Finding Home

Beating swallow wings and chirps, scraping chairs and chiming bells, children laughing and dogs barking. I understand this language. It’s the language of home. Then there is the smooth Italian tongue that hums beneath the rest. Like a crescendoing bass, it settles in the back of my mind, tightening my core to a clenching panic that if I look around I'm not really home. But what is home? A place to lay one’s head, a place where one’s family is, a place where one’s clothes are kept in dusty drawers and on cheap hangers, a place where one knows the language?

I stand in front of Hotel Lauri for the first time. I’ve been on a cramped plane for hours and slept my way through a bus ride to a walled city named Macerata that’s supposed to be nothing like the empty cornfields of Indiana. I notice first not the ancient walls tainted with graffiti, the pizza stands on every corner, or the lack of public restrooms. No, it’s the three stars under my hotel’s name. The middle star, slightly smaller than the two on the outside, reminds me of how the middle number on my mom’s house is somewhat smaller and more crooked than the rest. The first sign I’m not as far from the place I come from as it seems. These similarities calm the anxiety that prowls behind me like the shadows on the walls.

I see a man walking in front of me. He’s tall, a bit on the lanky side, but what strikes me is the way he walks, calm, like his feet know where he’s going without looking down. He doesn’t stand completely straight, just like my friend Angelo. I follow behind him till I stumble upon a courtyard tucked away between two buildings and shaded by trees. As I’m drawn in to sit down, I notice the Romanesque building to my left is Macerata’s equivalent of my university’s journalism building. The building is a place where on Ball State’s campus I go to write, which I am about to do there in that little nook.

I sit feeling at ease even though it isn’t the Art and Journalism Building or Letterman. My eye catches a professor teaching behind glass windows in one of the upper classrooms. He talks with his hands in a way that reminds me of my French teacher, only I’m too far away to read the shapes his mouth makes. I hear the familiar scrape of chairs against stone floors through an open window, and wonder if they are rearranging their seats in a circle to engage in discussion more easily a technique we use in my creative writing class.

My attention wavers as a motorbike sputters in the distance. It’s the same sound as my dad’s mower before he cuts the grass. As it fades I hear the pound of a hammer and I’m taken back to just weeks before when my mom was hanging a picture she found at the Fortville flea market. The bus that passes has the exact sound of my grandma’s school bus coming around the curve of the road before it backs into her driveway. Is Macerata really that far from where I come from? Its scenery is different, but its language is the same.

Here in Macerata, I live out of bags the same as in Indiana. Here graffiti covers the walls like it does the trains that block my path on Main Street. Here the clock chimes every hour like the bell tower of Ball State holding a similar tune. Here the flag flies blue with a yellow circle of stars like Indiana’s. In a place where I should feel as far from home as possible, I don’t.

I sit in a park surrounded by strangers, the music fading into the night sky above me, my face buried in my knees, I cry. A couple crouches down next to me and the man asks what’s wrong. I tell them I’m homesick. His thumb touches my cheek to catch a stray tear, reminding me of the time my friend Jon did the same thing as I sobbed on a sidewalk. Only this man smiles, pinching my cheek, and tells me to make Macerata home.

I return to my friends, some from Indiana, some from Macerata, whom I never would’ve known unless I traveled to this foreign yet familiar place. Then, on the steps of Giardini Diaz in Macerata, with strangers and friends surrounding me I make my own home.