I came back. Not because I hadn’t seen enough the first time. I came back because I needed to know whether what I had felt was real, or just the relief of arriving in a beautiful place at the exact moment I was ready to be surprised. The first journey had been like a breath, unexpected and necessary. The kind of breath that reminds you that air exists. I did not come back to recover something I had lost, but to go deeper into something I had just begun to understand.
I left Rome feeling empty. I am not a calm man: restlessness is my natural state, the ground I stand on. I left carrying other things with me as well. The particular weight of a father who still does not know how to be one. The distance that grows between a parent and his children when neither knows how to cross it, not out of indifference, but because of something harder to name.
During the journey, in the suspended moments between one airport and another, I silently felt a fear: the fear of disappointment, of not finding again the peace and serenity I had felt during the first trip.