When I was a kid and my parents would talk about stuff that happened “decades” ago, I used to think they were ancient and that I’d never get to that point of referring to time in decade intervals… Boy was I wrong.
I’m not sure when so much time passed, but it did. And today, as I sat hiding in my sunny 15th-floor office with the door closed, writing this neverending proposal, thinking I was so safe from the world, two things happened that discombobulated my world by making me acutely aware of the two bookends of my adulthood and of the numerous and irreconcilable tomes in between. Damn you, Communication Technology! Leave me be!
It was early in the morning. I’d barely been at work for a half hour when I hear the coarse voice of the office secretary crackling on the PA system: “Tirunesh call reception”. What’s going on, I think? I’m just in my office just doing my stuff.
I ring my very excitable Egyptian secretary who says to me frantically, “there is an Italian man with a deep voice who has called four times and he can’t get through to your extension. He sounds desperate to talk to you.” So I ask her to put him through to my phone directly the next time he calls. It’s uncommon that Italian people call me. Sure I’m often reached by Africans of all sorts, but, despite my Italian origins, I have no business in my motherland.
The phone rings a few minutes later.
“Tirunesh?”
“Si?” I reply.
I recognized the voice immediately. How could I not? Every girl remembers the voice (and, incidentally, everything else) about her first love. That one man who, for better or worse, swept her off her feet for the first time in her young life and made her live a love so impassioned, so romantic and so ideal. That one man who perhaps marked her more deeply than any other.
My first romance happened, of course, during a summer spent in my small mountain village in rural Italy. I was 17, idealistic and hopelessly romantic. I was full of life and ideas and boundless energy. I was beginning to understand myself as a sexual being and I was sure that I would take on the world very soon. With one more year of high school left, I was aiming for nothing short of our 2000 solar galaxies. Would I be an astronaut? Would I cure cancer? Would I be a Broadway star? Everything was possible, and I mean EVERYTHING WAS POSSIBLE. I didn’t live in hypothetics. I really believed in my ability to achieve anything. I really believed that I, alone, had the power to change the world. What did I want do change? Who knows? Substance didn’t really matter during that time. Everything was potential energy. All I had to do was harness it and turn it into whatever I wanted. That was the beauty of that age, of that innocence, of that ignorance, of that endless belief in the goodness of humanity and in the power of love.
With all this ammunition in my back pocket, I left my Canada at the end of grade 12 and went to my family’s Italian mountain village for the month of August, not knowing that I would live the most intense and most powerful love of my life.
I had known Sax when I was a young girl. His family who was from Napoli had a summer home in my mountain village and so I’d met him on several occasions. But he was an older boy, and even though I may have thought he was cute when I was 11 and he was 16, I was in no position to understand what to do with that “potential energy” at the time.
Now that i was 17 and ready to explode into womanhood, I needed very little coaxing when this gorgeous 22-year old science student, musician, poet and passionate Napoletano brought me to a vast country field one Italian summer afternoon and kissed me as we contemplated the images that jumped out of the fluffy white clouds.
We proceeded to live out an indescribable romance, a love that, to this day, I can’t make any sense of because I truly believe that it was unique and unreproducible. That story informed everything I was for almost a decade and everything I became.
I became invincible that summer. After years of feeling a little out of place among my peers at school, I found a partner in crime and love, who was equally idealistic, far more irreverent and who unleashed in me that delicious insanity and appetite for extremes that make me the indestructible, spontaneous, insatiable, somewhat iconoclastic, and overly-passionate woman I am today. He imparted his social conscience upon me, which fueled my first trip to the developing world the following year. He made me feel all sorts of wondrous sensations that are very possibly moral crimes in some parts of the world for one so young.
Thirteen years later, he stumbles upon my name and picture online in his work-related research. So he calls me up and we end up reminiscing about that magical time in our lives in which we were all that mattered, in which we lived something so powerful that it would remain within us forever. We had no idea at the time.
Suspended in this bitter-sweet emulsion while at work, I receive another call. A friend from Africa. A man with whom I had a difficult interaction during my last mission. He, a man very engaged in social justice, democratization, human rights, confessed to me when I was last in Africa, that he and his wife had “circumcised” their first-born daughter. I put that term in quotes because it is far worse than the male practice by the same name. It is what we call female genital mutilation and it happens far too readily in the developing world, especially in Muslim countries.
I was so appalled that all my diplomacy flew out the window and I totally let this guy have it. I was shocked! This is a man whom I’ve known for years and who is a leader in so many social justice movements. He is actually part of an anti FGM network! I basically yelled at him, saying that if he, as an educated, liberal man couldn’t break free from his society’s traditions in support of gender rights (not to mention to protect his own daughter), then his society will never change, will never improve. Then I dropped the subject cause I could tell that I probably stepped way over that line of cultural sensitivity.
He called me today to tell me that he had approached his wife to convince her not to subject their second baby girl to the same practice.
Bookends.
Merely Whelmed 