildings in Europe. I originally came from an apartment across from the stadium in Milan, Italy.

I changed my mind. I want to show you something I wrote years ago instead.


Here goes.

I am obsessed with finding a place of my own, in a space of my own. I am obsessed with not standing still. I want to be the grey whales that make thousand-mile journeys to their breeding grounds and back. I want to be a locust, changing my location for the season. I want to be a bull shark, flowing to sea to find pleasure and comfort. I want to never stand still, never be quiet. I have one hundred different homes, one thousand different families. I can sail a boat, I can ride my bicycle, I can drive my car, I can walk in very high shoes, and I can fly on an airplane, or swim underwater. I will keep going until my hands tremble with age and my hair turns from chocolate to silver to snow. From country to country, coast to coast. I have a hundred places I call home.

                         I.      Milan, Italy

I am conceived on a pink and yellow couch in my grandfather’s apartment. I am born in Ospedale Mangiagalli. My grandfather peels apples into hurricanes and my sister Giulia is born twelve months and ten days after me. Our apartment on Via Harar doesn’t have an elevator so my mother has to haul two babies in a double stroller up and down three flights of stairs every day. I make my first camera out of Legos. I have black ringlets on my head and floral dresses on my body. Giulia and I throw spoons off the third floor balcony every day and my grandmother walks down three flights of stairs to retrieve them and climb back up to see us-- smiling but guilty.

                      II.      Imperia, Italy

This is the only place where I remember both sets of my grandparents being together. My mother’s father owns this little rundown brick building with water you can’t drink and red metal bunk beds. My father’s father teaches me to catch fireflies in glass jars. The dog next door has fleas, my mother says, but I pet him anyway when she isn’t looking. We walk down to the beach and my father’s friend has a video camera. He takes the only video I have ever seen of me as a child, running towards the waves and then running away from them, screaming, when they crash on the shore. Over and over again.

                   III.      Sindelfingen, Germany

I remember the big lake and I remember the kite festival. I can remember being cast as a yellow tulip in the kindergarten class play. I remember my best friend Katarina’s dollhouse and sitting on the back of my mother’s bicycle, the same bike I ride every day, speeding down a hill. I remember my father buying pretzels for us when my mother is in the hospital having Anna, my smallest sister, because he doesn’t feel like cooking. I ride my first train to visit my grandmother in the next town. I am scared of a wreck. I still remember our phone number 814803. I remember the apple grove in our backyard and the games of hide-and-go-seek Giulia and I play among the sprawling, fragrant branches.

                   IV.      Fort Collins, Colorado

We’re immigrants and I don’t even know what that means. I only know two words in English; “fish” (because it’s the same in German) and “hello.” I go to school and I play soccer. My teacher wears twenty-three earrings. My mother is so enthralled by 24-hour supermarkets. We buy a house on Creekwood Drive with a tree house, a beautiful redwood circular contraption. My best friend Elyse and I spend all our time up there, listening to the Spice Girls on my Fisher Price tape player. On Halloween, we go dressed as Siamese twins. After four years of ESL classes, I am fluent. I win the Fire Safety Poster Contest and can’t stop drawing. We bury dead baby birds in our front yard and make up elaborate prayers to say to their graves. Elyse supplies us with “holy rainwater.” I take six years of ballet. I dance Pointe and my toes hurt so much. I can tell Vivaldi from Tchaikovsky from Chopin in a heartbeat but I get runs in all my pink tights.

                      V.      Milan, Italy

I am supposed to feel at home. I have my family all around me. I hate this place. The streets are dirty and pigeon-infested. I have no friends in Sunday school. We buy an apartment on Via Domenichino. I make new friends at school. I buy my first CD, Siamese Dream by the Smashing Pumpkins. My friend Sofia loves it as much as me. We watch the Exorcist on her rooftop and it rains and I am a devout Catholic for three months to avoid becoming possessed by the devil. September 11^th happens. Classes are cancelled and we all gather in the gym to watch it happen on the school’s one television. The American kids are sent home. One week later my friend Isabella joins our class. She moved here from New York City. We fly to Florence for a volleyball game, the International School of Milan versus the American School of Florence. We win. Mother says we’re moving back to Colorado. I don’t want to go. I love this place. The Smashing Pumpkins break up. I buy every album.

                   VI.      Deruta, Italy

Before we leave, we tour our home country. Nestled in the hills of Tuscany is a little town called Deruta. I have never loved a place as much as I love this one. Majolica is what this town is about, painting ceramics. All the Italian majolica you’ll ever see is made in this town. The streets are made of dirt; the town is in a fortress. I want to stay here for the rest of my life.

                VII.      San Benedetto del Tronto, Italy

This is where my grandparents live, where my grandfather dies. This little town owns my heart. It stole it when I was piss-drunk on sadness and won’t give it back. It belongs in the sand, in the olive groves. It belongs to my grandfather’s red bike and my grandmother’s gold teeth. It belongs to the old sailors and the top floor apartment on Via Boccaccio. I belong here, I think. I belong in a place that always smells like saltwater. My grandmother is deaf in her right ear. She just started driving. I cry in the bathroom when my grandfather is dying. I burst into tears during a conversation about my grandmother’s driving and can’t stop. I sit there for hours, bawling my eyes out and then eventually turned to the pop culture tabloids and read those until my eyes dry and the priest arrives to take my grandfather’s confession.

             VIII.      Fort Collins, Colorado

We’re back now. I’m in junior high school. I have my first American boyfriend. He likes the Smashing Pumpkins. I do too but I secretly love Destiny’s Child more. I learn to play guitar. We buy a house on Cobblestone Court and I get the room with three windows. I go to church once with my friends because I want to fit in. I tell them I felt Jesus touch my heart but it’s a lie. I just want to fit in. My hair is parted down the middle and I wear shirts with things like “Lil’Angel” written on them in glitter. My friends and I watch a lot of 'Friends'. My mom makes me set mouse traps but I don’t have the heart to make them work. When she’s grocery shopping, I snap them, one by one, to make it seem like we just have some really smart mice. I take a photography class and I can’t stop snapping pictures. My best friend tells me he’s gay. I pretend I had no idea and I think that makes him happy. My grandfather dies in Italy and it shatters my world for some time. Then I go to high school. I drink peppermint Schnapps on Prom night my sophomore year. I review concerts for the school newspaper. I fall in love with a boy who is two years older than me, which, at the time, is a big deal. He has a funny-sounding English accent and very weird hair. He takes me swing dancing. I feel vulnerable. We drink rum on prom night my junior year. I go sailing and when I come back he and I break-up. I paint too much and smoke too fast. I write short stories and my teacher loves them. I turn eighteen. I meet a man named David, five years older than me. He is Scottish and he is a musician. He tells me I have a gorgeous little soul. We talk about how bad Green Day is and kiss in the rain. He gets deported back to Scotland. I drink Heineken beers on prom night, my senior year. I graduate. I have no direction except away from here.

                   IX.      Cologne, Germany

I am eighteen and I saved up one thousand dollars for my senior trip. I backpack around Europe. I start in Cologne, to see my aunt Ruth. My cousin Mika has a pet gerbil he carries around in his shirt. I drink beer by the river and can’t put my camera away. At night, Ruth and I cook dinner and go to the bars to dance to Johnny Cash and play foosball. We share cigarettes and promise not to tell my mother.

                      X.      Venice, Italy

I am here to see the Smashing Pumpkins. I am in the taxi to the hotel when the radio tells me the concert has been cancelled. There was a freak-storm last night and three people died. The stage was blown over. I almost start to cry. The next day I walk through Venice. I can’t get enough. I get lost. The city is bathed in gold and smells like fish. I trip on cobblestones and break my camera. I fix it with tape and send a postcard home. I call Aaron, my best friend and talk to him about colors and smells. He is tall and lanky with bright red curly hair and ghostly skin. He loves the Smashing Pumpkins, too.

                   XI.      Milan, Italy

Everything has changed. Sofia moved back to Argentina when I moved back to Colorado. I see my other friends. I go see my godparents. I go see the church I was baptized in. The Priest has died. I go my old school. There are bars on the windows now, to keep the pigeons out. I sit on my balcony, the one Giulia and I used to throw spoons off of and now I sneak cigarettes when my grandmother’s asleep. I steal my grandfather’s old matchboxes. The apartment has an elevator now. I ride the tram all day and pass by Ospedale Mangiagalli. 

                XII.      Amsterdam, the Netherlands

I go to Amsterdam for the Rijksmuseum. I have been obsessed with the works of Johannes Vermeer since I was thirteen and I figure it’s time to see more of them. I see four of his thirty-three paintings and I can’t blink. I wander through the canals and rent a bicycle. I spend a lot of time in the hostel and a lot of time buying yellow tulips. I eat lox and cream cheese bagels and write in my journal. It’s always cloudy but everything is so beautiful.

             XIII.      Birmingham, England

David moved from Scotland to England so I stop by to see him. We have five days. We are in love. We’re wrecking like trains. We can’t keep our hands off each other and the rain off our faces. At night, we curl up on the couch together and in the morning I make us coffee. We talk about yellow cottages by the sea and play cards. We never leave the house.

             XIV.      Klamath, California

My friend Kelsey and I drive for twenty hours to get to the Redwoods Hostel but it is all worth it. We get Chinese food in Wyoming, Mexican food near Salt Lake City, fast-food in Nevada, Italian food in Oregon, and crab in California. The hostel is amazing. I tell Kelsey to exhale everything before she opens the car door and then take a deep breath of salty Pacific air. We do it at the same time and it is magic. Kelsey and I hike through the Redwoods and lie down under the massive trees. They are so old and so wise that I assume they have déjà-vu all the time. We drink a lot of coffee. I listen to the Smashing Pumpkins. It rains every day. The rain is salty. Almost like baby oceans are hitting me in the face, not raindrops. I close my eyes and think. After a while, the salt dries on my eyelids. When the salt dries on my eyelids, I know everything is going to be okay.

            Maybe one day I’ll end up back in Milan or maybe the pull of Vermeer’s work will land me back in Amsterdam. Maybe I’ll find myself missing gold-soaked Venice and try to catch it again before it sinks. Maybe David and I will get a cottage by the ocean if we ever see each other again. There’s a chance I’ll end up in Imperia, running to and from the waves. Perhaps the pull of the apple orchard behind our Sindelfingen house will become too strong. Maybe I will end up in Deruta, designing tables of lemons. It’s possible I’ll decide I want to spend my days in German bars dancing to Johnny Cash’s “Jackson” with my Aunt Ruth. Or maybe I’ll end up back to the place that stole my heart when I was piss-drunk, with my grandmother’s golden teeth and my grandfather’s red bicycle.

            Maybe I’ll find a new place, a place I can’t stand to be away from. I have a feeling though. Fingerspitzengefühl. I have a tickle-in-the-back-of-my-throat feeling that I won’t find a place of my own. My disease isn’t contagious but it has no cure. I am blessed with wanderlust.

I wrote that in 2011. Not much has changed. I mean, really everything has. The people have, the places have. But I haven't really. I like it here but I feel a pull for the ocean so intense right now I can barely breathe. And what I wouldn't give for a Belgian Jupiler.  Happy Blogtember. I'll see you tomorrow.