It's been over eight years since I last posted to this blog. Eight years of growing up, eight years of change, and eight years of reflection have ensued.
I started this blog because I was studying abroad and wanted a means of communicating with my family. Posts took on the form of a travelogue with occasional musings about my new Italian life compared with my life in New Hampshire. Reading the posts now provides a sometimes clear and sometimes foggy view of that person I was at 20. They're fun to read. It seems like it was another lifetime ago, and, at times, it seems like it wasn't me writing the posts at all – I'm that far removed from the place and time in which the posts were written. But it is fun to go back to those places I wrote about, to look again at pictures and recall the adventures and misadventures I engaged in during those closing months of 2008.
Oh, if I could talk to that kid before he boarded the flight from Boston that would take him to Amsterdam, and then from Amsterdam to Rome. If we could speak before the three hour bus ride from Rome to Ascoli Piceno, or in the taxi on the way from Ascoli's bus station to the hotel lobby that managed the apartment I'd be sharing with another UNH student. If we could exchange words as my younger self, jet-lagged and undergoing the initial stage of culture shock, struggled to carry his luggage through medieval cobblestoned streets . . .
What would I say to my younger self, so eager to part from his small world in search of things he'd dreamed about, imagined and reimagined? So sure of himself, so prepared for adventure. Overconfident. Overzealous. Sheltered. What should one say, if given the chance, to his younger self? Breathe. Observe. Don't worry about failure: you're going to fail and fail and fail. Just work harder.
I'd say this, I think, and other things: eat everything; talk to one new person each day; Italian is going to be hard (see above), but keep working at it; write; travel even more than you're planning to travel; don't worry so much about money, it'll all work itself out; drink coffee in Piazza del Popolo each day; try harder to be a nicer person.
Oh, if I could reach through space and time and tell myself these things. If I could, if I could, if I could . . .
But time and space don't work like that. Reaching myself at 20 is not possible. The best I can do is hope that someday I'll visit once more those places I wrote of long ago, and, in that far off, future visitation, I'll remember this post and what I would like to have said to myself when I first embarked with stars in my eyes for that older world.
