Houston, Here I Come

So why does it feel as though I'm about to fly into a ceiling fan?

If you asked me to describe my life here in Italy, I would use three words: loving, beautiful, and serene.

I worked hard for this. Made a lot of mistakes, a lot of wrong bloody calls. It’s not the life I would have wanted at eighteen. Back then, I was looking to make my mark. Prove myself. But at two months shy of my fiftieth birthday, this feels like a soft rain on the Sahara.

A typical day for me: I get up organically—no alarm clock (usually), which suits me just fine since I work late. Really late. Like, 7:00 a.m. late. Fortunately, John and I are both night owls and keep nearly the same schedule. After coffee, a nice chat, and the New York Times Spelling Bee puzzle, to which I am shamefully addicted, I start writing.

If the work is something I want to do, I usually have no trouble focusing. If not, I have to force myself to do it, which burns twice as much diesel in my tank. I replenish with more coffee, a few articles from The New Yorker or The Atlantic, and then it’s back to work like the boujee little work-pony that I am. In my world, missing a deadline is tantamount to death, and I would have to punish myself with years of mental self-flagellation, which is why I try to avoid it.

But I will make time for friends. I try to be very present with my friends. When my adult kids call, no matter what’s going on, I make myself available to them. And it’s my adult kids that I’m flying to see after three years of pandemic-related separation. Three years. That’s the part that fills me with indescribable joy. The other part where I return to a Trump-loving, gun-toting, pandemic-denying, no-mask-wearing, anti-vaxx America … oh, if you only knew the terror in my heart.

Houston, Texas. Not exactly a postcard.

To be fair, I always experience a nervous breakdown when I go stateside. It’s the oppressive crush of capitalism that breaks me. Advertisements are everywhere—standing at the gas station, where one of a dozen screens blares at me to go inside and buy a Slurpee. The phalanx of swimming-pool-sized billboards along the freeway. Signage from all the stores thrusting into a benzene-tainted sky, yelling at me to buy, buy, buy.

Good ole Texas. It’s all business, and it’s all the time.

Americans are numb to it, I suppose, but after eight years in Italy, my exoskeleton has gone soft. I feel disoriented and panicky. There are times when I don’t know where I am. The same Wal-Mart, Kroger, Starbucks I saw two blocks ago repeats over and over again, like Dante’s concentric circles of hell. I’m reminded that I will never be Italian, but I’m not strictly American anymore, either. I’m an in-between creature, neither fish, nor fowl, nor good red herring. But the sad truth is, I no longer belong in my own country. Maybe I never did.

Capitalism assaults you with too many choices. Study after study shows that an overabundance of choices leads to a form of mental paralysis. Complexity creates indecision; indecision creates stagnation. In my case, I need to be led like a blinkered horse through a fire.

Walk into an Italian pharmacy, and you will find two, maybe three types of one product—aspirin, say—and they all work. Walk into an American pharmacy, and it’s a maze of forty different shampoos, thirty kinds of pain relievers, ten brands of heating pads, fifty pairs of reading glasses, and you already know they won’t deliver as promised. But who knows, maybe they will. They’re all “new and improved,” right? I guess they weren’t up to par the last time you bought them.

Instead of a cobblestone pedestrian path lined with quaint little food shops, Houston is a welter of crammed thoroughfares, fast food franchises, and throbbing freeways. Psychologically, you’re going from 0 to 60 in .5 seconds, and it makes you feel defensive and afraid, like everybody’s out to kill you. They probably are.

I don’t trust American food. Frankly, it doesn’t taste like food should. The tomatoes are watery, the tangerines tasteless, and the garlic has no flavor. This worries me. Dining out, even at previously low-to-mid-range restaurants like Red Lobster, is alarmingly expensive. Of course, so are groceries: two bags are usually well north of a hundred dollars. Just existing on American soil costs money I don’t have. This worries me, too, since over 37.25 million people live below the poverty line.

Recently, I asked a friend whose Italian, high-school-age daughter is in the States what she thought of it. “She’s starting to see some pretty stark differences,” he reported. “Italian kids grow up together. They go to the same schools and know the same people. On weekends, they hang out together in the piazza. But American kids have nowhere to go. They lead terribly isolated lives. Going anywhere requires a car. But even then, where is there for a kid to go besides the mall?”

Here in Amelia, a 16th-century church sits at the top of the hill. I look at it every day and welcome the sound of the church bells ringing in the campanile. Beneath our window is a beauty salon where the soft roar of blow dryers and women chatting in Italian give me a feeling of cozy familiarity. I prefer to keep to the shadows, listening in soft fascination, wondering how lovely it must feel to belong.

The Duomo at the top of the hill in Amelia. Photo by Stacey Eskelin.

I’m damned lucky to have this life, and I’m petrified of losing it, now that I’ve found what I was looking for. But my heart will always be broken and never whole. This, I accept.

My family is in Houston, my soul in Italy. I would not wish this on my worst enemy. It’s not a Faustian bargain I struck by coming here, but a pyrrhic one, a victory that inflicts such a devastating toll on the victor, it feels like defeat.

Had I a chance to do it all over again, even knowing what anguish awaited me, I would still choose my life here with John. The utilitarian sameness of Houston was already bearing down on me, day in and day out, like a slow gray depression. Stay in the U.S. long enough, and you become trapped in the gossamer chains of ease, comfort, and convenience.

I’m going to miss my chair, my kitties, and most of all, my sweetheart. My life may seem a bit boring to people who aren’t me, but oh, how tenderly I cherish it.

Sunrise with Bunny. Photo by Stacey Eskelin.

You can’t regret the things you do for love. Never turn your back on it. Never. In the end, it’s all you have.

If you have some thoughts, I’d love to hear them. Feel free to leave your comments below.