I don't feel like going into backstory here, so forgive me for diving in without much explanation.
May it suffice to say that:
- I just went through a surprising, traumatic breakup with a man I thought was my future husband
- I almost booked a television role that would have changed my life in a major way, and I cannot talk about it because I'm still under a Non-Disclosure Agreement
- and everything else that's affecting everyone else in negative ways right now, which we're generically blaming on the year 2020
Twice in a week, the book "Eat, Pray, Love" was recommended to me. I'd heard of it, but never seen the movie or read the book. So I decided, hey, maybe I should get the audiobook and start listening to it on my hikes. (I recently hiked 32 days in a row... and am now 32 days into a meditation journey...)
I wrote the following email to a relationship coach that had recommended the book to me:
"Hey Kate,
I decided to download the audiobook of Eat, Pray, Love and listen to it on my hike, since you had mentioned it.
In the opening, Elizabeth Gilbert mentions that each section will have 36 chapters, and that she is in her 36th year of life. As I am currently in my 36th year (age 35, and turning 36 in October), it felt like now was the perfect moment to read this book. Like it was a sign.
In chapter 12, she starts to describe the statue in her favorite fountain in Rome.
I studied abroad for a semester in Rome in the fall of 2003, and I had the brief thought of “I wonder if I’ll recognize it,” but quickly brushed that aside. There are just so many statues and so many fountains. In fact, in 1995, my family Christmas photo was in front of one of the fountains in Villa Borghese in Rome, and when we went back in 2015 with the hope of recreating the photo, we couldn’t find that fountain even though we knew where to look for it. That’s how many fountains there are.
But as she described the fountain, I listened in disbelief. She spoke of a bronze family, with parents holding each other’s wrists, while their child sat on their arms eating grapes. She was describing the very statue that my brothers and I had posed in front of, and then couldn’t find.
I listened 3 times, shocked, before I let myself move on. The next thing she said was, “It was early September of 2003. I had been in Rome for four days...”
I got to Rome the last week of August, 2003. Elizabeth Gilbert was in Rome writing what would become “Eat, Pray, Love” during the same three months that I was living there.
It felt like a sign. And I wanted to tell you.
~A~"
And, well, I wanted to tell more than Kate.
And I remembered this beautiful time in my life when I used to write to strangers on the internet, and tell them everything that was going on in my life.
And while I'm quite certain that no one, literally no one, has looked at this blog in many years, and all of the blog aggregators we used to use to follow each others' lives have tumbled into dormancy...
I still thought of this. And decided to write it here.
Because even if you're not reading it, I needed to write it. And even though most of my own life is now documented through facebook posts and instagram stories, and those are sure to be ignored by future generations in place of whatever rises up to replace TikTok and SnapChat...
Well, I missed this. So here, I write. If not for posterity, then at least for sentimentality.
And maybe for luck.
May you all be alright, and may you be following the omens, wherever you may be.
~A~
