Summer Vacay, 2021. Day 10

The Face

August 13, 2021

I know I’ve seen this feeling before. It’s personified by the face of Jean Luc Picard in “The Inner Light” from Star Trek, and I’m living that face right now. I had no idea when I saw this episode ten years ago that I would someday understand it so completely.

It’s the look of “Wait, what?”

Picard had just regained consciousness after experiencing a lifetime as someone else; 40 years as a father and family man on a distant planet. He opens his eyes, back to his “before” reality, that of a commander of a star ship. He sits up. We see his expression, the granular reckoning of understanding as it clears its way through the bewilderment. He has lived not one, but two lives. And that’s the face.

It’s a profound moment on freakin’ Star Trek, omg.

In the last two weeks* Sandy and I established a new domicile in Italy, and I just flew off and left him in it as a plan we put into motion 18 months ago comes to fruition. It has cellos, ancient buildings, and a new slate. I’m on a plane skating through turbulence over Greenland going back to the other home, the one with cats, a glorious garden, and history. But no Sandy. I am moving between old and new worlds and my psyche can’t keep up:

Wait, what?

I got up at 3:30am tomorrow morning, 9 hours ahead of time now. I guess I could argue this hasn’t happened. But one look at the empty seat next to me on the plane confirms, the reality is real.

Thank you all for your love and support and for following this series. I will be transferring it to my new blog, the one I promised I’d set up after my last adventures with Sandy in Europe in 2019, but got lost in the shuffle of COVID. It was a Herculean effort as I consolidated almost all my writings from the last ten years that were scattered across numerous platforms.  I had planned to announce it six months ago . . . and here we are. It has over 125 entries and if you want to check it out before I finally announce it, you can visit it at www.TheresaElliottblog.com.

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*Note: We have been working on this project for 18 months. It has morphed at least three times and there were many hoops to jump through, including getting year round Italian VISA’s. Sandy will stay predominantly in Lucca as he works on his next books. It is only in the last two weeks that we now see the physical manifestation of that final plan.

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