The Long Trip Home: Archives

I am finishing up on the computer, checking email, and Erin and Corrie come back with lunch. They have bottled water and sandwiches for each of us that they bought at the small store down from the Scalette in one of the piazzas we always pass on the way to classes. I had been there myself a few times to pick up cheese or wine. It is a small place, stuffed tightly into a corner building with sunshine seeping through the window blinds. The nonni who work there make these great fresh sandwiches on order. Erin and Corrie bring me a cheese and tomato sandwich on dense crusted bread. I don't know what kind of cheese it is, but it is bound to be fresh and good. They each have prosciutto or another kind of sliced meat on their sandwiches, and I can smell the thickness of the store on them still. Erin hands me my sandwich and water. I close the email I've just finished reading and stand up, hungry. An eager student behind me takes the chair as I leave it.

We decide to head to the roof to sit and eat and watch the city. It is right around noon on a weekday, and we have nothing important to do now that classes are over. We are in the local library, and it dawns on us that maybe we can find a way upstairs. We have been to the library's roof before, our first few days in Macerata on a three day city tour, and Erin thinks she remembers the way. I don't; those first days were a blur of sights and sounds that seem so distant now that I've had three months living here. So Erin leads us. We walk quietly through empty hallways and past sunlit white rooms, looking for the staircase that leads up to the roof. The library is large and spacious at its entrance, but inside it is a maze of smaller rooms stacked against each other. It seems as if there are no books at all but just endless walls. Each room is bright white and practically identical to the next, with only minor differences. The windows, perhaps. Or the floor. They remind me of hospital rooms.

We wander through hallways until Erin finds the way to a small staircase ascending abruptly to a large wooden door. Soon we are standing up there, in front of the door. Through the small window you can see the sunshine melting the clouds above the roof. The door is unlocked. On the roof it is bright and warm and comfortable. It is drenched with sunshine, and we are amazed that we can manage this in Italy: sitting on the roof of the library in a small town as we eat our lunch. We laugh about it and open our sandwiches. Mine is perfect; the cheese has melted a little into the tomato, and everything tastes new. We sit around, eating and thinking to ourselves, enjoying the feel of the cool April air.

We begin talking about what it will be like without me. I sigh, consider them and nod. We are silent for a few moments, speaking with sad faces. In a week I am going home to Indiana and they will still be here in bella Italia, eating lunch on the rooftop and watching the town drift below them. I am jealous, I tell them. I don't mention that I still long for home, for my family and my boyfriend and everyone back at school. It's understandable, I think. Continuing to eat my sandwich, I feel lonely all of the sudden. I look out at mountains you can only see on clear days and at a landscape of tiled terra cotta roofs side by side, stretching across the sky. I smile and mention to Erin and Corrie how amazing this view is, as if they do not realize it themselves. But maybe they do not, so we all stop and take a minute to breathe in the view, taste it. It is that time of day when the heat does not overwhelm you yet, and you can just enjoy it. I know there have been days like this throughout the past three months, but today is different. The clouds move over the town as if they are guarding it, holding in all of the beauty of this one moment. I smile, happy. Today my eyes are wide open.