then we saw the stars again

We’ve been having such a glorious weekend. Just when you thought you were done with bermudas and sandals for the year, there come perfectly blue skies and unbelievably golden sunlight, so sharp you can almost touch it.

Those are some of the most beautiful days you could ever live.

10 years ago, we woke up in our apartment. Our home. We had decided to move in together over the summer that we had spent apart, and were getting accustomed with the familiarity that comes with it: the imprints of our heads on the pillows, the arrangement of the toothbrushes, the rituals of a shared breakfast. This was the first attempt at domesticity for the two of us, and we were falling in love with the 200 year-old house, its creaking floorboard and large, bright windows.

I had spent the summer worrying that I wouldn’t have been able to return to the States after my one-year (read: non-renewable) contract at Brown. My university clearly wanted me back, yet I wasn’t sure that Lyon was where I wanted to be anymore. But luck has its own ways and sneaks up on you when you least expect it, and all of a sudden things were looking good. I was going to start teaching my own Italian course in Roger Williams University, in a small campus by the water on the way to Bristol.
I remember the first time I took the RIPTA bus to meet the Chair of the department. Trees and water everywhere, old wooden houses and open lawns, people greeting you as you pass them by: Southern New England at its most pleasant and refined.

It was going to be a good year.

We woke up early. The ivy on the window turned our bedroom into a shadow play, golden and green and amber. And blue, blue everywhere: the late Summer sky, the Providence River, the Atlantic. I remember wondering how much blue it would take to ever get tired of it. That Tuesday morning really was magnificent.

And then it happened.

It took a while to make sense of it all. If at all.
A very good friend of ours from NYU stayed at our place for a while. We talked about many things, but not that. Not then. And still our silences would fill the gaps we knew we feared. Life as we knew it had changed. Everything did.
And yet people have to move on, as impossibly painful as it may seem.
And yet people need familiarity. People want normalcy.

For us, it was a cat.

We named our first cat Horatio. Hamlet’s most loyal friend, his survivor and witness.
Horatio was born on the week of 9/11, and welcoming him into our lives seemed to be the one thing that made sense. There was nothing ideological, nothing political: just a black and white kitten, an old house and a creaky floorboard under his tiny paws.

And hope.