River walks

Sometimes this stuff just gets me… this missing stuff… knocks me sideways and leaves me panting and crying.

Such was today’s lunchtime walk, when I suddenly found myself overwhelmed with a memory of…

Thursday 12th July 2007

Great things happened this day, and bad things too. It was a dramatic little day that started with a walk along the Po (the river that flows through the charismatic lil city of Torino, in Northern Italy), continued to my one and only pick-pocketing experience, and concluded spectacularly with a Daft Punk gig in a park under a summer night sky.

So perhaps I will come back to parts two and three of this day, since both are full fleshed memories even now, but today I am going to sink into the memory of that morning walk. Mostly because it was the memory of that simple, apparently unremarkable act that so brutally kicked me in the stomach just now as I walked by the river in my ‘home town’.

I remember seeing two turtles sitting on a rock as I wandered the grassy walking path, smiling up at the mountains that hug the city. I remember taking a picture of them – most probably because it was (fortuitously) the only image on my memory card when my camera was taken later that day in the aforementioned pick-pocketing incident. I remember a lady walking a whole troupe of Golden Retrievers and how the sight of them made me feel waves of familiarity (I had two retrievers growing up). I remember a general soft wave of familiarity for being in Torino at all, since I had been there exactly a year before for the Traffic music festival as well, and recalled lil things like where the internet café was and where not to eat.

And I remember how it feels to be in Italy… in Europe in general. It isn’t a feeling I can describe (it certainly isn’t logical) but it is this weighty contented sense of adventure and spirit that is just… there – just there when I am shopping for groceries, just there when I am drinking my coffee, just there when I am walking the rivers or streets.

Today the lack of this feeling hit me so suddenly, so unexpectedly, that I literally broke into spontaneous tears. I miss how it FEELS to be in Italy, miss it so much that this apparent substitute of Melbourne just seems… empty.

But it’s not. I’m just feeling dramatic today ;-)

Guess I broke my own rule about nostalgic reflections since this is really about today, but thems are my rules and I’ll do what I want with em.

(Oh, and I can’t post the picture of the turtles since the F#$KERS stole my camera, but I can see them if I close my eyes…..)