Beautiful Ruins

It's been over a year since I went to Italy.  Almost a year and a half.  Every single day of my life, that experience gets further and further away.  Every single time I talk about it on here, the (few) people who read this blog must roll their eyes in exasperation because, Teresa, that was over a year ago.  Every day it gets less relevant to your life.  Every time you bring it up just reinforces the fact that it happened, a long time ago, and now that it's over you have nothing important or interesting to talk about anymore.

Of course, it's all true.  It doesn't affect my day to day life anymore.  People don't ask me about it anymore, and if I do bring it up, I only get polite interest because it was over a year ago for goodness sake. 

But still, I am tearing up as I write this, because I still feel as if I left something important over there.

This is something I'm sure every travel-loving person will tell you.  It's not anything new.  I'm not someone with a particularly special story connected to Italy.  I had a nice trip there, and by the end of 5 weeks, I was ready to go home.

I missed Italy immediately after I got home, of course.  But I was so happy to be back.  And in the weeks immediately following my return, everyone wanted to hear about it, so I was able to relive it over and over again for some time.  

But when people stop caring about it and you realize that you haven't, that's when it starts hurting.  

So this is a post simply to say: Italy is still one of the most important things that has happened to me.

And I never want to forget, not one second of it.