In Gaeta

The train from Rome to Formia-Gaeta takes just over an hour.   The taxi driver is charming; he twirls me as I step out of the taxi. It's so lovely to be in a country of benign flirtation again.

There are so many wonderful things about traveling with A. She is adventurous and engaging. We can swap books and stories. We can talk about nothing at all. And she understands when I need to retreat and recharge.  Especially this trip, which I am still uncertain about.  I am not surprised when the email arrives saying the USS Mt Whitney's tour has been extended. In fact, it feels rather fitting that my life will continue on whilst the US Military fails to be where they said they'd be because they answer to a higher authority.  I stopped taking it personally long ago. 

We stay at the Villa Irlanda, on the outskirts of Gaeta, closer to Formia.  The hotel is scattered villas And makes me think of 'Last Year in Marienbad' but with an Italianate comedic slant.  It reminds of the summer we stayed at Lake Garda the second year we were back in Germany, when we were the most happy as a family unit I ever remember the 4 of us being. 

A and I walk into Gaeta the second day, pausing at a restaurant near the naval college, near where the Gen. Frank Besson, Jr is docked.  After lunch, I walk over the rocks with my small glass jar of smoke and ash, making the first release.   I'm stoic.  In the days that follow, I will cry more, alone in the quiet cold calm of my hotel rooms.  I'll slide between cool crisp sheets and burrow my head under pillows. I will feel like everything is spilling out and I will sleep in fits and bursts during the day, my dreams collages of decades' old memories and other people's words.  Part of this is cyclical - this is a transformative year in so many ways and this skin I am shedding, it pulls out old hooks stuck in my fins. The openings left need to heal.  I think less about the things that have hunted me in recent years, feel a gentler forgiveness come to rest in the manicured gardens and in the easy lemon groves outside my room before we walk to the bar, where the waiter is grumpy and delightfully uncharmed.

I'll order from the set menus - fish or beef? - making decisions as painless as possible.  Everything I can simplify at the moment, I simplify. Everything I can forgive, I forgive.  Every year that falls, I let fall.  

I'll swim in the sea and in pools occasionally pushing myself down to whatever water's bottom is closest. I'll move languidly then with frantic bursts that drain me. I'll float with my hair tangled out around me like seaweed. I'll casually eavesdrop on conversations, piece to together tales of these lives I am overhearing. 

On our third day, wander into Formia the next day, a bit more metropolitan, a bit more of a buzz.  I buy breadsticks from a small shop where the butcher delights in my haphazard Italian and blows me kisses as I leave.