Just a Tuesday

Nothing special about today but that I am awake, have no pain in my body, my mind is pretty clear, the air outside the open window is crisp and the view of the forest and overarching mountain behind the apartment is as green and stunning as ever. I'm baking loaves of zucchini bread, which no one around here is familiar with, oddly enough, so I bake it to share with all the sweet, elderly neighbors in this beautiful ancient building. My fiance is at work and as is usual most days, I am here in his, our, place by myself. I left my home in Tucson in June to stay here in Italy with Massimo for a planned six months. This is my fourth time here since we got together in 2007. Being apart and skyping, texting, phoning is so difficult and frustrating after a while and we miss each other--the daily ache of being without. So, I am here again, for the longest visit yet. On certain days I feel like running "home" again...but here is home too now, so where to go? I'm sure many people would shriek about my not being blissfully content in Italy, of all beautiful, perfect places in the world. And I think that of myself at times too. But I haven't learned to speak Italian, yet, and I'm shy, so sometimes being in a foreign land like this strains me to breaking. On the days I wake up covered in insecurity and self-judgement, like a sheen of sweat from a bad dream, I suffer terribly. I believe everything I think. Everything I do and try is wrong, a tentative move to, say, buy The International Herald Tribune at the local newsagent is flubbed: I don't know where to put my money, because there is a little curved platform on the counter but some people use it to pay, some to pick up their change; how many times do I say "Ciao" as a greeting (one seems customary) and how many times as a farewell (three seems typical)? I'm an idiot, awkward fool, nervous and neurotic...my thoughts plague me, the voice of doubt in my head is so loud I can't hear myself, I can't leap over and away from it and I shrink smaller and smaller. Usually I return to the apartment and keep myself inside, where I feel OK. I know this isolating looks weird. And poor Massimo worries about me, I know. Who wants to be with someone so unadventurous, so scared?

And then there is this: it doesn't matter. Not the doubts, the fumbling, the not knowing, my lover's worries, not speaking Italian or not wanting to go out of the house. Not even having just burnt the bread because I was so busy with this...Not one part of it matters so long as I am simply accepting what is. Accepting the mistakes, the desire to flee, the need to hide...My thoughts are not real. Why should I assume that they are? There is nothing empirical about thoughts. And maybe, (and this is a work in progress) thoughts aren't the point of anything in this life, in spite of the fact that most of us make them the center of who we are and what we do. Every time I dwell on my suffering thoughts, I suffer more. After forty-four years, I'm not interested in yet more twisting in the wind and this conclusion of "it doesn't matter" is something which is helping me enormously to be willing to get up and live inside just another Tuesday with some little bit of peace.