By Eric Millman

As I write this, I sit in a lovely, if rented, apartment with my family in perhaps the most picturesque city in the world.

I listen to ancient, tinny music on my pristine, though slightly aged, computer, and while these fingers are eons wiser than they were in mid-August 2006, they are simply incapable of saying what I need them to.
This is the beauty of writing, these feelings the glory of travel.

My year abroad has officially ended, one having proved to be what all of those other petty twenty-one years had been working towards, and if I seem forlorn and abstract in my reflections, I urge you to try these feelings on, for size or otherwise.

What might one write of the single most transforming experience of one’s life? Every adjective will lack sheen, every superlative proper expression, and no matter how hard I may try to urge you, your brother, or that of my best friend, to follow the footsteps of the brightest of our generation, I can’t come close to getting you there.

For many, studying abroad is breaking free, seeing sights, waking up in your own vomit, or simply the most superior form of education available today. For me, it was all of this, but most importantly, it was everything that I’m unable to express or even broach, a multitude of significances buried deep in the parts of my body that even my own brain is unable to access. Isn’t that beautiful?

My dad is now falling asleep. My brother is trying to acquire Internet access, my mom cleaning up dinner, and I’m working on a bottle of a most deliciously inexpensive Bordeaux.

I look out the window and see the Eiffel Tower, my ears filled with Trenet and Aznavour and Montand and Piaf, and yet I think only of my beloved Firenze.

I think of the temporary friends from Fall Semester, of my a-bit-more-formal-than-I-would-have-liked Italian professors (of Cosimo’s shared love of Tom Waits, Lee’s passion for baseball, Gloria’s cookies and tea), of Alessio and Aloush at the Michael Collins Cellar Bar, and of my roommates, each of who I expect will be lifelong friends.

I look out the window at this stunningly incomparable town and dream of returning here one day, and yet the mark of that Red & White fleur-de-lis remains indelible.

True, Florence is Pesto Fresh in my head, a yearlong memory still undefined by proper retrospect, but I already fear that these memories, these emotions, might stay with me forever, and right at the front of it all.

More, I fear that those memories will fade into single dimensions, mere snapshots in a photo album, driving me to live in a vibrant, if distant past. This is an inevitability of age, I suppose, but dealing in such inactivity seems to conflict with the mentality that helped make such fabulous memories to begin with, therefore being something I’m not anxious to allow to happen quite so quickly.

At the point of departure, I painted myself as content but not happy, individualistic but not daring, and the idea of traveling 4,000 miles was enough to make me convince myself that I would be miserable in the transition.

This, against all expected, did not occur, a trend of negation that carried into my dreams of lingual fluency. All of these goals and expectations I had built up were trashed the minute I stepped off the plane, and to see myself so content and complete today – as far as a foolhardy twenty-two year old might hope to be, anyway– makes nothing else matter.

Of course, I was lucky. Quickly, I found the greatest apartment in the city (Lungarno Archibusieri is the address), had the kindest landlady in history, and found myself in a program full of like-minded, good-hearted, deliciously diverse peers, but to give myself credit, you make yourself.

If you’ve come this far, either geographically or merely in the decision-making process, keep that momentum coming: visit cities you can’t find in your guide book, lie to yourself, make friends with the Florentines.

I have explored these ideologies but in theory mostly, yet the beauty of it is that it doesn’t end here, and I will be able to shun hypocrisy in my future travels, little by little.

Everything in this world works against us succeeding in such ventures, I’m learning, but they are worth it.

I know this and I can’t explain why.

So, my friends, you, like me, find yourself at a crossroads. You will come to Florence; you will be nervous and scared or proactive and brilliant or wild and stupid.

You may regularly echo the hallowed exhibitions of the Uffizi, urinate at the foot of the Bronzed David like the true dipsomaniacal student abroad, or quote L’auberge Espagnole like The Bible.

You might do a million things, and you might do nothing, but hell, unless you are completely without, you will find yourself inexplicably changed, and that just might be everything.

All I plead is that you give yourself the chance.

(July 2007- Written by Eric Millman, California State University in Florence )

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