In Which An Old Friend Comes To Visit

Turin, Piedmont, Italy

Doug, one of my dearest friends from the first weeks of high school, came to stay in Turin for three days. Only a few days before his arrival, something big and terrible hit me square in the gut, rendering me lethargic and hopeless: homesickness, like I'd never seen before. This wasn't the nostalgia I felt at the end of high school, the sixes and sevens I felt when I studied abroad, nor the identity crisis I felt when I moved to Colorado for college. This was a pure, opaque longing for my home, for my own bed in a sunny room in Berkeley, California; for my mother's voice, my father's embrace, and familiar footsteps in the other room; for a panoramic view from Arlington Boulevard, and a 510 area code. It was the realisation that, for all my romantic desire to live abroad and meet the world, I actually do belong in the Bay Area among my family and friends. This realisation manifested itself into nausea, loss of appetite, and extreme fatigue. I cried in the shower, and at night. Being with the kids got increasingly difficult, and after two days with no sleep I thought it would never get better.

Then Doug showed up on a night train from Milan, my tall, solid, American friend with sturdy walking boots, deep voice, square jaw, and glimmering cache of shared memories. He expected nothing more from me than a panoramic view from one of the city's highest spots (the tippy top of the Mole Antonellia/National Cinema Museum) and as many, or few, hours I could spare from my normal work schedule. We ventured into one of Torino's "Irish Pubs" (a.k.a. brewery for English-speaking tourists) for a couple of pints of beer and lots of gossip about high school friends. We hugged a lot, walked a lot, as I showed him the city I'm trying to call my own. And in the courtyard of a palace, despite the passage of more than one elderly tour group, he shouldered the weight of my heartache just long enough for me to catch my breath and muster up the strength to go on. All I needed, it seemed, was someone who knew me well to remind me that this coming here to Torino so soon after graduation wasn't necessarily a bad decision for which I should blame myself, but a hard decision. Choosing to do something difficult doesn't mean that I made a bad choice. He reminded me of some of the other hard things I've done in my life, and asked me to tell him about why I wanted to do it in the first place. Aren't I learning a lot about myself, he asked, about the Italian culture and language? Aren't I living with a family that indeed cares about me, and using skype and email to keep in touch with the ones across the world? Yes, wiping away my tears, yes, I'm doing all of that. It just feels like forever, I said, feeling small. It's just hard sometimes. And we hugged again and again until I sent him off on a train towards Florence with a little brown paper bag lunch. The day he left, I slept all night for the first time in five days. I could breathe again. Three days later marked four months, one third of a year, since I had landed in Torino, and the remaining eight that had looked so incredibly long seemed briefer.