A Florentine Affair
The chore of listening to him talk about how smart and bored of traveling he was would have been overwhelming if I couldn’t sneak glances at the Arno River’s glittering water straining under the oppressive Florentine sun. It was unbearably hot, and with each pompous tangent he exhaled more and more smoke until we were encased in an ever-increasing fog dense with more tobacco than I would have liked. It was worse than I thought it would be, but I also wasn’t there to enjoy myself, and so I continued to dutifully nod and let out small laughs on cue until he made a move to leave.
We walked down the street along the river, and while he pointed out a mansion his luxury real estate firm had just sold, I contorted my body away from his flirtatious touches on the back of my neck. We went to a café so he could get a coffee, and I chose to get an orange juice. I handed the cashier the absurd amount of five euros as he told me about how he might move to Luxembourg for his Master’s degree. A little later, he impressively found a way to shift the topic of conversation to an indictment of American racism. I continued sitting in the café chair, acutely aware of the drops of sweat slimily sliding down my skin.
My acquiescence to this date was motivated by a desire to re-establish an illusion of emotional control, which I had lost the night prior when my mother and I were helplessly sobbing on opposite sides of the bed following yet another explosive fight, reminding me once again that my feelings will always react to the words and actions of another before they listen to me. I needed to subvert the sensation of unworthiness and heartbreak I was drowning in by charming someone who I already had an ungenerous preconception of. If he believed me to be nothing more than the cute American girl who he had really been asking on the date, then my judgements of his arrogance and condescension would give me an illusory power. If he liked me more than I liked him, I would somehow have the upper hand.
Every time I levied another harsh judgment against him, I condemned myself ten times more for being judgmental, baselessly superior, and hollow. The ensuing numbness, born from an unbearable self-recrimination, served to protect me from confronting the true source of this desire to make myself unhappy: my life-long, confounding inability to live in close quarters with my mother without becoming involved in an earth-shattering argument. But if I knowingly repressed my true feelings, I could continue to intentionally do things that validated the perception she and everyone had of me anyway–– that of a girl pathologically unaffected, apathetic, angry, and temperamental. My emotionally destructive behavior would therefore inoculate me against what others thought of me, because I’d have already voiced thoughts more vile.
I’ve never had any power over how I felt, and I never will; a fact I helplessly know to be true of my relationships with the people I love and was increasingly becoming true of my relationships with strangers. Yet all I’ve ever seemed to learn is how to use people, like this pompous Italian, for my own corrupted self-aggrandizement.
When I finally left him, I wanted to cry for knowingly making myself feel worse again. I walked past the church of Santa Croce, stopping to marvel at the structure before having to avert my eyes from the sunlight its blindingly white and teal tiles reflected. I looked toward the stadium that had been constructed in the church’s plaza, which had hosted the championship game of the calcio storico tournament the night before. I wondered if any of the players, all of whom I imagined with faces bloodied from fighting the opposing team, ever looked up at the centuries-old building to push themselves to the end. I returned my gaze to the church, tilting my head so I could see the shape of its austere triangular rooftop against the endless blue of the clear sky, and I continued walking to the apartment where I was staying. I smoked a bowl, ate some ravioli, and watched Seinfeld.
When my mother walked through the door later, I wanted to tell her everything, but I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to. I don’t seem to know anything except for an emotionally exhaustive process I fool myself into believing illuminates a path towards a type of victory, even if all I’ve ever found at the end is the same persistent hurt.
Amazing