Travelling is brutal
An address written in pen on the palm of my hand. Paper gets lost, skin holds on.
It was Naples station, in winter. I was twenty, with a big suitcase and a ticket to a city I had only seen on television. Half the things in that suitcase had been put there by my mother, without telling me. I found them later, one at a time.
Pavese is said to have written that travelling is a brutality. It takes things from you one at a time: the streets you know by heart, the baker who already knows what you want, your mother's voice in the next room. It forces you to trust people you don't know, to ask, to get off at the wrong stop and step down anyway.
Then only a few things remain. Air. Sleep. Dreams. The sea. The sky.
Milan.
It has its winters, its long Sundays, the metro trains that after eleven carry musicians home with their cases on their knees.
By now your legs know how many steps there are up to your door. You cross a square and realise you haven't looked at the map.
You have learned the name of one street, then another. You have learned that bread costs less in the evening. You have learned that a woman at the tram stop, if you smile at her, will tell you where to get off. You have learned to sleep anywhere.
The address on my palm faded at some point, without my noticing. By then I knew it by heart.
Questions for reflection
Those who left before us crossed stations, winters and fears much like ours. They rarely tell us about it, and yet their path lights up our own.
What would change in your journey, knowing someone has already walked it before you?
Those who love us often give us things in silence. We find them only later, when we need them, and sometimes we understand the gesture years after receiving it.
What were you given without words, and how are you discovering it now?
When things are stripped back, what truly mattered remains. It is often simpler and closer than we thought.
What remains in your life today when you take away everything you could lose?
