Life Between Parentheses

This post could just as easily be titled: "Roni, This Is Real Life."

This is what my face looks like these days. Although, sometimes I close my mouth.

But I like slightly esoteric titles, and this one comes from a letter penned by the Italian Hermetic Poet Alfonso Gatto. He had been exiled by the Fascist regime to Tuscany (not a terrible exile, if you ask me), and wrote to a friend that he seemed to be "living between parentheses." The sentiment resonated. I read his letter as a grad student in Italy. I had friends in Italy. I had my crew of cohorts and my roommates, and we hit the town and such. I had a life and purpose. I attended classes, researched in the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze, and volunteered at a homeless shelter. However, everything felt so disconnected from what I considered my life.  

It was a parenthesis.

I'm barely in contact with the folks that filled my Florentine days. The most meaningful contact I have with my old roommates or university colleagues is writing "Tanti auguri" on their facebook wall on their birthday. I barely have the opportunity to converse in Italian and discuss the intricacies of Dante's body of work or the bombastic declarations of Italian Futurism. I went back to the world of pizza slinging post-grad and by following a windy road, found myself in the nonprofit world serving low-income families. The time I spent earning my Master's degree almost seems like an unnecessary aside in the narrative of my adulthood.

Sometimes I feel the same way about my time in New York City. Like I am living in a new parenthesis. I elaborated on this sentiment with my friend, and she said, "This is your life."

But the parallels are worth remarking about. In Italy, I arrived with two suitcases, an address to an apartment I'd never seen, and a letter that I'd been accepted into a university program--not knowing a soul. I arrived in New York City in much the same fashion, except instead of education, I'd come with the knowledge I'd have a job. Once again, I was disconnected from the world I knew.

As a result, I built a new world. I made friends, planned work events, settled into a new habitation. Everything is new, but that does not indicate it isn't meaningful.

Nonetheless, sometimes in the morning I still open my eyes and have to ask myself, "Is this my life?"

I'm trying to get better at living in the moment. I suffer terribly from an overindulgence in nostalgia. Once I learned the term saudade, I became obsessed with it. (In case you are wondering, it is an untranslatable Portuguese word which means something like a deep melancholic nostalgia with a sort of repressed understanding that the object longed for will never return. Heavy, beautiful, and kind of tragic.)

I romanticize even the recent past--which in someways I think is worth romanticizing. 2013 was a complex year with nearly every feeling in the spectrum being felt within its twelve months, but I forged amazing friendships and learned a lot about life, love, sacrifice, beauty, the transience of youth, fallibility, and so much more. I miss so much of last year, even though I was just as angsty and existential as I am now.

Anyway, I guess I am trying to break out of the parenthesis mentality and say, "Hey, this is your life now! Just live it! Don't over-analyze! It will only be a parenthesis if that is how you treat it."

And even if it is a parenthesis, sometimes those are pretty important.

Like how would you know the definition of saudade without my parenthetical aside (besides google)?