A History of Trouble (Creative Writing Assignment #20)

At times it is difficult for me to travel. You might read this and draw images of a figure of a fragile disposition, a lethargic nature, or an anxious temper. Do I fear airplanes, pickpockets, terrorists, or the horrific countenance that might constitute foreign cuisine? It is altogether less interesting than that, though perhaps you will still fail to believe me. It is this quandary that has led me to finally claim my word as PARALLEL.

When traveling, especially in Rome, you can see all sorts of people. There are the hordes of red-faced, animatronic tourists, trudging mindlessly forward, dominated by their headsets. Moving among these is that class of people that sustains itself through the generous tourist. The hawkish vendors of knock-off purses, the ubiquitous statue men in their latest unpersuasive wrapping of sheets be it a gold painted Tutankhamen or a spray painted Roman orator, and of course the many beggars of all imaginable forms. One can even sometimes spot the endangered species, the Roman. So many people. And with this phantasmagoria of faces and bodies, within this cacophony of clucking, whining, barking, grunting, sighing, and screaming, there are weaving around me so many stories. There are probably more stories, memories, and impressions walking about St. Peter’s on a Saturday afternoon than could fill the Vatican library.

This overwhelms and troubles me. I walk through the Camp di Fiori and pass a man selling flashing heart pins. Did he know that he would one day be doing this? Does he sit late at night, counting his earnings and think back to the first time he learned to swim in that now remote amber river? Do his sore legs again remember the sensation of being able to thrash about, free for once of soil and stone? What of the silent Japanese woman that sits alone in the Pantheon early on a Thursday morning. Why has she come to Rome? When did she first leave the city that she was born in? Does she remember the excitement at seeing the ocean for the first time, the horizon so keen that your eyes might slip over the edge? I can never know these things.

So my word is more a hope than a reality. I hope that all these lives actually run PARALLEL. That by living my life, I have in some way lived the lives of all this flesh that swarms through the streets of Rome. It is a selfish hope. Like the man who burns a book simply because he knows that he is incapable of finishing it. But what an ease it would be on the traveler. To be able to walk down a dim street in Trastevere, see an old man sitting without a shirt, mending a dilapidated bicycle and be able to confidently think, “What an interesting sight, but I know that what this man has felt I have felt as well. His life has just been a variation upon mine just as mine has been a variation upon that of the gaudy woman that is walking toward me”.

PARALLEL. Probably just an illusion. Nevertheless I continue to meander on through Rome, passing countless eyes, but perhaps only one continuous story.