Hello from Zurich, Switzerland--
At 6 AM this morning, I woke up on a couch on the coast of Sicily and promptly plunged into the Mediterranean Sea, bathed in the warm rays of a pink-orange sunrise. I am now en route to the North Pole.
Thus concludes my 3-week stint of indulgence (the American word for “rest”) in France and Italy. I have been astounded by the hospitality of my hosts: savvy European twentysomethings who I haven’t seen since we studied abroad together in Spain nearly four years ago. The universe has thrown many things our way since then—a welcoming entrance into early adulthood amidst a global pandemic, for one—and the next time we’ll be able to reunite like this is unknowable.
I am happy, and I am sad. It’s wonderful to find a person or place that makes you want to linger for longer, after all. Indeed, we are creatures of the past and the future—always grieving the loss of one chapter and looking ahead to the next. When these moments hit us, we want to grasp on to them forever, to capture them between our palms, oblivious to the fact that in order for them to actually mean anything, we have to let them go.
We forget that there will again be times like these—people we will love and circumstances we will stumble into that lay beyond our most generous imagination—as long as we continue to put one foot in front of the other.
And so, for now, I will be grateful for friendship that endures time and distance. I will cherish our many conversations—a mix of English, Spanish, Italian, and French—on the sun-kissed beaches of Cap Ferret and cobbled streets of Céfalu. I will laugh at the scab on my right hip, proof of a drunken night e-scootering through Palermo’s lawless traffic.
And I will trust that our next adventure together is coming…perhaps sooner than we think.
***
A couple of weeks ago, riding high on a white-hot lucky streak after scoring some free housing in one of the nicest arrondissements of Paris (thank you so much--you know who you are), I ran into a girl I went to a Chicago house party with in 2019. Let’s call her Olivia.
I remembered being introduced to Olivia by a mutual friend, pseudonym Julian, as we all gulped down awful pineapple-mango Svedka before heading out into the thumping Windy City. She was 22 then, an uber cute Korean-American with artistic flare and tattoos that dotted down her right arm, standing tall with her wolf cut at a towering 5’1”.
I recalled bonding quickly with this girl three years ago, admiring her bookshelf, trying and failing to get into a sticky bar, and yielding the rest of the evening to IPA’s and cheap red wine back in some Evanston apartment. Alas, she had a boyfriend then.
But this time was different.
Weirdly, crazily, we found ourselves in Paris at the same time as Julian, too: a fortuitous replaying of the events from our first meeting, European-style.
From the sprawling vista at Montmarte, we watched as the vanishing sun gifted the City of Love with a different nature altogether, the volume of the metropolis tuned down while a muted collection of pinks, blues, and purples settled onto the skyline like a heavy, iridescent fog. We passed around a rolled cigarette and snacked on some good-pungent French cheese and encouraged each other through twentysomething lostness.
Maybe not so different from our peers in this strange, transitory phase of life, career and relationships were top of mind. Julian, having lived in Paris for nearly a year already, explained all of the ways that he felt his inherent Americana even more starkly in the face of his French boyfriend. Olivia commented on her now yearlong single status, how she wanted and was feeling ready for the real thing.
She caught a glimpse of her window of opportunity right then, looked up at me with those shining brown eyes, and asked with complete nonchalance:
“So what about you? Are you single?”
***
I attended the first wedding of my trip yesterday in Palermo: quite the milestone for a year on the road exploring marriage, relationships, and everything in between.
The wife-to-be, Cass, was a French 26-year-old woman, set to marry Giuseppe, a Sicilian man through and through. (Thank you again to my French friend and host, Lea, for getting me in the door. You won’t understand this reference, but you helped me to avoid reliving some post-traumatic who-do-you-know-here questioning from the many times I, a mere GDI, attempted to crash a frat party uninvited in college.)
In line with Catholic tradition, the service took place in a local church. It was ceremonial. It was beautiful. Vows were uttered in Italian and French from both the bride and the groom, perhaps as a way not only to express themselves in their most essential form, but also to communicate to the other person: We may not be from the same country or culture or kind, but I love you, and I’m willing to put in the work.
I met Cass for the first time only a couple nights prior and had never met Giuseppe until his big day, but their cross-cultural connection ignited my curiosity. I learned that Cass, as a respectful nod to Giuseppe’s more conservative family, had been studying with a priest over the past year to understand more about the role of a woman within a Catholic household.
I wondered what this must have meant to Giuseppe, whether Cass’ conversion was a dealbreaker or just a family-pleasing front. I wondered how Cass thought through this life-altering decision, how she reconciled modern feminist egalitarianism with orthodox gender expectation.
I wondered how they truly felt about each other. Whether they really thought of the other person as “the one," whatever that means, or if they were anxiously engaging in a game of social musical chairs, grabbing at the nearest adequate suitor to ensure that they wouldn’t be left standing alone in the end.
I wondered if they preferred a more intimate wedding instead of this spectacle of seemingly enormous pressure, balancing over a hundred varying degrees of closeness—from loved ones to total aliens like yours truly—gathered together to witness their public declaration of infinite togetherness.
I wondered what challenges these two strangers had already overcome to arrive with this very person in this very moment. All of the heartbreak. The yearning. The excitement. The disappointment.
Who knows where they came from? Who knows what obstacles still lay ahead? There are no neat answers to these messy questions, I don’t think. But perhaps therein lies the beauty of the thing; the future can be a terrifying cliff of unknowability, and yet, Cass and Giuseppe chose to jump off hand-in-hand.
And so, as they committed to one another in God’s presence speaking languages that escape this ignorant American, I stood there, moved and still.
***
“Hey I just finished the wedding,” I texted as I walked out of the church, subjecting myself and my borrowed suit jacket to the unrelenting strobes of simmering Italian summer.
“Ah how was it!!!” Olivia replied, marking our 12th straight day of messaging since we pecked goodbye in Paris.
I told her most of the truth—I was extremely happy for this freshly wed couple and sent them good energy for their journey. It seemed so crazy and miraculous and astonishing that two people could commit to each other till-death-do-us-part despite not knowing the path ahead.
“When you put it that way marriage sounds insane,” she remarked in blue chat bubbles. “What kind of insanity is so normalized hahah.”
I mean, she was right. I was all too familiar with the insanity gone wrong, glued to a front-row seat throughout my childhood to the occasionally catastrophic fallout of a tense, contemptuous partnership. If my individually lovely parents—who traversed the Pacific Ocean together in their late 20’s and built an entirely new life in the Chicago suburbs—couldn’t make it, honestly, who the hell did Cass and Giuseppe think they were?
If I am anything like the other children of the 50% of US marriages that end in divorce, weddings are an opportunity to feel joyfully teary and terribly cynical all at once. Some abandon the concept of long-term monogamous connection altogether, while others want it more than anything, hoping to learn from where their parents went wrong.
I admit, the lines are never quite so black and white. Standing there in the pews of a stuffy Sicilian church, not understanding a word, I cheered for these two strangers at the altar; I wanted them to score high on the test of time. And yet, in the deepest recesses of my mind, I couldn’t help but measure myself up to them, the enormous distance between our lives on full display despite only a couple of years in age between us.
Because there I was. Firmly planted in my mid-20's, exiting this ceremony of forever and always to DM my rent-a-girlfriend from Paris.
It’s not that I regret those dreamy mornings together sipping coffee along the Seine and people-watching from flowered balconies; not even a little. And it’s not that I worry about finding a partner.
Almost always, actually, I trust that our time on this earth unfolds for the best. That things will work out: not necessarily in the way that we foresee or want, but in the way that we need. That our lives intersect with the threads of others unpredictably, often circling each other for months or even years before becoming entangled and untangled and re-tangled, an event of phase-shifting magnitude just around the corner.
But sometimes, on my darkest nights of the soul, when my naturally rose-colored glasses fog up with gray, when I find myself getting bored and pulling away, I wonder if I will ever have what it takes to build a relationship that doesn’t fade.
Sometimes, I wonder if I’m damned to this liminal space of playing rent-a-boyfriend forever.
And sometimes, I wonder if it was ever meant for me.
“Yeah,” I texted back. “Maybe I’m just a romantic.”