By the nature of having moved a lot, to Italy at 10, to Rome at 19, back to the US at 25, I struggle with continuity of friendships. In an era when social media wasn’t a thing, when you moved, you either wrote letters or you lost people. Letters were too painful to write, so I lost people.
The time spent in Italy the past year has been a recovery of my relationship from a place I hated my whole childhood/teenage years. There is a gift of continuity in relationships, that I’m painfully aware of, when I observe other people’s lives—aware of what I’m missing. While, new relationships are precious, because we can honor who we are now by introducing ourselves anew, old relationships are precious because we get to experience who we are in relation to who we were and how far we’ve come. Also, relationships from our youth give us a sense of—this is where I started off, compared to where I landed.
Passing through Milan yesterday, I had dinner with a high school friend. She opened up a world of new insights into my childhood: “We were all troubled youth, each of us in our own way. We found community together, but were all strangers to the world,” she said. I realized that I was so self-absorbed in my being a foreigner, a New-Yorker displaced to small-town Italy, that I couldn’t see that the others I hung out with were misfits, too.
This particular friend played a key role in my youth, she was/is fiercely independent, stubbornly free, impeccably loyal and with a knowledge of the Italian that, at that time, I drooled for. As we reconnected last night, I realized that I fell in love with the Italian language through her. She had learned to write at 3 ½ years old: off-the hook precocious and intelligent—by 14 she had finished reading all the childhood books and was well into her knowledge of adult writers, she spoke to me of Oscar Wilde, Herman Hess, and Pier Paolo Pasolini—a voracious reader, already well-versed and politically engaged in discourse of patriarchy and oppression. I, instead, had been speaking Italian only for four years. I was struggling to read a book cover to cover above 10th grade level. Her expressions allowed me to fall in love with this new language, passionate, fierce, alive, nuanced. I was raised in a working-class family—no one in my family spoke the language as she did. As we reengaged over dinner last night, spaghetti alla bottarga and red Taurasi wine—because I refuse to not have a full flavorful mouthful even when I eat fish—I remember listening to her speak for hours and me listening enchanted by the rhythm of her speech, the emotions that shined through the words, the poetry of her word choices.
Looking back with the wisdom of now—I no longer see myself as a lost little girl finding her way. I see a young writer who had discovered her love of language. I’m sad that I didn’t immerse myself in the written word, then—I could have begun devouring books as my friend did—books could have saved me sooner.
Yet, as often is, retrospective regrets make little sense. In fact, I struggled so much with the reading and writing of Italian in high school, textbooks waaaay above my reading level—that textbooks were all I had the time to devote myself to. I collected tons of books—but never found the actual time to read most them. One day…
My friend and I also reminisced to my piecemeal memories of our friendship then. Our talks about our conflictual families, our broken hearts, our status of perpetually out of place humans: troubled, tormented, and deeply alive.
We knew each other through the scouts. So, our reminiscing is more about walks in nature, interactions with our leaders, and each other, than actual high school. We have our criticisms, our disappointments, but also the values instilled in us: love of nature, community, folk music, and being essenziale “essential.”
“Essential” was a key value in the scouts. It was a clear distinction between what was needed and what was superfluous. The point was to use what was essential—not waste it and reduce the superfluous to a minimum. As a teenager, it had me become acutely aware to what I actually needed—the essential, versus the shiny objects that would be cute to own, but would take time to earn, keep, protect. It also carried a corollary principle that I still live by: People are more important than things. I aim to never let a relationship deteriorate over things, people come first.
It’s a peculiar sensation, revisiting these values now—after a year of reducing my life to the bare bones to make space for writing, healing, and recovering a part of my life that I had set aside. Being essential is still an important way I live—choosing to not surround myself with shiny objects, valuing my time more than things, gestures and relationships more than gifts, words of affirmation instead of demonstrations of status.