It has been nearly four weeks now since I made the jarring transition back to real life and to tell the truth it hasn’t really gotten easier. At times in that ephemeral, split-second eternity between asleep and awake I still find myself expecting to catch the muffled sounds of Campo, vendors crying their wares, tourists clearly distinguishable by their overloud English, and fifth, photographic appendage, a customer haggling over the price of oranges or apples. Expectation turns to confusion and confusion to disappointing realization as the only thing that reverberates against my ears is the soft snoring of my roommate and the occasional car driving by.
I have found that it is difficult to rationalize the rapid replacement of lifestyles and so the experience is tinged with an altogether surreal quality. I am occasionally overwhelmed by the feeling that Rome was merely a dream; the notion aided by the static character of home life, which creates a temporal illusion that no time has passed during my fantastic adventure, a feeling often experienced accompanying dreams. When I give myself over to this emotion I am often confronted by the contrary notion that perhaps it is Seattle that is my delusional city and that I have only to awake to once again find myself in the Eternal City. Yet previous experience tells me differently.
It is altogether disconcerting to encounter the other members of our group out and about on campus, like seeing phantasmal characters from a movie or book actively participating in my everyday life, their connotations so heavily saturated by the shared experience of Rome that it is unnatural to witness them separated. I recently had the opportunity to sit down and have a reunion dinner with several of the group. Had someone came up and told me I was in Rome during that meal I might have been convinced so complete was my reversion. The brief interlude from academia that the meal provided only served to bring to the forefront all my feelings of surreality.
While I make no excuses for my extreme lack of punctuality regarding this final blog entry it has given me a rather unique perspective on it when compared with the other individuals (with the exception of Mr. Carlo). Time has been allowed to touch its weathered fingers to my temples and where once memories were sharp and vibrant, every detail important and duly noted, now a morning fog has rolled in. Everything has been allowed to settle, to precipitate, and through this process those memories deemed truly important, consciously or otherwise, have established themselves at the hierarchal lead.
So what stands out as the premier memory of Rome the previous times I began to write I was hung up on that memory being a place or a piece of art that I had seen and while there are certainly pieces and places aplenty that will remain hallmarks of the trip I recently realized that those will be there when I return, what makes this particular journey unique is the people I spent it with, with that in mind here is one of my more memorable accounts.
It was early in the program week 2 if I had to guess. The majority of the group was in the girls apartment socializing. I was having an intense discourse with Erika, as is not entirely unexpected when one talks to Erika, when we stumbled upon the concept of the spirit animal, an embodiment of one’s personality and soul in bestial form. After quick deliberation we agreed that she was an Orca and I was an Arctic Fox which if you know either of us shouldn’t have been too hard to guess. Having found our link to the natural world we solemnly took it upon ourselves to discover everyone else’s spirit animal, an attempt that lasted for the next few hours. Our obtrusive attempts at classification were greeted with a broad array of reactions from enthusiasm to indifference we were later informed that some even found the whimsical activity assuming and slightly offensive, I apologize this was not our intent. And that’s pretty much it, its not a flashy memory, nor particularly epic, in fact it is not even overtly attached to Rome, it could have happened anywhere. But maybe that is what is important, it did happen in Rome, and it happened with a select group of entirely mismatched individuals, I suppose that is the very definition of unique.
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