5 AM, a blue dawn. I open the green shutters. I have decided to watch the sun rise on a midsummer morning in Florence. It has been years since I’ve done this. From my window I can see a custard yellow wall and some terracotta roof tiles tinged by an indigo light.
There is a well-known piazzale on the other side of the river, a spot frequented by tourists at sundown. The piazzale is raised and offers an overview of the city and surrounding hills. If it’s good for sunset, I reason with myself, then surely it will be good for sunrise. This makes sense to me. I will hold on to the things that make sense to me.
As I enter the street in the blue almost-dawn, I feel like the only person in Florence. Thank God, a reasonable temperature. Thank God, solitude and space. Quiet. I don’t need to be funny or smart or engaging. Everything is old on my street and I am walking on a film set before call time.
Why do I want to watch the sun rise? Of course, it will be beautiful. It’s summer, it’s Italy, how could it not be? But there is more to it than that, I think.
I recall climbing onto our roof in Cape Town with a cup of coffee to watch the sunrise in the east. It was a moment of my own. This ritual gave me a unique sense of wellbeing as if I myself were a solar-powered vessel charging up, refuelling some spiritual source. I wouldn’t have to do anything at all. I could simply sit and the sun would rise. It was certain. Surety. Something magical that I didn’t have to do anything to manufacture.
I liked how the sun was slow to come out at first but once she broke the horizon, there was nothing stopping her. Her ascent was assured, confident, buoyant even.
Even when she was draped in a cloud, she gave it a golden lining. Like a kintsukuroi pot, the Japanese art of “golden joinery.” A dazzling fracture. Sometimes, when my mom would drive us to school, I would see such a cloud with some of the sun’s rays peeking through. I used to think these were the elegant fingers of God (or Mother Earth or some other higher power) caressing the Earth.
On the roof of our house in Cape Town, I felt as if there was a USB port in the centre of my chest. If I was feeling low or flat, all I’d have to do was head up to the roof at sunrise and open my chest. Thus, an imaginary cable would connect my being to the sun and charge me up like a battery.
Out on the street, I see a group of four young people. I can tell they are the out-all-nighters. Or the all-out-nighters. They laugh and lean against the wall overlooking the Arno. Everyone looks so beautiful in this blue light. Young, hopeful, the good kind of tired.
Again, I have the same sense that I’m on a quest from a time gone by. As in Monte Argentario where I followed the clues (a yellow house at the end of the road) to get to the beach. Now, I’m chasing the sunrise. It is a race between me and the sun. The sun will rise and I will walk up the hill. Surety. Something entirely of my own.
I pass a fountain on my way to the piazzale. I have, almost compulsively, been throwing copper coins into fountains in Italy. An action like a spell, an incantation. A symbolic ritual repeated over and over with the same objects, the same intentions. To lighten the load of coppers in my purse while attempting to lighten the metaphysical load. But not this morning. This morning I choose not to throw a coin into the fountain. I will not make a wish that would surely fail the Bechdel test. What I want is a morning without contingencies.
The sun also rises. And I get a peek into another world. The world of people collecting the coins from those binocular-pole-tourist-view things. A cascade of coppers against the early morning quiet. Street sweepers performing street sweeping. A woman in high-visibility orange trousers flings a beer bottle to the ground. It shatters. She keeps going. She uses a leaf blower to blow confetti from the previous night down the hill.
A silhouetted David. Rolling hills in the distance, gradated. Five different shades of flat blue, collaged like torn pieces of paper. Italian teenagers on their bicycles. God, they are so cool.
“If I wanted to,” I think to myself, “I could have this moment again and again every morning for the rest of my life.” How wonderful. No contingencies.
For the longest time I wanted to live in New York. At all costs. A dream so fervent it became who I was. I came close but this dream turned out to be devastatingly contingent upon others. Upon an American man loving me enough. Upon an American company loving me enough. Upon an American embassy texting me back.
So how freeing to stand on a hilltop by myself with my Dutch passport in my back pocket (worth its weight in gold, cheese, and stroopwafels). How freeing to breathe and play with the idea of a permanence that doesn’t feel oppressive but comforting. Like the sound the keys make when you throw them on the table when you return home.
In a strange way, I feel like I have too many choices. And yet, in another sense, the things I really want do not feel like my choice at all. The things I really want (or think I really want) feel, at times, unbearably contingent. In the hands of other people.
Some people have a swear jar. Others have a jar where they put all their spare change. They add to their jars with the hope that they can bank a ritual, passively save up, and then dip into that jar to retrieve something nice for themselves.
I do not have a physical jar. Famously, all my coppers fall to the bottom of my purse and go jingle-jangle, jingle-jangle whenever I need to run to catch a bus.
What I do have, however, is a glass jar in my mind where I collect the quietly beautiful things I’ve seen and felt. I guess it’s a sort of comfort bank. It makes sense to me. Saving up moments of beauty for a blue day.
That indigo sunrise belongs in the jar.
As do sunflowers. In Tuscany, I see field after field filled with sunflowers. The Italian word for sunflower is girasole comprised of two parts – “gira” from the verb “girare” meaning to turn and “sole” meaning sun. Legend has it that when there is not enough sun the sunflowers turn to face each other. The science on this remains to be seen, but one cannot fault the poetry of the image. That poetry belongs in the jar.
I love their sturdy stems, how honest and steadfast these flowers seem. There is something so pure and unwaveringly positive about them. They appear, to me, eternally hopeful.
Old Italian men enjoying themselves on the beach belong in the jar. In Elba, I saw an old man in a blue speedo. He was slinging chunks of bread to the seagulls with all the vigour and grace of an Olympian throwing a discus. His body sinewy, leathery from a life of sun on an Italian island.
The first figs of the summer (from Puglia) belong in the jar. What an unexpected joy. Ripe and purple and plump in my palm. I saw the figs and the choice revealed itself.
Did you know they use stale bread to make a salad in Tuscany? Did you know that it is actually delicious? It shouldn’t work (stale bread in a salad). And yet, in this typical Tuscan summer dish, the bread becomes fresh again. There is a vibrant new life for this bread amongst the peeled cucumber slices, red onions, and vinaigrette. They call it panzanella. A recipe of hope, rebirth, freshness. This recipe belongs in the jar.
Hearing a song for the first time and just knowing it is going to become one of your favourite songs belongs in the jar.
That red kite against the clear blue sky in Baratti belongs in the jar. Strangely, the kite wasn’t flying. Instead, it was pinned to the sky. Static, suspended above time and earth. And yet, the stillness was calming, for both myself and the kite. We were so far away from the restlessness. The kite was so beautiful in its stillness, there was no need for either of us to put on a show. A red diamond pasted to a blue sky, smiling at me like a stingray without a sting.
The jar is so precious, a trove of quietly brilliant things. I’m collecting these things like sea glass so I can turn them around in my mind and admire them whenever I want. Run my fingers over the smooth edges. It’s a balm to hurt, to sadness, even if only for a moment. I dip my hand into the riches and retrieve a handful of gems.
The jar is precious but it is fragile too. Sharing the jar is risky. However, sharing it with the right people shines a spotlight on those gems like never before. They gleam brighter than ever when you share them with someone who truly appreciates the magnitude of their beauty (and by extension, your beauty). It is a magical thing to witness someone fall in love with the way you see the world.
I made the mistake of sharing the jar with the wrong person. I remarked upon an expanse of sunflowers, a silver fish in the Tyrrhenian and was met with a shrug. They may seem like small things but they are my things. This jar sustains me. His dismissal of the sunflowers, the silver fish (amongst other things) made me feel a profound loneliness. If you don’t see the jar, you don’t see me.
I started to feel silly and frivolous for sharing the things that light me up. His inability to appreciate the contents of the jar placed a crack in the jar. The jar was at risk, my precious thing tainted. What if the gems started to lose their lustre because of a crack in the jar?
I finished reading a book so moving I wanted to weep on the beach (a feeling that, oddly enough, also belongs in the jar because my God, the power of art and the human condition!). But I couldn’t share this precious thing or my depth of feeling because I was in the wrong company. I wasn’t alone on the beach but what I experienced was the very depths of loneliness.
I know I would have felt a hundred times more alive and myself if I’d been at the beach alone and finished a breathtakingly beautiful book by myself. I would have sighed out loud and had a weep behind my black sunglasses (movie-star style). It could have been a moment of such raw, unbridled life and feeling that it simply had to be added to the jar. But I couldn’t risk another crack in my jar, another moment of not being seen. So I pushed the feeling down. I told him the book was incredible. He read the back and said that it sounded like a girl book and that he probably wouldn’t read it.
Funnily enough, I was with him when I saw that perfect red kite pinned to the sky. More precisely, he was in the bathroom and I was in a field. Alone. It was a moment of solitude and beauty, untarnished by the wrong audience. He returned from the bathroom. I didn’t share what I had seen because I couldn’t have handled another crack in the jar.
I think that is why I sought out the sunrise. I knew it would be beautiful and I would feel so happy without contingencies. Basking in beauty without any fear of this beauty falling on deaf ears. I needed to replenish the jar.
Him and I broke up. A week later, I ventured up to that same piazzale to watch the sunrise. This time with my parents. And my jar gleamed with the glow of a thousand fireflies. My parents’ appreciation of the sunrise another gem to add to the jar. As the sun rose, out of nowhere a hot air balloon ascended from the river, floating above the city at dawn.
I love so much about this. I love I get to read this after spending time with you in Florence and being familiar with things you describe. As always, a treat! A long awaited treat this time !
Thank you for your vulnerability. Such depth. I’m loving your writing Claire! You have a wonderful ability to encapsulate precious moments in time.