I’ve been back in Portland four days now, and it still isn’t processing for me quite yet that I am home and that the trip is over. I don’t feel like I am all the way here yet. Feels like I left part of me in Rome and that it is still there, looking at the sun set over a skyline of domed basilicas, tile roofs, and TV aerials.
I still have a lot of writing to finish, a lot of posts still need to be made to fill in all 17 days of the trip and ten or so classwork posts to complete still. Maybe once I have the writing done, that the trip is over and that I am back home again.
Haven’t managed to settle back in yet. Laundry is done, some groceries back into the fridge. Hot showers, having more than a handful of outfits to choose between. The world seems so quiet and still and empty outside my window in the morning, just a few birds chirping instead of the lively sounds of people out on the streets.
I woke up this morning and laid in bed for a while, waiting to hear the bells of some church in the distance calling people in to service before I remembered where I was.
Not sure yet on how the trip has changed me. There wasn’t any single moment during it where it felt like the heavens parted and I had some grand revelation about my life or who I was or what I should be doing. But I am sitting here now thinking about next year, making plans to go back, and thinking about other places that I would like to travel and see. Which is different, very different, to find myself looking out like that instead of in.
Strange the little things I miss too. Walking through downtown Portland yesterday had me missing Rome’s uneven cobble stone roads with their marble curbs, so much more character to them than the bland asphalt and concrete I was walking upon. I remember thinking while I was there about how dirty Rome seemed, but the streets of Portland seem dirtier to me now, though the buildings I passed yesterday had less graffiti.
It is weird what does and doesn’t stand out in my memory now. The flowering bush on the corner of the building that Sarah, Lizzie and M were staying in I can picture clearly. Cheryl at the Rome Center, but not the other woman who helped us there. The Russel Street tube station in London. Big Ben against the skyline, which I didn’t even realize for a couple of days was Big Ben since the name I saw on a sign was something like “Parliament Clock Tower”.
Just random things, no rhyme or reason to the bits I remember clearly (the almost luminescent white skin of one of the paintings in the Borghese Gallery) and the bits that I struggle to remember (I sat on the steps of the fountain in front of Santa Maria in Trastevere at some point almost every day I was in Rome, but I can only picture the steps now and not the fountain itself).
Find myself saying “grazie” on reflex now, instead of “thank you”. Small bits of my brain thinking in Italian instead of in English. “Il conte, per favore” instead of “check, please”. Not sure how much of it is correct Italian, but it is stuck in my head now.
Have to sort through the 3217 photos I took on the trip, now disorganized as the iOS 8 update sorted all of my imported picture folders into one large folder instead keeping them separated by day.
Textbooks for the term starting next week sit in a pile, stacked besides the maps and guide books and history books I bought while on the trip.
I miss Rome. I am glad to be home. I think.