Woke up feeling panicky this morning. I don't know what I'm doing, and that is not a state that is good for me. Forget all the nostalgic Italian stuff, all the lemons, and names and family and everything else.
I'm American, for chrissakes -- I need a plan, a goal, a roadmap. And I don't have one.
I bought a used car here yesterday (when you have plenty of time to kill, I'll tell you what that entails).
If I'm going to be here for awhile (am I?), I can't just keep renting cars. It's expensive, and I don't even have a job anymore. (Why don't I have a job anymore? I felt a lot stronger when I did. Why did I leave my job? Can't remember any of the reasons this morning).
I bought the car also because if my older son gets an internship in Milan for the winter, the company told him he'll need a car there. We have no idea if he's going to get an internship though, because well, the global economy sucks and it's mid-August now, so Italy is coming to a grinding halt until early September. (Went to Rome last night. Not a soul there except the foreigners. My cousins have all left town now too.)
My son will go back to the States next weekend and we have no idea where he's going to live. The arrangement we had set up for him before this possible internship came up is gone now. He's given up his two jobs and his apartment in his college town. He got his wallet stolen in Barcelona (natch) so money is tight for him now.
We're no longer there so there's no place for him to go home to for even a month, a week, or a night. It's been exactly a year since we were so lucky to have sold our house in the States.
I feel like crying when I think about that house, our so comfortable American home of 12 years. I just want to run back there so I can open the front door for my son when he gets back from his trip next weekend. And needs help with his laundry.
What am I doing here chasing lemons while my husband works in London and my son searches for a couch to flop on where we used to live?
And now I've bought a car too, so if I don't stay, it'll feel like such a waste. When it was supposed to be just the opposite.
I'm the happiest here that I've been anywhere this past year of upheaval. I've even made a new friend.
It feels familiar here, comforting. London feels strange, full of strangers with habits I don't share and weather that is alien to my Neapolitan soul. But does that matter? Who cares? I've lived everywhere with people much more alien than the Brits. And my husband is British.
But I feel like I need to belong now and to create a new home that can endure. That I can build on. And I'm pretty sure London isn't it.
Nobody knows me there, so working means starting all over with people who don't know what I can do and couldn't care less what I've done in the States. I have no life there beyond waiting for my husband to come home. (A mediocre cappuccino on the high street in the afternoon does not a life make.)
And here? Can I make a permanent life here? I've tried that before, in Rome, and it didn't work. A friend reminded me of that recently. Will it work now that I'm older, now that my options have shrunk? Can I actually live full-time on my side of the hill in this little town on the lake?
And if I stay here and my husband stays in London, will that work? We've raised our children now. There's no pressing need for us to be together all the time -- the empty-nester dilemma. That's scary.
Or can I make a life shuttling back and forth between London and here on cheap flights? (which when you add it all up, are really not that cheap).
Gotta get out of this mood. The merry back-packers have come back (money running low; pickpockets haven't helped) and they're here for only one more day. My younger son is coming tonight for five days.
Don't know when I'll see either of them again after that. So cannot ruin it.
Gotta quash that American need for a plan, for a clear way forward.
And try to just live for today. Like my son and his friends.
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