I need to go to Italy, but I don’t know why.
Do you ever get plagued by a feeling? As if some invisible hands are pulling you in a random direction, like when you wander the city sensing to walk a certain way, that eventually leads to something enchanting.
The feeling is also akin to an elephant suddenly showing up in the middle of the night, wearing a swing tag with your name on it, disturbing your familiar comfort and peace.
‘Italy, Italllly!!!’ it trumpets from its crinkled snout.
I can’t do anything about Italy right now, Elephant. But if this carries on, I’d better figure it out, as I’m currently planning to turn my bedroom into the Amalfi coast. Sans lemon’s trees sprouting from the ceiling! Italian-themed wallpaper costs an arm and a leg. So do lemon trees!
And I’m not so sure how it would feel to be in an English winter with a pumpkin latte and fur blankets, whilst also baking in the steaming rays of a nuclear yellow paint that you’ve decided is going to emulate the sun. If I’m not confused about my life now, it will probably make things a whole lot worse.
Italy is everywhere! I even caught a glimpse of the tag on my shirt today, which read ‘Made in Italy’. 🙄 Of course it is. Everything is made in either Italy, Taiwan, China, or Bangladesh. You have a 1-4 chance of getting ‘Made in Italy’ printed on your attire.
Maybe it’s reminding me to get on with learning Italian (a lifelong goal), but I get this odd feeling that there’s more to it, almost as if a chapter of life is opening and some version of ‘Eat, Pray, Love’, is about to begin.
I don’t know if I need to go on a feast quest, though, to be honest. I kind of did that, and it took me to pumpkin city. I was adorned with sugar-encrusted flowers and crowned Queen of all things buttery and curvaceous.
Maybe the pumpkin needs to pray?.. maybe it’s time to meditate? Just pumpkin and elephant, maybe if I feed it some Ciabatta and biscotti, it will go away.
I don’t think I’ve ever been on a holiday. Well, not if you count Benidorm. 🤫 But no one counts Benidorm. I went to Hawaii once, but that was to save my life. A gruelling 6am-10pm bootcamp of terrible agony. Sobbing profusely whilst being forced to stare into the bottomless pit of some random stranger’s equally red eyeballs, until all the grief and rage poured out in fitful uncontrollable yelps, that sounded like someone had strangled a Mogwi. (I usually forget to breathe when I cry, so the leader had to come and whack me on the back to restart the whole living process!)
Retreats will do that to people; they get you to pay enormous amounts of money to cry. Something I was already an expert at. I cried half of the Atlantic Ocean by the time I was ten! I didn’t need milk on my cereal, I could just cry on it!
It’s shameful really, that the only time I’ve been anywhere in the world was because if I didn’t, I was going to jump off a cliff like a forlorn lemming. I find that both amusing and awfully miserable. Surely Universe, I’m due an actual holiday now, at the grand old age of forty-two.
One in which I decide I’d like to participate in, without being gagged, tied and trundled in the back of a clapped-out Ford for family trips to my rich relatives farm house, with my brothers, whose never ending derriere explosions would mix with my dire and relentless motion sickness so that I’d be the perfect shade of artichoke green.
Well.. Italy, by the time I’ve got lemons dropping on my head from the sprouting trees above me (why I’ve decided to stick them on the ceiling god knows! Seemed like they’d be less of a bother that way.) and a fully customised room that transports me to some Mediterranean vista, the desire for all things Italian might wear off. One can hope. Otherwise, I’m going to have to start packing.
The worst-case scenario is, I find myself in a hotel room in Amalfi with the elephant. Having M.E. is not exactly great for exploring cobbled streets in the hot sun and coastal villages. That’s where I’d probably decide to ride the elephant (aka get a scooter) and end up ploughing myself into some good fella’s bakery window.. I’ve watched too many Mediterranean rom coms. Lord help me!
It’s hard being Rebecca with an Elephant. ‘Rebecca for now’ was just about all I can manage, but now I have the travel bug creeping up on me just when I’m settling down to a nice cup of tea in my new shared home.
What is it to live? To be able to go anywhere you want, any time. That feels like such a fantastical dream. Perhaps one day I can make it real. If more elephants show up, I may have to.
If I follow my hunches, which I usually always do.. it will lead to something or someone. Half the time it’s because someone needed something from me, like I just instinctively knew to carry a certain book that day, or leave them with a token of hope and kindness, like in ‘One Million Lovely Letters’ by Jodi Ann Bickley. I used to gift random strangers the most peculiar notes all because of that book. I also used to write to the postman.
Once I told him that I was ‘Stuck in a bottle, lost at sea, please send help!’- but what I really meant was I’m alone and isolated in a little Welsh fishing village, drinking myself to death and sending out all my recycling into the ocean with my name on it, in hopes that someone finds it, marches up to my front door and rescues me from certain doom. I was not mentally well at all for the whole two years I was transported to Wales by the sudden shifting wind.
I’ve lived all over the UK; I find myself now planted in Liverpool. Nothing in my life makes sense, so actually, if God picked me up and moved me to Italy it wouldn’t be much different from what I’ve always known. The way I figured, it’s either a vacation, a move, a man, a gelato, or the sudden inspiration to become a travel writer. I’ve got to ask the Elephant what he means when he grunts in unintelligible bursts and kicks at my boots.
I feel like Italy has moved into my heart, and it’s forming roots fast! If I can somehow get well enough to get on a plane, survive take off (scared of flying), and make it to the hotel room, I might find out what it all means. I’ll do it.. I’m sure I will.. but I will turn my room into Amalfi first and sit in it with sunglasses on long enough to decide that this isn’t Italy, and real Italy would be a far greater adventure. Hermit leaves cave.. it could happen! Ouch!.. Stupid elephant knocked an entire crop of lemons onto my head