Without Becoming Less Italian

Amsterdam did not replace Italy. It simply became another place where my keys fit a door. #

I keep thinking about yesterday’s post because writing something often makes it continue after I close the browser. I wrote that I am Italian here without consciously performing it, and today I noticed all the tiny evidence again. I spoke to Mom in Italian while making tea. I used English for most of work. I understood a Dutch exchange without translating it. I came home on a bicycle. I cooked something from childhood almost automatically. I listened to American country music while doing it. Then hardcore. If identity required consistency I would be disqualified. Good. I have no desire to become a clean category. Living here has not made me less Italian any more than loving country made me less attached to hardcore. Addition is not subtraction. That sounds obvious written down, but it took me years to feel it. When I first moved, every new habit seemed to carry a faint threat of replacement. If Amsterdam became home, what happened to Milano. If Dutch words became natural, what happened to Italian. If Christmas here became ours, did Christmas there become memory. The answer turned out to be much less dramatic. The old things remain and the new ones accumulate around them. Sometimes they overlap. Sometimes they do not. Milano is still home in the emotional grammar of Mom. Genova is still home in Dad’s voice and the sea. Our house here is home because my clothes are in the wardrobe, my tea is in the cupboard, my camera is on the table and Yuri’s missing charger is exactly where I told him it was. The Milano house remains ours too, another piece of our life not erased by distance. Home can apparently tolerate plural forms better than I expected. Tonight I looked around this room and tried to imagine seeing it as I did the first week. Impossible. Familiarity has covered every surface. I no longer see old Dutch architecture first. I see where I leave my bag. I see the place Yuri puts things he later cannot find. I see the window where I photograph the street. I see the table where tea at five happens. This is what a place does when you stay. It absorbs biography. Italy is not smaller because this room contains mine.

Remember me, Eclipse.