it’s your problem free, philosophy.
(via liveyourlifewithstyle)
(Source: conflictingheart, via onehappyhippie)
<3
(via fuckyeahtattoos)
Go be that starving Artist you’re afraid to be. Open up that journal and get poetic finally. Volunteer. Suck it up and travel. You were not born here to work and pay taxes. You were put here to be part of a vast organism to explore and create. Stop putting it off. The world has much more to offer than what’s on 15 televisions at TGI Fridays. Take pictures. Scare people. Shake up the scene. Be the change you want to see in the world. You’ll thank yourself for it.
—Jason Mraz (via brknrrs)
(via ladyinwaiting)
There I just said it, I’m scared you’ll forget about me
Tonight for dinner, my dad and I had a tomato and basil salad, grilled eggplant, and roasted peppers, parmesean cheese, and Italian bread. I bought Nutella and croissants today, and even found the type of long, yellow melon Zio cut up after dinner so many times. It was almost as if I never left.
Except I have. And that realization hit me more times that I would have thought today. I cried, the first real cry I have had since being in America. I cried not because I am home, I love home. I cried because they aren’t with me. I didn’t cry because I am not happy to see my family here, I cried because I left my family in Italy.
I don’t mind the crying though. It means I’m still feeling. I am afraid of the day when I don’t think about Italy and cry, either tears of sadness because I left, or of happiness remembering the bliss that was my summer. I want to keep remembering. And when I do, I want it to mean something. I don’t want my summer to be reduced to a “Ciao Bello!” on Facebook chat, or a nostalgic sigh flipping through my photo albums.
I’m scared of normal, because when things go back to normal, I go back to being too busy to think, my cousins sit at the dinner table without thinking of me. I take a train to Boston without thinking of Italy, and Giuseppe drives to the beach without remembering how I looked in the front seat. I don’t want to forget, and I don’t want to be forgotten.
Maria Rosa sent a text right after I left Vazzano: Whenever you miss Vazzano, raise your eyes, and remember, we are all under the same sky.
Va bene, bella mia. I just hope I don’t trip.
It’s a funny thing, absence. It literally means lack of something. Nothing where something once was. It isn’t tangible, and therefore shouldn’t have any weight. And yet it does.
I am carrying the absence of my family on my shoulders. It is heavy. It is comprised of the best, and the worst of each member. It includes the town of 800, and a city of thousands. It pushes my heart into my stomach, and leaves tears where mascara once was. Absence colors my cheeks red, and rings in my ears as my aunt says “enjoy all of your life.”
The lack of passionate dinner conversation sits heavy on my tongue, my mouth now silent. My joints ache, longing for walks around Vazzano. My hands hang at my sides, motionless, lacking anothers’ hand or head of hair to ruffle. Absence reaches all the way to my feet, now heavy and loud, once quiet and quick as I silently stepped behind my cousin, dousing him with water.
It lives in the distance between me and Vazzano, me and Zia, and Zio, Giuseppe, Domink, the Maria Rosas. It is the ‘fog inside the glass around my summer heart.’
Absence isn’t tangible, and doesn’t weigh anything, and yet it is the only thing on my mind.
I SEE MARTA TODAY!!!
Flying to Milan from Lamezia at 9:20 tonight, landing in Milan at 11, and heading for a 2 hour drive to Veneto to bella mia’s house.
I haven’t seen Marta in 4 years. This is going to be awesome.
