Light, and lightness

I'm returning to normal after the whirlwind grandeur of Italy: a rag soaked in glory, then wrung out. But the imprint lingers — I feel more spacious, somehow, as though my chest is filled with all the vaulted spaces of all the cathedrals we were so small in. I'm bigger on the inside. Fragments of gold leaf and mosaic glint in the corners of my closed eyes. I think being in a foreign country, where I had to strain to capture meaning, where I could never just bumble along complacently but had to be always alert, made me more permeable to the avalanche of images and sensations we experienced. I feel tattooed, in layers, like a palimpsest.

I haven't yet slept a night at home without waking up convinced that I was sleeping in some historical site — my bedroom having become the Medici Chapel or the Vatican Museum, and me an interloper. Where's the bathroom? Are we allowed to be here? What can I touch? Usually only I have these waking delusions, but adfamiliares has shared them at least once, which makes me wonder if it's a common experience. Do we both see the same unreal room? Could we stay there together, if we didn't wake up?

I came home with over 1700 photos. Posting them, and writing up my Italian experiences, will be the work of a summer, so expect them in dribs and drabs over the next couple of months.