smiling with tears in my eyes

Before I left for Italy, I remembered what Daniel told me when I was staying in his and Mary’s house in New Jersey after my trip to Madrid fell apart. He said, “We humans tend to procrastinate joy a lot, saving it up for the future. We think we’re doing ourselves a favor, but what we really are is just lazy.” I packed those words with me to Siena, and I vowed that this time, it’d be different. I would throw myself into every joyful moment and break my cycle of saving up happiness for some future version of me who might never come around to claim it. I stopped procrastinating my life… but I did procrastinate all of my schoolwork.

In Italy, I realized we deserve to feel happiness now, just as we are. You don’t always have to be striving towards some idealized version of you. The world has plenty of gentle, sweet offerings for current you to take. And it’ll produce more of them tomorrow, next month, ten years from now. The choice is yours to lean into the joy of today, to trust that it will come back to you, that you can’t use it up.

Touchstones I encountered on the last few days of my trip:

Horse trials and neighborhood dinners where the whole city came alive. Tables of men erupting into song and harmonizing for hours on end.

Lightning and super moons and sunsets seen between buildings.

*Watching a storm roll in at the piazza*

Roommates grabbing drinks at Bar il Palio or Nanini one last time.

Overlooking the city and thinking about the life we’ve built.

Lauren and her SpongeBob balloon, and the night we took advantage of the student discount at the bar with the University of Oregon flag.

Two attempts at the Palio.

*Before the Palio, with ribbons in our hair. We had no idea what was about to come.*

*After scrambling around the city trying to find a way to enter the race, we got caught in a torrential downpour.* *The bearded man in the back’s face is how I was feeling.*

*We got there four hours early, so we played heads up to pass the time*

*Katie & I squeezed hands the entirety of the race because we were so nervous*

The cathedral filled with flags and song.

The realization that two girls were born a day apart at the same hospital, only to find each other again in Italy, taking every day by storm.

Smiling with tears in my eyes, feeling happy and sad at the same time.

Running into our professor eating outside, thanking him with words and gifts and Instagram follows.

Bringing pieces of Siena home with me.

In “The greatest,” Lana del Rey sings, “I miss doing nothing the most of all.” I get what she means now. I also miss doing nothing. I miss the days and nights where we were all in one room, sardines packed into beds and spilling out onto the balcony. I miss Maeve’s and my runs to Conad where we’d pick up popsicles or fig newtons and give them to our friends we found in the hallway. I miss the times I’d sit on our balcony after hanging up laundry to dry, letting the voices of nuns and daylight wash over me. Those small, in-between moments—the events that seem so inconsequential at the time—those are the things that make up a life. They are bridges that connect the gaps big moments leave in their tracks. They are nothing, and they are everything, and they’re what you remember most when you look back on at a chapter that has come to a close.

I left Siena in a hurry: pulling an all-nighter to leave the hotel at 4 in the morning, walking thirty minutes outside the city walls on cobblestones while lugging my 50 pound suitcase, hopping on a train, then a tram, then three planes. As I walked through the city for the last time, I was mostly thinking of how I wished a taxi was getting me from the hotel to the train station instead of my legs. I didn’t give Siena the goodbye it deserved. So let me end with this:

thank you, &

I love you, &

you shaped me into someone new, &

you’ll be in my heart for a long, long time, &

I’ll be back. I promise.

Until we meet again,

Maya

smiling with tears in my eyes

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