A Letter to Rome: Embracing Freedom and Self-Discovery

Rome,

I came to you thinking you were going to make me productive.

That sounds strange to write down now, but it is true. I landed with a plan. I was going to walk your streets and something in me would crack open and the words would finally come. I brought my whole self to you, but I also brought my whole habit of needing to prove that I was worth being in Rome. I would stand in a piazza feeling something real move through me, and before it even finished moving, some part of me was already asking what am I going to say about this. So here is my letter to you, Rome.

You did not give me anything to write. Not at first at least. And I panicked about that.

Then I climbed the Spanish Steps. I sat at the top for more than an hour, looking out over you, and I thought about a version of myself from years ago who could not have imagined a day like this one. A woman who spent a long time just trying to get through the day, who would not have believed she could ever feel this free. I thought about her sitting here now, on your steps, on a trip she used to only dream about, completely on her own, completely free.

I could not hold it. I cried without deciding to and I let my tears fall upon you, oh Rome.

That was the first time I understood you were not going to give me content. You were going to give me my life back, in one long look, and ask me to just receive it.

A man with whom I took a Vespa tour told me to put my phone away one night and just wander. He gave me three instructions, and I have not been able to stop thinking about any of them since. Walk with intention, because your traffic does not forgive people who are not paying attention. Stand up tall, because that is how you move through a city like you belong in it. And look up, because the beauty in you is not hiding, it is just above eye level from where most people are staring at their screens.

I did all three. I let myself get lost in your streets, Rome. I walked without knowing where I was going, and somewhere in that walking my whole body changed. Goosebumps came up my arms for no reason I could name. I felt my face smile before I decided to smile. A few times my eyes filled and I let them. It felt like floating, like something in me had finally put down a weight I did not know I was carrying.

I have thought a lot about those three instructions since. They were about crossing your streets, but they were also about the rest of my life. Walk with intention, so I stop drifting through my own days waiting for something to happen to me. Stand up tall, because I have spent enough of my life making myself smaller than the room, and I do not have to do that anymore. I am allowed to take up the space I am standing in. And look up, because the beauty was never something I needed to go find. It was already there, on every corner, in every wall you have ever built. I just had to be willing to look up.

That is the part I keep coming back to. I did not create the beauty in you, Rome. I did not earn it. I only had to stop long enough to receive it. And once I let that in, I understood something else too, something I had been carrying without realizing it. I have spent years waiting for the good in my life to end, like happiness was borrowed and the bill was going to come due. In you, for the first time, that waiting went quiet. I stopped scanning the horizon for the next hard thing. I let myself believe that life is allowed to be good, and that good does not have to be followed by a punishment. It can just keep being good.

I have spent a long time believing that I only get to feel worthy when I have earned it, when I am fighting for something, building something, showing something. In you, for the first time, I practiced the opposite. I let a city be beautiful and let myself take it in without needing to do anything with it afterward. I did not know that was a practice I was capable of until I was standing in the middle of it.

By the last few days I stopped trying to earn you. I walked your streets in the evenings with nowhere to be and nothing to produce, and that was the first time in longer than I can remember that being was enough on its own.

Here is what I am bringing home from you, Rome. Walk with intention. Stand up tall. There is beauty everywhere, if I am willing to look for it. And I am allowed to receive it without having to earn it first, without waiting for the good to run out.

Thank you for not giving me what I asked for. Thank you for giving me what I actually needed.

I will come back. With Love,

Mariana.