I melted…again

There are few thunderstorms in Rome, but when they come, they take you by surprise like a nuclear bomb. There I was, alone on the outskirts, in the borgate -- the ugly half-slum suburbs, in a cheap fenced-in garden apartment. Empty, alone. It was about midday when it struck. Boom -- the walls resounded. I just knew that all of Rome had been nuked in one stroke -- couldn’t assume that sound at 11:30 am could mean anything else. The whole earth was shaking and held out for several seconds. Then silence. There was no telephone, no television, only the fast-approaching rain to tell me what was going on.

Every once in awhile, I still hear it. Sometimes it comes in the middle of the night and wakes me, lulling me back to sleep with the hum of the rain. Then, half asleep, I am re-aroused by subsequent sonic booms growing further and further distant. Here and now, in this moment, I long for that earth-shattering-ness, that cacophonous reminder of something real but which cannot be seen, only heard (sentito) and felt (sentito) -- sensed. Hung over, I have the heat, the chills, the need for a hot bath where there is only a small, mouldy stall shower. Some thunder would do me good right now, sucking me into the vortex and out of this coal-blackness.

Nonna always said, learn to love the longing, it is the best thing yet -- and it’s true; after the longing comes something much darker, uglier, more frightening. Like entropy itself, it is always moving, pushing urgently toward something ahead in the shadows, unseen and just out of reach but near enough to make the hairs prick up on the back on your neck. This is the fun part, she says, yet I can’t help feeling that here we are all crashing down together, this ship of fools, in our own personal electric storms of longing without peace, save for maybe a few seconds each day when we re-create the glory of Rome all on our own, before the tugging begins all over again and we know intimately that this place is no longer the center of the universe.

Seems a bit carrot-and-stick, but then so ultimately does life.