Ruby said my writing made her uncomfortable, and I replied that it made my family too. She thought it was a strange hobby. That I should let go of grudges and revenge. That I should leave behind romance and precise sexual descriptions. Ruby says I should let go of everything, in general.
I explain that I write in the same way she plays tennis with her friends on Tuesdays, or like her brother plays guitar in a bar where no more than five people show up to see him. I write in the same way our upstairs neighbor, Melissa, goes to pilates.
—Melissa goes to pilates because she wants to lose weight —she said.
—Ruby, Melissa goes to pilates because she doesn’t know who she is.
When I started writing (and when I say writing, I mean writing like this), I was in Liguria. It was summer. Memories are always either very vivid or complete blanks. Sometimes I feel like I’m reliving it, and other times I can’t even imagine that summer ever existed. It was the best and the worst of my life, and since it was the summer I started writing, there will never be another one like it. Passions can be ignored for years, but they are never discovered twice.
For the three months of summer, my family had rented an apartment in a town almost at the border between the Italian and French coasts. The place had one bedroom, a living room, and a kitchen. My brother and I slept on a sofa bed in the living room, while my parents took the bedroom. The first weeks they made me go down to the beach early in the morning. By the end of the month they gave up. I woke up whenever I wanted, almost always at noon, and went down alone.
To get to the beach you had to walk through an underground passage beneath the coastal avenue. You could cross it in a minute. It took me twenty. They had built it just a few months before summer started; the work was still fresh and the smell of cement, glue, and paint was still alive. The stagnant water at the ends, the puddles, and the lack of ventilation gave the tunnel a damp scent that I loved. But it was also a dry scent. Concrete. I would spend a long time there before reaching the beach, just to hold on to that smell.
When I finally got to the beach, I had to cling to something else. I sat on the shore, on the sand, and stared at the sea. I focused on the line where it ended and fused with the sky. But it doesn’t end there. The sea was right beside me, over my feet, I swam in it, but it was still so far away. Everything was so far away. I had never felt so lonely and desperate. The Italian coast was dazzling and stifling at the same time. The apartment suffocated me. It made me sad. I didn’t say anything so as not to seem ungrateful. I thought of many scenarios better than this one. One day they became so many that they began to blend together. I couldn’t create new ones; I ran out of space. I had to start writing them down.
At home, Ruby and I have a cupboard in the bathroom where we keep cleaning supplies: basins, slightly damp cloths, rubber gloves, sponges, ammonia, detergent, laundry soap, alcohol, stain remover, mold remover, brushes. When I’m sad, when I feel nauseous, or sometimes when I go to pee, I open the bathroom cupboard, stick my head inside, and inhale deeply. I stay there for a while, feeling contained. The bathroom cupboard holds that same smell of confinement and dampness; of clean, of stagnant water, of something a little new and a little toxic that the Ligurian beach tunnel had. The bathroom cupboard is one of those things I forget about, but when I remember it exists, I visit it with an enthusiasm that gives life back its meaning. I open its doors, stick my head inside, and I’m reminded of a difficult moment that’s now over, of something beautiful that comes from being alone, of writing. Some of the first things I ever wrote (truly wrote) were about that underground passage. It took me nearly the whole summer because I had no idea how the hell to describe a damp smell without simply calling it ‘a damp smell.’
Lately, Ruby gets mad when she sees me shut in my room doing my things. When I come out to talk to her, nothing I share seems to excite her. I think she’s might be jealous of my independence. She doesn’t say it, but when she walks down the hall she makes an irritated face. She bites her lower lip with her teeth. Ruby has spent every summer in Panarea since she was little, only ever leaving religiously on August 16th to go to Siena for the Palio, the horse race. Her summers had freshness, elegance, and even a medieval touch. It’s no wonder she doesn’t get what I’m doing when I stick my head inside the bathroom cupboard.
I recount the story of the summer in Liguria: the tunnel, the damp smell. I explain, with a little shame, how my summers were always isolated, static, and called for invention. I jump to talking about descriptions, about passions, about life plans. I tell her about a dream I train every day as if it were a dog. I make it sit, give me its paw, jump, spin around. It’s the most precious thing I have. Ruby looks at me like what I’m saying is an atomic-level stupidity, and not something that allows me to breathe. In fact, she’s not even listening; she’s gone to her room. I’ve been talking to the kitchen wall for ten minutes.
It’s on afternoons like these that I wonder whether summers taught me how to cope with loneliness, or if they gave me something that pushes me even further away.
Palio di Siena, Tuscany.
i really love your writing!!!