7 years ago

Lucca (Italy), afternoon

Just for a change....it is raining now....I arrived here on December 23 and since then I had only 2 days of sun....
I have been walking a lot in the past days. From my mum's place to downtown and back, walk everywhere it was possible, just to move a bit, even with the rain. And I think Lucca is boring. Really boring for me now. It is not that I want to complain about every single place I live, but there are two factors to consider: 1) the more I live abroad, the more there are things I like (and I don't like) of the places where I live 2) last time I lived for long time in Lucca was 7 years ago.

I left Lucca when I was 25, when I was working in a discopub to get some money, when I had full of friends more or less involved in relationships, but basically also with a strong desire of just having fun, when I had a full life in which the only negative point was the frustration of working at the University of Pisa.
I left everything here to start a PhD in Germany, where on the other hand, I had no friend, I didn't speak the language (neither I spoke english at that time), I had nothing and I didn't know anything of what I was starting to work on (at that time I didn't even have a clear idea of what evolutionary biology was). During the 3 years and half I spent in Konstanz (Germany), I changed boyfriend, I saw friends leaving, people who I thought to be friends using me, I had to strongly change my behavior to adapt to the Konstanz environment, I had to survive to a bossy boss and I had to learn what it means to have no life and work until 2, 3 am in the morning. Of course, Konstanz also had positive aspects, but in all those 3 years, I spent a lot of time thinking about the kind of personal life I had in Lucca before to leave. And in Konstanz I was not happy, basically due to the lack of friends. In the mean time I got older and my friends from Lucca some disappeared and some got married and had kids.
Then I moved to Amsterdam and I loved the city. But my boyfriend was in Konstanz and the only friends I had in Amsterdam were my roommates, two at the beginning and then one since Ulli moved to Luxembourg. The olandesino, came to see me quite often and I was also going back to Konstanz to see him often, but due to the lack of friends, the fact that the only two people I knew were working a lot and the fact that I lived my relationship on skype, I didn't have so much life either in Amsterdam.
The same in USA, with other negative and positive points about New Haven.

I thought that coming back to Lucca would have meant to get my life back. My life of 7 years ago. But the reality is that for how close I am to my old friends, for how close they can be to me and even if being here makes easier any communication (see previous blog), I grew up in one direction and they grew up in another. They have families, kids, stable relationships, jobs. They don't live too much as an individual anymore, as the people I remembered but more as the role that the have in their life, a mother, a father, a wife ect. The life I hoped to find coming back here, was my fun personal life of 7 years ago. It is like my personal life stopped at that time, while all the rest moved forward. Even the city of Lucca changed a lot in the last 7 years and now at 8 pm if you walk downtown, the city is basically dead (the fact that it rains continuously doesn't help of course). Maybe I needed to realize this to start to really live my life in other places too. Of course it is great to have found my old friends again and having the chance to spend time with them, without rushing every time. But the life I can have here now, it is not anyway the life I left, I remembered and I dream of having back of 7 years ago.