Re-renaissance

Friday

It's snowing. It doesn't settle. Flakes collide with the windscreen and melt, trickling down in little streams that are blown off course as we speed up. 

In the airport. Waiting at the gate. A toddler runs up and gives me the uncanny look of recognition. She grins and stares at me intently, waiting for a response as though she's asked a question. Her mother comes and collects her. 'I'm sorry. She thinks you're someone she knows. But I'm not sure who you remind her of .' We laugh about it. She says it's never happened before. It must be because I have a kind smile. They take a seat a few rows away but the little girl keeps peering over her mother's shoulder to look at me. Her mum tries to stop her, but it's a losing battle. She's determined, and I almost feel like I'm letting her down. As though I should recognise her. That I really should know the answer.
It's the strangest thing, the look in her eyes. 

Over the Alps. A snowy Italian peak, peaking and peeking through the canopy of clouds. And now we descend back into the gloom of a wintry late afternoon. 

Sit in silence. I no longer chat to taxi drivers the way I used to. I'm thinking about that. Wondering if I've lost something, with age or the latest prolonged heartbreak. Wonder if I'll get it back. Wonder if it lessens me somehow, to be this closed-off. But I just don't have the heart for conversation right now. I'm comfortable in my silence. Back to being the observer. 

Tuesday 

The silence is loud. Surprising for digs in the heart of a city. But it's made louder by this cold. The ears that feel as though they are stuffed with cotton wool. Every heartbeat, every thud of my own step, an internal reverberation amplified by inflammations and fluids of the out-of-sorts sort. 

There is a cosiness to all this, too. My aching limbs, the shivers, curling up on the couch in this grand old apartment building. Once again I feel like a wounded animal that has crept off to some cave to recover out of sight. I snuck out of England, quietly, timidly. And I'm glad.

Thursday

The weather has turned. The wind blew all night, overturning plant pots and the cafe tables in the streets. But now it's as though we've skipped straight to high Spring. The sun pours down the long straight avenues, built so precisely by the Romans, and the scent of trees and citrus flowers fills the air. 

In a quiet piazza I take a seat and wait for the waitress. A huge medieval church, elegant even in its decay - perhaps more so because of it - casts a shadow over half the square. Green shutters on the yellow facades are opened. That beautiful language all around. And now here she comes, enquiring through her mask, and I order an espresso and a croissant and the unknowable secret of everlasting youth.

By the evening, my cold leaving me, my feet are aching from the many miles I have walked. Through the narrow alleys, past off-the-track drinking fountains and crumbling chapels and weathered benches of the old and the young, over bridges and through gardens and parks and colonnades of budding trees, around the clusters of tables and chairs of good food and great friends and sublime wine, I have walked and walked and walked. Cool ice cream on my tongue. A little music back in my heart. Even a little lust, now and then, as those Latin beauties pass me by. But the weight - the weight still with me. No less heavy, not yet. Sometimes cursing Saira out loud, then chastising myself for the unfairness of it. Sometimes ruing my crimes, and apologising to Nadya out loud. Chastising myself again for still being in my head. 

Open your eyes. Stop playing the old man. Look:

At the end of the street where I live for now, the distant snow-capped mountains stand, taller than everything and everyone in this city. And above them, the blue blue azure of cloudless sky. 

And even though it is still a little cold - still a little chill in the air, almost freezing at night - I can start to believe a change is going to come. 

Wednesday

Another day, another square, another coffee. My skin has begun to turn the golden brown that has always given me my best form. Made my eyes glow electric blue. Made me smell of summer. Made me into music. 

A troop of Italian schoolchildren march across the square, each with a cup of gelato in hand, each wearing a Juventus branded t-shirt. A teacher shouts instructions at them. They're excited. Laughing and squealing and not in the least concerned about whether the gelato gets into their mouths or on their cheeks and chins and t-shirts. I'm watching them with delight as Paola arrives. Ciao. 

Paola orders an espresso and immediately teases me for drinking an Americano. She begins to go through the local etiquette of eating, occasionally pausing to ask if I know the word for this or that, and have I been to this place yet, and have I eaten this dish yet? Lists of places I must visit, jokes about the English. And then Ukraine. And now we're lamenting the state of the world. And she's rolling a cigarette. And yes, thank you, roll me one too. 

I'm observing myself as much as I am her. This is a kind of test run. What kind of man am I going to be now? What kind of man am I capable of being, at this stage of my rebirth? Will I be more of my old self, here? Is the sun bringing me back to life? As Paola talks about her time arguing with racists in Lisbon, I'm both listening and thinking about the many various citrus plants I left in London. How they blossomed in the summer and filled the whole apartment with sublime scents. And how most began to die in the winter, the once glorious verdant lemon tree now a brittle skeleton with several rotting fruits still dangling from her limbs. There just wasn't enough sunshine and warmth in London to sustain that kind of life. 

We've been talking for two hours now and we're chain smoking. Paola's hair is dark and naturally curly, and she has several long braids that trail down her shoulders. Combined with her sun kissed skin and the little nose stud, the expert rolling skills and bohemian clothes, she has the look of a gap year traveller. This is exactly what I'm going for, she jokes. She's funny, and she's smart, and she's pretty, and she's kind. 

I wonder what kind of man I will be. And I'm watching to see if I'll try to flirt. If I'll remember how. But I don't even get the urge. And that feels like a form of progress. Like my new superpower. Watching all the addicts getting high and taking pleasure in not needing to. Conceit, most likely this is. All my apparent restraint is probably an artefact of heartbreak. But for now at least it's good not to be a sleazy prick; not to need the affirmation of a woman's want. To be human with humans. 

After three hours I return home. The setting sun sends glorious golden rays all the way along these perfectly straight avenues. It's close to 6 and soon every cafe and restaurant will be filled again, the streets glistening with the orange of aperol spritz in the sunset, the walls echoing laughter and the reassuring hum of human society, alive again.

Friday 

It's twenty-six degrees celsius and the winter of last week is a distant memory.  I'm by the river. Saira, if you can hear me, I'm alive and in heat, and I'm down by the river. 

Of course, Saira cannot hear me. Will not hear me. And I am still only just alive. But there is vibrant green all about me - trees and bushes and lawns and parks - and the bright blue of the sky and the gentle trickle of flowing water, the hushing of fountains, the crooning of unfamiliar Italian pop from the speakers of the teenagers, gathered in circles on the little hills and slopes by the water. And all of this adds up to something, in my head. It's a resuscitation, a further proof of life, the gradual reconstruction of a broken face that is now beginning to show something recognisable. I remember him. I remember this man, who was born in the summer, and walked with sorrow in the sunshine, made love with sorrow in the morning hours, wept and elated with the girls of gold. I remember this old fool, this young clown, this legend, this act. How I've missed him. Get this man a gelato. 

And so as I inhale the gelato in the sunshine, delirious amid wafts of perfume and tobacco and flowers and trees, I have convinced myself of two absurdities. 

One: that this country has the power to restore my heart. The music, and the scent of my skin.  

Two: that to live on and to live beyond the heartbreak, I have to be reborn exactly as I was before I had a heart.