My ears rang with the pop of each burst of light over Piazza
Michel Angelo.
I took a deep breath in, filling my lungs with the crisp
Italian air. I felt a squeeze on my arm. I looked to my right. Maggie had tears
in her eyes.
“We leave in 7 hours.” Her voice could barely be heard over
the fireworks. The tears shined blue, then red, then green.
“Don’t,” I pleaded stepping away from her. “7 hours is a lot
if you think about it.”
“Yeah, if you think really hard.”
This life of wine, spaghetti, trains, love, language, and
exploration is over.
I thought I would want to leave. I thought being with Maggie
for six straight months would drive me mad. We weren’t friends until we got
here. We wouldn’t be friends when we got back.
I was surrounded by people, shoulder to shoulder on the
Ponte alla Grazia watching the festival of lights but I felt so isolated. I can’t
leave. I couldn’t leave.
“Hey,” I knew his voice before turning around. His hand hit
my hip like an electric shock. When I could finally look at him he had his arm
around Maggie too.
“What should we do for 7 more hours?” I asked.
“What could we not do in 7 hours?” He had a point.
Experience an entire city in 7 hours and do all of the things we forgot to do
throughout the months.
“Yes.”
“Will we make it?”
“I don’t know.”
This semester we have had to keep up with our blog, incorporating a different blog into or own each week. These assignments challenged us in a way I have never had to think before. When reading my partners blog I had to think of a way to extend my own blog, keeping my current theme while also weaving in the theme of my partner. I have never had so much fun with a project before. Every time I started out writing, my blogs always took a turn I didn’t expect, following closely to my partner’s post or drastically differing while still maintaining the theme. The article on Benjamin talked about the representation of an imposter and how if something is a replica of something then is it truly art? These assignments made us somewhat replicate a certain post and somehow make it our own. This stretched your mind in a different way each week, because no two blogs are the same and each week you are given a different partner, there is no telling where your blog will go. My original post started out as a longing for adventure and a thirst for something more and from the different blogs I interacted with the more it morphed into an unhappy love story. I had never intended for my blog to go that way, in fact, I had planned out most of my blog entries when I heard of the blog assignments and knew exactly where I wanted it to go. Looking back over my entries, each one of them surprises me. They start out with the same excitement that the first one did and as you read on, they begin to fall, sometimes in a good way but, in reference to my last entry, in a bad way. Everything can’t be a happy ending. Being paired with this last partner made me change everything I had led up to. This post shows the uncertainty and the unhappiness of something so wonderful ending. This semester of blog entries has really helped my writing as well as my critical thinking. I wish there had been more of them and we could really see the blog entries come full circle. To disagree with Benjamin, I think that if there had been more and the blogs have come full circle, the entire collection of Blogs could be considered an artwork instead of each individual blog. Since it becomes a collaboration, all of us have worked to create a thread that would run through to connect every blog.
ReplyDelete