Helps to visit churches and museums when it’s hot out during the day because it’s cooler inside and then walk around the city when it’s cooled down outside in the evening.

Skipped a walking tour in favor of the museum featuring the history of Dante’s life, plus a church that houses a tomb (or at least a shrine) of Beatrice.

I’ve never read past the first canto of The Divine Comedy but I think I would like to try to read it again.

Feeling nostalgic for staying in youth hostels alone with one (1) backpack and walking every day until my feet hurt.

At a homestead in Tuscany they gave us a four course meal. Cheese and bread, pasta and sauce, vegetables and chicken, bite of pastry for dessert. There was also a tour of the house (old and expensive), a mention of the history of people visiting to hunt wild boar on the grounds, a lesson on how to make pasta from scratch, and a wine tasting. Tasted four different red wines from their vinyard and winery.

I felt hot and overstuffed and out of place among a different class of people and unfortunately kind of tipsy. Have sobered up now.

Lots of time spent on the road in a bus full of other people. Have been trying to read.

The hills are pretty.

I don’t have a chef’s knife.

The place where we’re staying is lovely. The kitchen was actually furnished well when we got here – soap, towels, pots and pans, plates and bowls, glasses, mugs, cutlery, a wooden spoon, even a moka pot for coffee. But they didn’t have a cutting board or a chef’s knife or a sponge. Managed to pick up three out of four of those things at the public market across the street.

I’ve been using a sarrated steak knife. Not easy to mince garlic with those things.

I made fettuccine with garlic, asparagus and parmesan for lunch. Wanted mushrooms or spinach. Didn’t have those. Also wanted this carbonated lemonade drink that’s popular here but didn’t have the motivation to walk over to get it from the café across the street.

greatful for

• somewhere to rest in the shade when it’s too hot outside. the room with the electric fan. the crossbreeze between open windows.
• cold water
• espresso
• something good to read
• a cool place to lay down and take a nap
• waking up from pleasant enough dreams after a rough night

my mind’s been doing that thing it does, again

when that feeling of knowing that every good, safe, loving connection is real and solid kind of – withers.

I have been spiraling at night, unable to sleep

trying to stay numb during the day

thinking theyhatemetheyhatemetheyhateme

for no good reason

every time any miniscule thing goes wrong during my day.

I am smart enough now to try and maintain a hermeneutic of suspicion

re: the crooked reasoning based on evidence cherry picked to support this one specific conclusion to which the pathways between thoughts and emotions have grown attatched over the years.

why does it do that

why do I do that

for what purpose.

I know that my mind returns to this mood, this place, when I am tired.

and I am tired.

I try to concentrate on the good memories

of everyone. of all of them.

the other familiar mood to which I have been returning lately has to do with, like –

wanting to run away.

wanting to crumple up the paper with the shoddy work in progress with all of the mistakes on it and start over

(even if it was actually rather good.)

this one is more difficult to describe.

no matter how good my life is, I keep thinking –

I could have had a different life.

one where I was slightly more free, or independent, or adventurous, or lonely, or any of the things that I always wanted to be or knew that I was but hadn’t fully gotten around to becoming yet because those things take time and what if I miss out on all of it because of the specific direction that my life appears to be going, now

and is this just what it’s like to be in my 20s?

I try to focus on the things that I like about the way my life is.

I try to remember that there’s time. and I’m not trapped. and none of it’s ever going to stop changing whether I like it or not.

after all this time writing still helps me.