2 week checkup

Rosemary, the flower of remembrance

So much has been happening that it’s hard to remember and certainly to keep up here. I have many deep thoughts to share and I will get to them - including but not limited to: ups and downs of dining alone; and the power of the wedding ring ‘shield.’

I left Bologna yesterday in my rental car and drove three hours to Monticchiello, which is a couple miles from Pienza in the Val D’Orcia of Tuscany. It is breathtakingly beautiful here, but I was sad to leave Bologna; it was starting to feel comfortable after a week. Food is great, young intellectual energy from the University, funky stuff going on like a college town, easy to manage on foot and not intimidating.

Last week, I was really '“putting myself out there” and had so many social engagements, which is partially why I’ve been slow on the posts here. Met up for aperitivo and dinner with the girlfriend of my Italian tutor’s brother who is studying at UniBo, went to an English language aperitivo that I found on the ‘Bologna Expats’ Facebook group, met up with an NJ native currently living in Bologna who I found through the Workaway site where I registered and arranged for my current agriturismo stay, and then on the last night there, this lovely Italian couple at the table next to me started chatted and then two hours later we’d exchanged numbers “in case I need anything” on the rest of my trip. So much extroversion.

I’m conducting my own exposure therapy I guess. Practicing meeting new people, practicing being myself as opposed to trying to get them to like me, etc.

The day before I left Bologna, April 11, I got a call from the Ontario County court secretary (who kindly sort of took our case under her wing because it was pro se and I was missing some documents at first) telling me the judgement of divorce had been signed. I checked my email and saw it had already been filed and so we were no longer married to each other.

You know at the ocean when you’re bobbing around, getting oxygen from the air and greeting each wave in a respectable way, and then some big one comes and takes you all the way to that drop off where the breakers hit the sand and you’re tumbling and fumbling and you come up with your hair flopped to the front and sand in your bathing suit? Each new step of the divorce felt like that. I moved out and in with my parents and I couldn’t breathe for a minute, but I got to the surface. I filed the first paperwork and he signed it and that officially started the process, and that was a wave smacking me into the surf but I clambered out. And I knew this wave, this final step to dissolve our marriage, would come but it’s still disorienting.

And I’m in Italy, but I’m also sad, and that’s allowed.