🇮🇹ITA

Kathmandu, Nepal

27 September 2018

It’s my last night here. It’s late.

The streets of Thamel are empty, the shops are closed.

The lights look blurry, my legs feel heavy, my head is cloudy and my heart’s filled with the last two months. I lean my head on his arm wrapped around my shoulders and I close my eyes while we keep walking.

I painfully drag my body back to my hotel room. I’m tired. So damn tired I wanna cry.

I’ve been on the road a while now, I haven’t slept in my own bed for two years, actually that bed doesn’t even exist anymore. I took too many planes to count and then taxis and busses and boats, I crossed 5 countries and the lives of so many people in between. I collected emotions that—as it always happens—have changed me. 

That’s why I travel. To feel alive and learn from life, to remind myself that I simply don’t know shit and the world is a huge mystery I’ll probably never get. It’s my way to learn, the only way I grow and maybe my way of escaping something i’m not quite sure.

But to keep on traveling I need to keep on working and though I love what I do and I’ll always be grateful for it, I worked myself into exhaustion on this round: From the chaos of the streets of Delhi to the peace of the Tibetan monasteries in Ladakh, from the skyscrapers of KL,Malaysia to the paradise-like islands of Thailand, from the thousands shades of green of Vietnam to the thousand colored flags hanging everywhere in Nepal, it was a long long beautiful journey. Each of these places gave me something I will never forget, each of these places took something from me, something I probably didn’t need anymore but that left me weaker than before.

I collapse on my bed. Too tired to fall asleep just yet; too drained to answer the emails and message I need to get back to; too empty to acknowledge the million thoughts and feelings that are tearing me apart this week.

I hear the shower turning off and I feel the tears coming, I wipe them up before he opens the door, I don’t want him to see me crying. But crying is the only logical thing to do when I think that tomorrow I’ll be on a plane to Italy and all this will stay here in this room, in this country, in this moment that will never repeat itself. But I have some very important things to do: my first speeches in public, my first exposition; I’m running towards some dreams i’ve had for as long as I remember but back to the place I spent most of my life running away from. I feel it coming, I know her well by now. Fear. I’m scared of not live to the expectations, of not being enough. I’m scared to be alone, to feel the pain, to sit still and stay.

I’m torn between the need of constantly moving and the desire of having somewhere to call home again. Split between the need to be free and the will to share a bit of my life with someone else. And while I drift into unconsciousness I can’t help but wondering…

Will I ever find balance between the two?

Balance.

Everyone talks about it these days, everyone’s on the hunt.

‘Balance’ It’s a word I gave a lot of thoughts to (and never lightly). Not a day goes by without me thinking of it (and where to find it.)

Some people make it seem so fucking easy but I don’t think it will ever come easily to anyone. No matter how happy, content or serene one can be, it will take a lifetime to find it, if it can ever even really be found.

There’s a past I never write about, a past that scarred me and shaped me, leading me here today. Looking back at the last few years I know I put myself here. I wanted to be here. But now all I see is fog. Fog in my head, my vision blurred, my feelings numbed from my constant exhaustion. Today ‘Here’ looks like a foggy lonesome road in nowhere’s land, and though this road looked clearer before, it never had street signs in the first place. For as long as I’ve been on my own I remember thinking daily: “What the fuck am I doing here?”; always wondering what I really wanted, always worried I’d never get it, and always, always questioning where I was really going and if I’d ever make it there.

Fog. Fog like in the one that wafts in the fields where I grew up. But no fog ever lasts forever though, eventually it dissolves, it only comes and goes. I still don’t know where I’m going. I still move from world to world without ever really belonging, but hoping—and trusting—that eventually life will bring me home one day. Wherever that will be.

Finding the way home requires solitude. Art requires solitude. The work requires solitude. In the last 5 years I’ve been isolating myself more and more, moving away from the people in my life, from the city I’ve loved so passionately; pushing my limits to the edge of the world leaving everything I had behind the moment it didn’t feel right anymore; putting myself out of the reality most people share; running as far as I could from the toxic morse of society whose a jailer for free spirits and a killer of dreamers.

Fragments. My life became a puzzle with many missing pieces. I’m catapulted from one reality to another more times than I can count. Here today, gone tomorrow. I’ve slowly become only the friend to call only when in need, the blonde to fuck and leave, the artist to use, the “web-star” to abuse. I was ok with that till yesterday. But not today, today I’m too tired. Not of this or that, not of traveling, not of anything in particular. Just really really drained. Phisycally, mentally, emotionally. My head fuzzy, my sight blurry, my heart numb from this constant exhaustion, my soul empty sometime. Longing for wanting to be something more than air for once.

But it’s all good. I made it this way. Maybe I’m tired of having nowhere or no one to go back to for more than a glimpse of a second. Maybe I should learn how to let myself wanting those things without panicking, feeling my freedom is under threat. 

I might be lost again, I might never find home, but I’ve lived some of my wildest dreams and fuck it if they’ll kill me. If I’d die tomorrow I’d go with no regrets beside maybe knowing that I could have loved a little harder and kept my tights a little tighter. Maybe balance is knowing that you can have both freedom and roots.

Balance.

I might never find this balance thing but in the end ‘Balance’ may only be a word that will makes sense only once you learn to read it upside down.

Love,

—S