I am now 27. 

27, what does it mean? I have hopes and dreams, despite the despair, I have so many. I have a devouring desire to create art. I have lived in 4 countries. I have a fucked up sense of self-esteem that comes in waves and then is crushed. I have a terrible fear of confrontation. I shake off vulnerability with stupid jokes. The other day I still cried while talking about my father. I have a half brother I don't speak to and I'm not even sure if he remembers me. He is in his twenties now too. He's a fucking adult. I hope he is happy. I hope he is happy. 

I think the world is hilarious and a blessing and I am obsessively afraid of dying. I don't want to see the people around me growing old. I have an energy and a lust for life and I am a woman and I am a kid and I am a being. I wanna get drunk past reason. I wanna laugh so much I forget all the ghosts. 

I have never trusted a man enough. My friends are a huge chunk of my entire world. Art gets me up in the morning and keeps me awake at night. I am passionate, so fucking passionate and it pours into any outlet it finds. 

I wanna talk about the meds and how much I still think about it and how much they fucked with my brain. I wanna talk about the screaming and the house(s) and how terrifying touch can be. I wanna talk about broken little children and how brutal life was. I wanna talk about the blood and the unsureness of it all, about a little scissor and my knees. 

I wanna be loved, held and understood and maybe slapped in the face. But, overall, loved. Above all, loved. 

I wanna fly in a private jet at least once. I want go to all the countries. I wanna see how people have made sense of life. 

I'm eating worse than I used to and I fucking hate cooking. I have one wrinkle in my forehead and sometimes it drives me insane. I can't deal with the passage of time but I wouldn't go back either. 

I'm terrified and I'm excited and I care. 

I wanna find this long lost brother. I don't have the courage for what it takes.

I'm glad Buddhism found me. 

My body self destructs sometimes. 

I should dance way more often.

 

"i am not a creature who was born, i am a fire that was started"

 

I want to be twenty-five forever. The unending afternoons and evenings and nights and late nights into three a.m., drinking beer or cider or wine and talking about love, and heartbreak, and nothings and nothings and lauhging and other people and free will and cosmic space and the existence of God, the freedom of women, the constraints of society, the love we have for the theatre. the messy room as the dawn light creeps in through the window, old doc martens tossed sideways on the floor, an unfinished book on the bedside table, medicine forgotten and half taken, a water bottle always empty because wine leaves the mouth dry, the messy sheets, the large t-shirts, a leather handbag that belonged to my grandma forty years ago and couldn't be prettier, theatre and museum tickets scattered around. the music, the music, the endless music, the endless nights, the endless reading, the endless writing, and the endless talking. the energy to begin again and the undying, immortal hope even when the future looks all but bright, the chilhood nostalgia and the crippling fear and the burning youth, screaming to come out, screaming to find expression. the intense love for art, for friends, for people, yearning for love and to be loved and to forgive and to never forget. anything, anything, anything. suddenly there are new people, suddenly new things to get to know, suddenly new interests. suddenly everyone is very very attractive and people are captivating and my brain is getting healthier and there's no clouds above my head as there used to be, and I have a new coffee machine, and it is yellow, and it makes me so incredibly happy that I lived this far to look at it every morning. and every morning might look different, and please don't take this away from me, and please never take my freedom away from me, and don't take my body away from me, my body that can withstand so much and endure so much and bruise and break and heal and cry out. I wanna be twenty-five forever. 

it's been almost three years since I last wrote here.

 

twenty-third of december evening - someone smokes a cigarette and cries their eyes out on the balcony of the house they grew up in. the town looks almost the same, so little has changed. new houses, big houses, were built, with big backyards. in the old houses, only the dogs are new. they bark and bark and won't shut up every time someone walks by. it is unbearable. the sun sets over the hills. silence.

they think "I should have not bought a flight this year. should have stayed home. went travelling. meet some new places. take a couple photographs. what am I doing here in this forsaken corner of the world?".

a few houses up the street, someone is changing a flat car tire. they think, okay. life could be worse. they go back inside. someone is fighting, again. the dogs are barking. Christmas sucks. 

but it could be worse. of course it could be worse.

 

today I must write, cause my blood is boiling. I am again in that state of mind like when I used to hear melancholic songs at my rented house balcony and drink random supermarket tea in an ikea coffee cup. I am again in that state of mind where I found those songs so deeply calming, yet so deeply disturbing, because a void inside was born, out of listening to those melodies: I knew there were perhaps thousands of people feeling exactly like me, and yet it felt impossible that they could feel exactly the same. maybe because it is so hard to put into words, so very hard to turn into something explainable, therefore easy to imagine in someone else.

i am in that state of mind where I question the vast majority of life decisions and try to really understand why, without lying to myself in the face with the conniving confidence of being truthful. you can't be truthful if you can't find the truth. 

today I think about all the possibilities and opportunities I left behind for reasons I can't quite understand. I was never clear about it, not even to myself, and it took a long time to recognize it. maybe feeling like this is a crucial part in, at least, coming to terms with myself. I have lived alongside fragile, makeshift theories for far too long. I can romanticize my permanent existential crisis only up to a certain point. at a certain stage it's impossible to ignore the frustration and the confusion. I can fit in so many places, yet I can't fully fit in any. some parts of me are always off. can't help but feel I'm missing out on all these parts if I just ignore their existence. I'm a collection of pieces without a definitive form. 

made for everything; and made for nothing.

I just want to look another person in the eyes without paralyzing fear. 

When I joined Erasmus I knew - I knew there were going to be irreversible changes inside myself, yet I didn't know their grandeur. I came hoping I'd find more people like me, hoping the horizon would open into dozens of layers so I could see a different sunset than the one I've been seeing for the last years. I came wondering if this fitted me - if I was the right kind of person to do this. 

The other day someone said "Erasmus improved my self esteem" and without even thinking I nodded. Because it did. Physically, yes, maybe because people here look more natural, because I've slept on the same bed with pratically 4 strangers, because I've sweated on the mountains and my perfectly straigthened hair got wet too quick on rainy days: basically, you develop a familiarity with these people that you don't really get to have with most everyone back home, unless they're relatively close friends. 

But there's more than that: somehow, it also improved the way I see myself, or made me hate myself less sometimes. I can't say I hate myself now, cause I know what that truly means and it certainly isn't this. But this didn't make me "like" it either. It's a bit less, or a bit more, I'm not sure, than that, it's a step towards a strange direction, one of a kind of peace you estabilish within yourself that doesn't exactly mean you improved but it also means you are closer to it in a very natural, strange way.

I also discovered that I didn't find people like me. For sure I found people with similar interests, similar travel bucket lists, similar adventurous and random spirit, but this experience so far made me realize I have some kind of an incomparable wanderlust to the people I have really met so far in my life. From frustation, to my ocd kicking in when trying to organize a trip to finally sort of making peace with it all and truly going with the flow, I understood that there is something inside me that I suspected was there; and now I am sure. And it is both good and bad, because I gradually feel like I know a little more of myself, and I can freely express it because I feel it so strongly but it also is such a lonely journey that only distances myself further from everyone else. 

When I go back, I won't be the same person. I would have found things and grown out things inside during this time. And now they are there, and I'm not sure what to do with them, but it's such a big world of possibilities. 

There are still two months and a half ahead. My anxiety needs to calm down. I must breathe. I can't wait to find out more, and have more adventures. 

Photo credits to Tommaso and his digital camera, because the analog's pics weren't developed yet.