embrace the world and all it has to offer
bruce wayne, christmas lights, and a really strong French red wine.
“Have you ever seen The Dark Knight Rises?” He asks me one night.
I stare at him blankly, forgetting he doesn’t know me well enough to know that my movies of choice fall underneath the Romantic Comedy section and rarely span elsewhere.
In fact, I remember opting to not leave my bedroom when my mother chose any one of the Batman movies to watch for family movie night. She loved Bruce Wayne.
“No.”
“The final scene that happens in Florence. Watch it. Reminds me of you.”
“Okay. I’ll add it to my list.”
“Watch it. You’ll know.”
—
It’s November in the city. Little white lights climb up the trunks of the trees that line each major street. Wreaths are hung on lamp posts. Cafes are selling mulled wine, stores are decorated with snowflakes and sale signs. The red Starbucks cups are in the hands of each person I pass, and I bury the bottom half of my face in my fleece zip up.
Every Christmas, my mother used to take us to her favourite floral studio. The studio was full of each and every type of winter rose imaginable. We would never buy anything, instead we would stare in awe of each arrangement, wondering which fancy holiday party each bouquet would be sent off to.
I am inside the same studio, watching the man behind the counter cut two dozen long stem white roses and arrange them in a tall vase. Timeless. I walk through the aisles of expensive ornaments and stocking stuffers, eyeing the glittering branches of each mini-tree they have on display.
My hands graze the covers of a table full of books.
Vintage Roses. Vogue Covers of the 60’s. Alexander McQueen.
150 Restaurants of the World.
And that’s when I see it. His name in print.
–
“It’s the irony of it all. I’m the writer, and I have to see his name in print.” I tell my best friend over dinner that night.
“So, what happens in the Florence scene?” He fills up my glass with a dark, French red.
“It took me all night to find the script in the scene he was talking about. And then…” The French red is beginning to make me tell a story I swore I’d never share.
I pass him my phone.
Every year, I took a holiday. I went to Florence, there's this cafe, on the banks of the Arno. Every fine evening, I'd sit there and order a Fernet Branca. I had this fantasy, that I would look across the tables and I'd see you there, with a wife and maybe a couple of kids. You wouldn't say anything to me, nor me to you. But we'd both know that you'd made it, that you were happy. I always knew there was nothing here for you, except pain and tragedy. And I wanted something more for you than that. I still do.
His eyes widen. “Maybe in a few years…”
“I’d be lying if I said that never crossed my mind.”
–
I crawl into bed that Wednesday evening, wine drunk, strands of blonde and caramel highlights spilling over the covers. Closing my eyes, the French red again making me admit something I swore I’d never say aloud.
I thought I could write him out of my memory. Those afternoons and evenings, written out as diary entries, poems, and newsletters that would eventually turn into forgotten moments.
But today, surrounded by roses and expensive ornaments. Surrounded by the glittering branches. Surrounded by the most beautiful things.
His name on a page, in big, bold, letters.
I feel my eyes start to water.
I thought that if I just dove in, I’d meet us in words and realizations and write us into our own ending.
Maybe we’d be sitting across the table from each other, in a café in Florence. Surrounded by red wine and white roses and Fernet Branca. And I’d think back to the night we first met. When you asked me what I like to write about, and the way I paused and looked at you for a while before admitting to what I’d never tell most: “Grief”.
I’d think about how the night swept both of us in, and how you showed up on my doorstep the next morning. The way you spoke about grief changing you, the way you spoke about writing and the way it helps you make sense of things you don’t understand. When you told me the only time you felt like yourself is when you wrote music and played your guitar. And the way you looked at me when I told you I can never write for other people, because then my art belongs to someone else.
In this Wednesday night dream, it is hard to let each other go. In this Wednesday night dream, we don’t belong to anyone else. In this Wednesday night dream, we are here.
And here, we never were.
—
Back in Rome, I’m two martinis in, sitting at the bar where I think they might know me by name.
“So, do you think I should go to Australia?”
He puts down the glass he’s cleaning and looks at me for a long time.
“Yes. You’re curious like me. You’ll know when it’s time to settle.”
I want to ask him when he knew it was time to settle, but there are some questions I already know the answers to.
—
Wine drunk and under the covers, I pull up a note:
To my daughters: Embrace the world and all it has to offer.
I read and re-read her final words when I need to hear her voice the most.
Embrace the world and all it has to offer.
—
“I have a question.”
“I have an answer.”
I roll my eyes.
“Remember when you said you just wanted more time? What exactly did you mean?”
He leaves the couple he is serving and walks over to me.
“Time to be … myself. My life has … changed. And I love it, but it’s just different. Yesterday was the first time in months where I could pick up the guitar and just … I felt like myself.”
—
Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if I stayed in Rome. No one was surprised that I was leaving, and no one had talked me into staying.
Embrace the world and all it has to offer.
—
I stopped believing in “the one” a long time ago. But I do think that the world is full of “ones”. Ones that come in the form of friendships and ones that come in the form of lovers. The ones that will jump immediately to your defence, even when you both know you’re probably in the wrong. The ones that will pour you glass upon glass of French red as you make up for lost time. The ones that you will laugh with, cry with, and after one too many - tell you that you feel like home.
Those are the ones I treasure the most.
And there are ones that come in as if they were sent specifically to us, as some sort of higher message that none of us were ever made to understand.
Those are the ones that never stay the longest. But they’ll always exist somewhere inside of us, buried in memories and in hope that we made them feel something, too.
Embrace the world and all it has to offer.