Sunsets, Red Wine and Love Bombing.
There’s a thing that I don’t really do anymore. Not like I used to. I don’t drink, much. I don’t enjoy being drunk anymore. The idea of a hangover lurks over me like a Tim Burton-esque shadow every time I’m given a glass of anything else than sparkling water with lime. Also, I like feeling good. Lately I’ve been associating feeling good with feeling healthy and I would say that it’s my standard default setting. I make the best choices I can when it comes to food, I sleep as much as necessary, I stay active, I nurture and cherish my relationships (the ones that matter), I pet all the dogs and sing to all the babies. I would consider myself a healthy individual all round. This is coming from someone who smashed shots of tequila like it was nothing. I remember when I used to work in the events business and would have 20+ hour shifts. Starting a job at 8 am and making it to 2 am has a very specific effect on your body. You’re tired, yes, but you’re a variety of different things. A mix of exhaustion, desperation, hatred and excitement. At 2 am, after you’ve given the best of yourself, you start pouring yourself shots with clients and beers with other just as “lost-in-life” colleagues until closing the bar at 7 am because you’ve reached a whole new level of “fuck it”. Safe to say I’ve got some experience under my belt. Yet taking alcohol out of the equation has been surprisingly easy.
Coming back to Europe as my new sober self has been confusing. The me that lived here five years ago was one that never turned down a drink. The people that stayed knew this Sara. So who the fuck is this? Was a question I had to start answering. One night I dipped into old habits which served to remind me why I changed. It was fun, don’t get me wrong. I was in great company. People from a past I forget I lived sometimes. Great memories are harbored in these groups of people. What I love about being sober in this particular moment is the fact that I can finally enjoy the person I’m with. I listen. I care. I empathize. I’m no longer waiting to relate to something so that I can speak. I want to know everything about the person in front of me. Being with people and really loving to be with them even after so much time had past was one of the most rewarding feelings I’ve ever had the pleasure to live.I mean I already told you how people are fucking amazing!
Meeting people is one of my favorite things to do. Learning a new life story, perspective, moral standing, interests makes my pupils dilate. As I was feeling the reverse culture shock quite strongly I thought that maybe a couple of low intensity dates would help with the process. I thought that the opportunity of meeting people from my surrounding area to help settle into my new-old home would do me some good and also maybe give me some content for the blog. I was greeted by some curious characters. It had been a while since I’d been in the company of people that had never really left their hometowns. Italians are lovers of details, of luxuries and extra’s. There’s a reason why the idea of the “dolce vita” or “bella vita” is a concept that was born here, the century old Boot. This proclivity is something I never understood. It always confused, at times out right frustrated me, how much attention people payed to the smallest things. “How useless”, I would tell myself. “How unnecessary”. “How Italian”. When it’s the particular and not the ensemble that interests you it makes it rather easy to never feel the need to explore and navigate the world. Why would you? Minute traits are so easy to change and shift. It’s enough to keep you busy. It’s enough to keep you there. And let me tell you, Italy has some stunning details. In any direction you turn there’s the opportunity of falling in love. No other country has this. It took an encounter with one specific young man to make me appreciate this nature. A joy towards my roots. Something I carried somewhere inside some compartment of my confused national identity.
Being guided through narrow cobbled streets, medieval city walls and parks, views of curving wheat hills and loud voices even though so foreign for whatever reason made me feel at home. Watching the Italian sunset over Tuscan hills and sitting in the colors it left behind felt so warm even though the cutting air told my body otherwise. The lights went out, the temperature went down and the night sky started to creep up above our heads. This of course means one thing, especially in Italy, dinner time! And what dinner is not complete without a good glass of wine? I could never drink and eat. It was my opinion that alcohol simply denies the taste of food. Why do it? That evening I understood something. It was never about what the wine does to you, it’s about what the wine represents. It serves as that extra, that luxury, that detail. Drinking in Italy is that adoration towards the unnecessary that in many ways makes the italian individual who they are. At least, in part. Feeling the love towards the particular moved me. So I had another glass. That I couldn’t finish because I’m too much of a lightweight at this point.
Before a drink served a purpose. Get. Me. Fucked up. It did a very good job of it and I had a bunch of great times. Today it’s like wearing earrings or putting on make-up. It’s a plus. Something which is at it’s core is meaningless. But it adds. Everything is already there, you can move on happily from there but what makes it hedonistic is the gurgling noise of the red liquid flooding into your glass. And who doesn’t want to indulge in hedonism every now and again?
There’s something about watching the sun rest over a landscape I had been denying for years that gave me back part of who I was. There’s something other than the percentage on the bottom left corner of a bottle of red that makes it more than a buzzing background noise. As someone with no identity it was nice to feel like sunsets and glasses of wine are two new pieces of a puzzle that make up my self.
Oh, wait. You wanna know about the love bombing part hey? Well, here’s what I’ll say. Love bombers are a very common reality here. A typical Love-bomber’s M.O. is: they’ll wave a palm leaf over you, feed you grapes of compliments, surrender to your ego and make you feel like a Roman goddess. Okay, goddess is a bit much, but high royalty for sure. Especially if you’re not accustomed to it. And then, once they’ve gotten what they want, which sometimes isn’t necessarily sex but validation, they’ll disappear. Italians are notorious for their charms. This isn’t at all accidental. Italian women are notorious for being impossibly difficult to charm. So developing skills to penetrate that hard emotional exterior is in many ways necessary. It was rather apparent that this was this particular individual’s aim yet they were so good at what they were doing that I had a moment of doubt. Let’s say there is no more doubt and this person closed the scene to his show without getting what he wanted in return.
Until next week,
Sarita.
