Yoshi

The entire month of September was spent in Padova, without any feeling of permanence – a beloved city, full of old friends and family memories taking form as the waiting room of life. I find myself in Reggio Emilia now, in the spacious bedroom that I have always dreamed about. A lot of freedom of expression to facilitate zen and a conducive work environment for the remote job that has finally been sent down to me from the grace of god after the continued sacrifice of sweat, tears, blood, spinal injuries. I worked my fucking ass off for this and I will continue to work just as hard, if not harder, to get even more of what I want out of life. Goodbyes and departures from friendship circles have been a bit unceremonious which is preferable and more symbolic of their true nature, casual and persevering, words don’t need to be said unnecessarily, things just need to be felt and realities need to be realized to make good on the unwritten promises that tie such bonds together. Visits to markets with old friends, grills, celebrations for those graduating and recounts of ambition from those now graduated. Much of it still felt like being in a waiting room, ultimately, getting a pretty good idea of who will still be around when we are not. One specific experience that I had in Venice keeps coming back to me - a particularly intimate one night stand with a woman that I would have liked to see again and kept in greater contact with, but ultimately that contact wouldn’t be in the spirit of things or in the reason for our initial meeting. Better to leave it as it was, the crying and the memories shared – less about any of the sex and much more about the hours spent at her kitchen table, more about the view that you could see from the window of her bedroom, more about the bruises already left by others on her thighs, about the character that such a woman had and her ambitions of teaching English and Italian and moving back to the UK of which she had once been for so long and loved so profoundly that she’d cry when she thought of how much she missed it. Regardless of the impermanent nature of the night and the meeting, the idea that such a thing can happen will stick with me for a long time. Admittedly, I am no stranger to hooking up needlessly, and I don’t think I’ve ever had such a meeting that genuinely felt satisfying or left such an impression on me. With the few friends that are left at the end of all of the bridges that I have crossed, there exists a growing need to express myself better in the Italian language. I am not getting the full potential out of my life while being unable to communicate profoundly and to the level otherwise possible in English with the people around me. I feel like Yoshi, hence the title of this entry - an integral part of the group undoubtedly, but not entirely human in the same way that the people around me are. My humour and feelings confined mostly to non verbal communication, my accent comprehensible by those who have spent enough time by their trusty yoshi to be able to understand the things I am saying while the weight of the words that come out of my mouth are unfelt and softened by my lack of mastery. My true feelings remain something that are locked behind hours spent in game, mostly seen as self serving since these are the sentiments that are easiest to communicate - I want this, I want that, Penso Io. This, like many other things, must change and be dealt with through discipline if I am going to get something meaningful out of my life. No more I going forward in this writing, but this was a big update since I moved twice since writing the last entry. I started work last week.