Scattered Moments

I have moved from Via del Poeta to Rue de l’Ermitage.  (Both appellations are strangely fitting—consider it coincidence or not, your choice.)  In the past month, I have slept in nine different beds, only three of which I consider (or considered) mine.  I have traveled by plane, train, and automobile.  And bicycle.  I have lost and gained kilos.  I have used three different SIM cards[1].  (I think) I have dreamed in three different languages.  I have learned, forgotten, and remembered words.

Like last week at the station when I missed my train by one minute and had to ask a kind-looking businessman if I could borrow his cellphone to call my new landlady who was waiting to pick me up.  I was doing just fine, coaxing out a half-smile, perhaps by using the ten magic French words[2] I had faithfully memorized in my advanced conversation class four falls ago, when instead of “mon portable”,[3] I could only remember “il mio telefono”.[4]  Then, when I was reading off the phone number, I blanked on how to say 77 in French French and then tried to turn my Italian 77 into a Belgian French 77.  Needless-to-say, that patient businessman had no idea what number I was trying to read.

All of this is new, bright, and exciting.  I love all the different sounds and syntaxes and the puzzle of arranging them in just the right way.  (In the end, I did successfully contact my landlady.)  I love the different pastries.  I love trying on the different rhythms of daily life, and I’m quite pleased with the work visa that I waited months for and the most recent stamps that are filling my passport.  Yet, that ink also makes me uneasy.  It means that I’ve come and gone; that the last few weeks have been a series of scattered moments.

All of this transience has been gnawing at me.  Maybe it’s because, until I left for college, I lived in the same house for eighteen-and-a-half years and am finding myself more of a homebody than I want to admit.  Maybe it’s something to do with people and their roots, as a few of my lovely colleagues have mused on.  (What about nomadic peoples, I wonder?  Although I’ve heard that transience is a characteristic of my generation, it’s not actually something new.)  Who knows.  What I do know, however, is that I found the continual cycle of arrivals and departures in Perugia disturbing.  Every month there’s a wave of newcomers, a turnover of flats, a new session of placement tests.  Initially, it’s crazy cool—you meet people from all over the world.  But the wave that breaks also riptides.  I came, and I went.  I was part of the cycle of people that used the city and then moved on.

While I was in Italy, Lauren’s post, “Stay Gold, Ponyboy” both comforted me and gave me shivers because I was only there for a month, and I could feel the days careening away very Italian-like—manual transmission with no seatbelts.  She’s totally right.  Nothing gold can stay, and I don’t like that.  I wished and wished and wished the moment would not end. / And just like that it vanished, writes Christian Wiman.[5]

Now, my French visa marks me as a “travailleur temporaire”—a temporary worker, and after April, I will at least have to move to a different apartment, if not a different city or country.  In the meantime, I will continue to worry about how to distinguish situational friendships from true ones.  (Or, are all friendships, in the end, situational?)  I will obsess over what to hold onto and what to let go of and how to cling and cleave gracefully.  But I will also have to remind myself, as Lauren’s post did, that I do hope in something beyond an irony of continual effervescence.

Sabrina Lee

Sabrina Lee (’13) returned to the Calvin English Department in August 2023 as an assistant professor. She is currently finishing her dissertation and teaching “Ways of Reading,” the department’s introductory theory course.