The Leaning Tower of Pisa

In the summer of 2001 I made my first trip to Europe. It has been my only trip to the continent but there's something about saying it's the first that inspires of sense of culture that I can fool you in to thinking I own. I visited London and spent a lot of time in the curry filled street of northern England, a place many Indians still reside, and make a masala sauce that still haunts me in sleep. I spent a week in Paris, a week I spent not understanding why Americans don't like the French. They were nice, and gracious, and smelling flowers at a market smelled better because I was smelling them in Paris. I spent 24 hours in Dublin. Enough time to take a tour of the Guinness factory, experience the most torrential of rains I've known and drink brew with Irishmen at the cities pubs. The bulk of the rest of the trip was in Italy, and for reasons I can probably attribute to it being the most cost friendly solution, I flew Dublin to Pisa.

Pisa's a city of an airport, and a leaning tower. If by chance the airport went in to disrepair, and the leaning tower, leaned to its demise, the city, may never make another map. It was the only thing we were seeing there, so it made the most sense to lug the luggage from the airport to the tower, from tower to train, where we'd travel to Florence that afternoon.

Once you squeeze through crowds and get close enough, camera in hand, do the cliche photos, me in front of the tower, me next to the tower, me pretending to hold the tower between my fingers, me pretending to be larger than the tower, your work at the leaning tower of pisa is done. And if you have an ex-boyfriend like I did, not only will he delete all the pictures accidentally so that my readers would just need to take my word this entire post isn't a figment of my imagination, you'd have an ex-boyfriend that after London, Manchester, Dublin, Paris, and an afternoon in Pisa, had driven me to meltdown status.

Years later when I broke up with him (in a therapists office - but that's for another post) - they were for all the same reasons that drove me to that meltdown that August afternoon in 2001 burning sun beating down on my bare skin, luggage surrounding me, as I told him I didn't want to go on.

Oh don't get me wrong. No suicide intervention was necessary. With him, I didn't want to go on with him.

He told me I looked silly. Tourists, children, backpackers, manueving to get around me. While I sat on my large suitcase and sobbed. This post isn't about him, so there's little reason to go in to details. All you need to know is I was right, and he was wrong. About everything.

I've been siked about turning 30. It happens tomorrow. And even though it falls on a Friday the 13th, it clearly is more of a magical wonderful sort of 13, and not the horror movie sort of number. But 30, it comes with some baggage, some luggage, like the one I sat on in Italy. And in yoga today, between a birds of paradise pose and tree pose, I discovered - I'm turning 30.

When class was over I walked outside. I sat down. And I cried. I can't even remember why it was I started, but after a half hour, I got my life together and walked away. But I needed to sit down, melt down, be down. And admit some truths to myself. Truths like you can't ignore getting older. Or the responsibility that comes with it. Or that sometimes when faced with it, it's ok and not be ok.

I suppose if I could rationally explain a meltdown, or any meltdown, about age or the weather, than I'd in some way let the world in to the complexity of women. But I don't have that answer.

I needed about 10-12 more minutes of good crying time, but I discovered I'd been sitting on ants, and worried at any time they'd use my legs as a food source, so I got on my way.

So with complexity of women, and complexity of relationships, and complexity of age, comes a spontaneous meltdown.

Years ago, in the summer of 2001, I eventually got up, I dried my tears, I hopped on that train to Florence, and I enjoyed it as I did Naples, Pompei, and Venice. Today, the fall of 2009, I metaphorically do the same. Move on. With purpose, and cause, and a humanity.