01/26
remembering myself, old delights, & Europe before me.
January takes a lot of shaking to get out of the limbo of holiday after holiday and into the hyper-motivated, resolution-soaked couple months to come. If you, like me, were on break between college semesters, it’s an even stranger sensation of being intellectually exhausted but itching to get back to it— being home had me acting like my seventeen-year-old self and yet, unlike her, I have a place in the outer world I couldn’t wait to get to.
Remembering myself
I have decided to become myself again, which shouldn’t be too hard. I found her in the last two years of highschool, after a few different catalysts lined up in such a way that I really couldn’t do anything else. So I found her, and then freshman year of college knocked her out of me, and I spent the summer & my first semester of sophomore year recovering. But she’s coming back! She must! Europe is before me, and I have to be me while I’m here.
It’s always been Europe for me. As a little girl, I would write lists of what I wanted to do in the coming grade, or when I was an adult. I don’t remember a year that Rome wasn’t on the list. From second grade on, I’ve dreamed of this moment until it’s become a part of me, and so I couldn’t embark on this journey without bringing all of me there. Really, though, it wasn’t too hard. She had already begun coming back. She’d been peeking out in the punch cards I made instead of new year’s resolutions; she’d been laughing and wearing no makeup at all; she’d been doing things she knew she’s good at and letting that make her okay with doing things she’s really awful at. I knew she’d come back around. It had to happen sometime or another.
She takes walks, and so do I. I look at my shadow and remember senior year of highschool, music pouring through my headphones, watching puddles distort my image. Once I sat on a hill overlooking an empty warehouse lot and pulled my headphones off of my ears. Sound was breathy and suspended in the air. In the warehouse lot, far below me, three or four young men were practicing wheelies on their motorcycles, and as I watched them I felt far removed from their distant whoops of victory and yawning motors. Yet all the same, I let out my own whoop when I finally ran down the hill back to my house, my feet falling over themselves to catch up with my own momentum.
It’s fitting to be so obstinate about becoming myself again at the beginning of the Year of the Horse. She is, after all, enamored with horses. On my bookshelf sit her relics: a white stone bookend in the shape of an angular horse head, & a silver rocking horse with a slight tarnish and a sweet little tune if you wind it up. In the garage is the leather saddle her grandfather gave her, unused since he grew too old for his cowboy days.
On my walks down the road I used to always stop at a pasture and stroke the retired horse there, Old Gray, until my hands smelled like the thick, earthy musk his mane. A thin line of electrified wire ran around his yard, switching on & off every second, and I would play a dare game there with little brothers or friends. Each of us would grab the wire in turn and see who would have the misfortune of feeling the buzz jolt up their arm and the metallic taste lie on their tongues. I used to secretly savor the feeling and the way it made the top of my spine itch. As I pass the pasture where a new, young, & skittish horse grazes now, I run my finger along the wire. It isn’t on anymore.
Old delights
Anyone who knows me, the myself that I am, knows that two things are very dear to me: competition & conversation. In highschool, those two things happened to come together in a beautiful little organization. I competed in speeches (some prepared beforehand, and some ad-libbed on the spot) and in debates about philosophy & politics, riding the high of putting just the right words together in just the right way, right off the top of my head. I signed up for as many events as the rules allowed— and sometimes more. I lived & breathed the art of public speaking.
Leaving it all behind when I graduated was bitter, more bitter than the phantom taste of the electronic wire around Gray’s pasture. The sport demanded so much of my mind, my body, my soul, that I felt like I was leaving a part of myself there too. In a way I was. As with so many things in highschool, the specific experiences I was privileged to have are not ones I can ever have again, and the person who I was at the height of my competitive arc had “muscles” which have atrophied today. When I try to lift the same weights that I could in senior year of highschool, I feel the same as when I attempt to speak extemporaneously before a crowd now. I’m far better now for the training I put in back then, but when I was at the peak of that training, I would have laughed at my efforts today (I probably wouldn’t have. I would have felt too bad. Instead I would have said something like, you’re doing so well for where you are right now!).
As with any muscle memory, mercifully, it awakens quickly; over winter break I was able to coach two teams preparing for the start of the 2026 season— both of which placed in the top five in the first tournament of the year! I worked at this tournament as a photographer and spent three days running up & down two flights of stairs so I could get photos of certain competitors at certain times performing certain events. My Garmin watch was happy and so was the main photographer, who could dedicate her time to curating the perfect end-of-tournament slideshow to play before the award ceremony on Saturday evening.
While I lined up shots on a borrowed DSLR camera, I got to see how the new generation of competitors is approaching the organization I love so much. I saw thirteen- & fourteen-year-olds whose potential was poised to take off, and highschool seniors who I remember as “the younger crowd” now leading others in examples of how to excel in every category. When two other alumni joined me to help judge, we laughed & marveled at how far the league has come and how far we have, too. I always return to that first tournament a little differently. This time, I finally felt like an adult, instead of an oversized girl wishing for the past back. When I celebrated the successes of my younger family, my past acquaintances, and the teams I’d coached, it was without the old ache. I’ve grown out of it.
Europe before me
After a delay due to the massive storms on the East Coast and a sixteen-hour travel day, I landed in Rome with nine-hour jet lag, three bags, & the most basic Italian vocabulary to get me by. The program hits the ground running— the next morning, half unpacked, I found myself on a VIP tour of St. Peter’s Basilica. I passed through a hallway lined with the tombs of former popes, sealed in stone beneath the Vatican City. Far beyond glass, a shrine of St. Peter marked where the Rock of the Church lies, waiting for the final day of resurrection. We ascended spiraling stairs and came out into the overwhelming golden glory of the arched domes & columns covered in images and letters so thickly & closely I felt I could spend hours studying just what was within one glance.
The deacon who spoke to us on the tour was deeply knowledgeable & full of love for Church history. Every two minutes I had to catch my breath over some beautiful or astounding fact or meditation he shared. Throughout the tour, we heard the gentle chanting of choir or the melodic Italian masses being said towards the front of the basilica, enveloping our footsteps in back-to-back services. The deacon pointed at side altars: the mosaic of the Transfiguration, which Raphael considered his best work. The tomb of St. Pope John Paul II. Michelangelo’s Pieta, carrying a lifelike glow impossible to communicate in photos. As we stepped from one side of the basilica to another, we made our reverence to the Blessed Sacrament, kneeling and crossing ourselves atop a circular red tile in the floor. We stood, and the deacon said, “That’s the stone Charlemagne was crowned Holy Roman Emperor on.”
How in the world am I supposed to just take all that in stride?
It’s been only a few days. There is time, as our program director said, for Rome to become ours in a much more personal way than it is by simply being our Catholic Inheritance; I’ll know its streets as I’ve already begun to, know its walls and its shops and its people better than I do now. This morning I & a friend took an early walk, twenty minutes to a coffee shop. I ordered a cappuccino & a vanilla croissant in awkward Italian, but the shop owner humored me and made her answers slow so I could better understand them. We ate outside, under a canopy in the whitish morning light mixed with the small pools of warm gold from the hanging bistro lights. We watched people glide past with the easy gait of those used to walking their way through the world, and after an hour went back in for two more cappuccinos. An older Italian woman sat in a purple coat & purple glasses, and I saw her gaze comb over my electric blue coat and my friend’s pink & green shawl as I motioned to her coat and said, “É bello!”
“Ah!” she said. “Your coat, the blue, beautiful. And you—” she turned to my friend— “your shawl, ah, beautiful. Molto elegante.”
Behind the counter, the shop owner laughed. “Sí,” she said. “Loro sono belle.”
“Molto elegante,” repeated the older woman, smiling at our blushes and grazie milles. We giggled without the vocabulary to communicate much more and walked out of the shop red & glad. Tomorrow, after Mass, I’m going again.
Europe is before me, and I am here in Rome. There’s nothing else but possibility.
