Midnight in Tuscany

 

I often drift and dream about a life past the city lights and congestion, where music suitable to my mindset drifts outside store doors and onto cobbled streets. I often see myself engaged in the reality of the more-to-life state of mind and I put myself there every day. When days seem too hot to run in or too cold to enjoy nature’s gifts, I do what I was born to do: write. I write about what life would be like if fresh bread from the town bakery filtered the air instead of smoke, or if wind chimes aided to my presence instead of car horns or screaming babies. I prefer to create stories with my thoughts and fantasies, over my reality; it’s a more attractive reflection of what I am. This story which is what I call life, is a never ending storytelling process of the mind that although keeps changing, cannot go back and be erased. As a writer, I tend to contemplate about my past and recreate situations that I can smile about instead of frown. For 25 years of my life, I have sought out my passion as a writer and in turn, have only started to begin this long, strenuous and although lonely journey, it is still my journey and it is filled with adventure and drive. Part of my drive came from a very young age where writing was my only escape and has long since turned into my profession where I am allowed to wake up every day and embrace this gift because in reality, it isn‘t a profession/job but more of a fixation; something I was born to do. Part of my drifting is to seek those who are dreamers as myself and encourage and enlighten them to take that step forward and thrust into a world of words and expression. As a 6th grade Language Arts teacher, I have found it enthralling that a large amount of my students want to carry on their passion as I did and write books. After a few of my students bought my self-published poetry book, I had realized that it wasn’t only because I had introduced them to a world of poetry, but because they looked at me and realized that at this tender age, I am limitless. They saw the fervor in my eyes whenever I taught them poetry and other styles of writing and embraced my love for words. They continuously embrace the kaleidoscope of colors I forever install into their brains when I show them what beautiful ways you can say the simplest things. With dreams of fulfilling this within adults in a college-sized classroom and non-physically through the text of my novels, it is with great dignity that I attempt to bring forth those talents, who like me, think outside the box and onto paper. It was when the warm, hazy California air squeezed its way through the palm trees, did I see another side of what my dreams allowed me to see. It wasn’t the gentle sway of the palm trees, the sounds of nearby airplanes jetting across the sky or even the rumbling of the streetcar tires on the pavement that aided to my attention, but of the friendly smiles that carelessly spread across the faces of strangers I won’t ever remember that brought me to a new surface of writing. To write about a smile is like writing about how fast your heart felt when you smelled the cologne or perfume of your love as they walked past you. I had written about something so obscure as that before. And that’s where another part of me started to believe that there was more to life than my congest city streets. It’s something I think about while I sit back under the summer sun, and drink my cold and sweet glass of familiar. One of the things I have often thought about was using my passion and love for writing and utilizing that toward something I take part in pretty often; wine drinking. Wine itself is like literature. If it’s classic and makes you feel expressive and speak in poetics, than you know it’s worth giving yourself up to. Italy is a place where I will be able to look inside my glass as I sit on the corner at the café and up at the sky and say, “I can drift and dream forever, but it’s the reality of my dreams that will always keep me writing.”