“If I have to leave, I don’t want to stay.”

March 20 2024 | St Maarten

On this Equinox, I find my journal from Venice…just a few months ago.

It’s been a year. But is as if I have been here forever. So dizzy as I walked to Tonolo. Discombobulated. I step into Dorsoduro… I was missing home. 

Reorientation. Not a tourist. Confusion between being tourist and being here. 

I live here. Whether my body is here or not. And now, my spirit has found my body again. Things make sense. In the most insensible way. 

Friday September 29 / 11:01 am / Getting found in Venice

“Don’t go where you know. Go where you don’t know. And I will find you.”

“If you follow the path you’ve always known, You can’t hear my steps. You will only hear yours. I am unknown with You. Be the unknown with me.”

The days before today… I wasn’t even alive. Now. Now I am here. 

Still at the Adagio Bacardi in the campo dei frari. Walking home with my ice cream cone and soon will get ready for the opera. These words come to me as I pass close to my Dorsoduro apartment: 

“If I have to leave, I don’t want to stay.”

Anyone who loves Venice as I do, will understand precisely what I mean. This pistachio ice cream cone doesn’t change it either. Though it is my first one, after one and a half glasses of Chianti, I don’t feel the same even without the ice cream.

I find that my conversations are changing. Like when I talked to Hans and he was talking about taking a cross Atlantic sail. I told him, if you have the chance then you have to go. It wasn’t… My God I would love to go!. But more: if You have the chance, you must go. I used to be: yes yes me too! Now I am: oh that is so beautiful yes you must. And now I have one percent of my battery left. I will walk back to my San Marco apartment without any map. It’s in my heart.

Life in Venice IS a story. How to take the time to write it, when we are so very full just living it.

I don’t want to go back to the apartment. I’m walking through my Dorsoduro. And this is home. I don’t want to go back to my apartment. It is cold. And isolated. And  from before I burned.

From before I burned.

I’m not necessarily walking fast. I’m just celebrating that I am.