To Root Elsewhere

a meditation on transition

September 14th, 2024

Today has been the first day in the last three that I have awoken before midday.

The amount of traveling I have been doing had me lost in time, unable to accommodate to a new time zone. I have been feeling drained, sad, tired— in a lot of physical pain from the end of a new cycle.

My dreams have been speaking of a past long gone— of those ‘unfulfilled dreams,’ and goodbyes to others, to myself, to what no longer is present.

Today I walked through a cemetery in Turin. Every one of the tombstones, the pillars, and spaces the deceased hold has a picture. Of each face gone, of the smiles of those who lived, the eyes that shone for each soul that is now set free. Black and white, some color. Of the aged and the young, each with a recognizable face, a familiarity. The way they are remembered by those who know them, and as for me, a way to know that I am walking in a space that still lives and breathes life.

It made me think of the materiality we try and give death— turn the abstraction into cemented rooms, the grief into bouquets of flowers, the Love into frequent visits and cleaning the spaces for the dead to rest. But where is it we truly lay?

Where will my soul dissipate to after the body becomes soil? The soil in which we are buried is us, the wind that blows autumnal leaves, the sun that brings us warmth. Isn’t there where we stay?

In it all,

around the crowded spaces,

unseen,

in the quiet night.

Photo by Lana Todosiychuk on Unsplash

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I’m coming into the realization of how much of my own life has changed in a few years.

I am still grieving what I had to let go of,

the people I lost,

the places I once knew.

It’s been two years since I graduated college.

It feels shorter than that because I am still unsure of where I stand as a ‘working’ adult.

It’s been more than three years since my last relationship.

And I’ve still loved, and I still want Love to be in my life because I know what it feels like to love someone for all they are.

I just want to make sure, this time, that they want to love me for all that I am too.

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My sister has grown. She’s seen pain, loneliness in the working, moving world. She knows more than I can teach her. I somehow feel younger and naïve. Still figuring my shit out, moving around attempting to define my place in the world.

Italian dining with Maria (my little wise sister)

The next months bring plenty of movement for me;

change of scenery, learning, trusting, just to keep moving forward because I must— I must take the bus, I must catch that plane and hop on the next train. I must walk miles with my belongings at my back. I am not afraid to fall no more.

All those dreams and scripts, unwritten books, and unfinished stories I wanted to tell, I am somehow still telling them; they’re just different. They come from a place of play, knowing I can write them not for anyone, simply for the pleasure of creating something,

injecting joy into my heart and hopefully those of others.

I am willing to take new and old risks,

I tell myself I am ready; to commit to a new life, a new place, permitting to root elsewhere. To finish projects, to build relationships, to make somewhere feel like it could be there and nowhere else— for now.

For a moment. For longer than a moment,

to be a time for me to look back on in five years and know that it lasted enough to still evoke feelings in a decade.

To know that I will be able to remember it vividly, and feel again what it felt like to be in it then.

To all the wanderers and nomads,

May you also allow yourself to root elsewhere in your life and find home to be not here, nor there, but a bit in everywhere. in You.