Flying Solo

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Kristina Kasparian | Longreads | February 2024 | 2,513 words (9 minutes)

“Are you traveling alone?” the agent asks as I hand over my passport.

“Yes . . .” A nod would have been louder. “Yes,” I try again, uncurling my shoulders.

I’m out of practice with confidence. I’m out of practice with a lot of things.

It’s late October and I’m flying to Milan to wrap myself in its chestnut-scented fog. I’m headed back to the city where I lived in my 20s, because I miss it, because I miss myself.

I move my carry-on behind my knees, partly to hide its size but mostly to stabilize myself. I’m such a fool; my angst is totally self-inflicted.

I must’ve been about 5 when my dad drove me to a playground to meet a friend. He parked across the street from a house that had just burned down. I have always been petrified of fire; I usually avert my eyes from anything to do with it. Somehow, that day, I forced myself to study the scarred skeleton in a curious, steady analysis of hurt.

I am prepared to mourn myself the same way in Milan by staring the loss straight in the face.

Just how much has this illness engulfed?

“Let it all in,” Ethan said earlier as we pulled into the drop-off lane. “I think you’ll find that your nerves are also excitement.”

In our 20 years together, I’ve never had to justify to Ethan that I feel six emotions in one breath. While so many others shame me for my emotionality, he considers it a gift. By all, he means: the joy, the pride, the grief, the fear, the giddiness, the awkwardness, the loneliness, the triumph.

He’s right—I am excited. I’ve planned a homecoming not only to Milan but to my other beloved northern Italian places: Cinque Terre and Venice, on opposite coasts.

“You’re planning to do all that? On your own?” My loved ones are concerned. They’ve witnessed every act in my drama, every tango between force and fragility. I’ve done it before; do they think I can’t do it again? Their doubts become mine. Or maybe they were mine all along.

I live on the fault line at the intersection of two axes—illness and wellness—and two planes: what is and what could have been. My body is the most unpredictable factor in every day. My decisions, however mundane, involve a constant negotiation of energy. My time is dissected into pacing and pushing, with episodes of hurling myself past the breaking point and paying for it, only to feel a semblance of normal, of able, of the before—if there ever truly was a before, a time when this beast didn’t inhabit me.

Resilience has a cost.

“You’re leaving Ethan alone? Is there food for him in the freezer?” My grandmother’s notion of independence is one thrust onto her as an immigrant and a widow, not an elective independence like mine. “No,” I want to tell her, “but I’ve left him love notes in the sheets and in his boxer drawer.”

Our independence had always been our defining feature; we lived as individuals first and a couple second. Much of our story has unfolded on separate continents, with us chasing our own dreams. We honor our distinct cultures and faiths. Even our wedding bands don’t match—he prefers yellow gold, I prefer white.

My independence also once meant I’d take so many flights a season that I’d fall asleep during takeoff, unfazed—or debilitatingly fatigued, unknowingly, even back then. Predicting my future from the sludgy swirls at the bottom of my cup of Armenian coffee was an easy task for our elders. “There’s a voyage around the corner,” they’d say, seeing open horizons in patterns of coffee grounds, and they were never wrong.

But the weed inside me tethered my organs and bound my ship to its anchor. It suffocated the independence that pulsed through me since I last stood in Milan. I went from winning more scholarships than I could accept to watching my savings dissolve into medical debt. I walked out on a dream career in academia after my PhD and became self-employed to give myself breathing room between surgeries—a “choice” my Italian supervisor called a real shame for the field that had invested in me.

I asked Ethan for more and more: to do my dishes, to run my errands, to support me financially, to speak for me, to bend down for me, to pull up my underwear, to carry me back to bed. He dealt with the stress of being our household’s sole contributor. He dealt with our shared PTSD from medical appointments gone badly. He dealt with us being late to everything because I couldn’t get myself off the toilet. He dealt with our rattled intimacy, with my screams in the night, with the sight of me depleted, pale, immobile. With every thank you and I’m sorry that he collected from me, my individuality unspooled.

Through it all, he’s been more than stoic—he’s been loving. He swaddled me in acceptance long before I could even entertain the idea of acceptance myself. But I often wonder: How fine are we, really? How far can we bend without breaking? And so, when I remember, I refrain from complaining. I try to balance taking with giving. I test how long I can hold out without letting the word “pain” sneak into my sentences. I make myself lovable, to the extent possible. I’ve come to rely so much on Ethan. Do I even make sense without him?

I tuck my boarding pass into my passport. I’m flying solo to test my wings.

There’ll be no one to help lug my suitcase, my groceries, my body. But surely, Milan will feel good. . . . But what if I don’t feel anything at all? What if healing has left fragments and fissures that can’t be made whole? What will Ethan do with his time now that he’s unburdened by me?

My seat on the train into Milan has me going backward. Fitting, I think, to be pulled into my city in reverse, my life on rewind.

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Soon, I have an ornate key in my purse again and my address refers to a peach house with trees sprouting from its rooftop and balconies crowded with pots. Milan is a city of handsome façades and secret universes tucked backstage in interlocking private courtyards, and my neighborhood—Brera—is its artistic heart.

I have a type when it comes to cities; Milan isn’t it. Its dense smog veils the Alps and gives me a chronic cough that only disappears if I go to Switzerland for the weekend. Every intersection is a chaos of squealing trams, cars, scooters, and pedestrians, each fighting for their slice of space. Its only waterfront is along the banks of its murky Navigli canals.

But I grew up here. Milan was my companion as I befriended the voice in my head—the voice that was suddenly so loud when I left my parents’ nest and ventured overseas with a big red suitcase packed with ambition and anxiety. Milan taught me the art of being alone—really alone, before smartphones and social media strapped us into a permanent grid. Without Google Maps in my pocket, I’d rely on my hand-drawn scribbles of cross streets or, if I was feeling brave, my instinct. As we got to know one another, Milan grew smaller. Locals began asking me for directions. Dinner for one became comfortable, even romantic. I was unbothered by glances and poised for inspiration. I was free.

Milan raised me to believe I could do and be anything. To have had that and to have lost it might be worse than never having had it at all.

When I step out, it feels as though I’m walking inside my mind, opening drawers and boxes I sift through often in my daydreams. I let my senses fill with all that used to be mine, and my chest might just burst open. I comb the streets that I knew better than those of my hometown. I didn’t expect such fuzzy memory traces. I know this once mattered, but I can’t tell why. I’ve forgotten the order of the subway stops. Left here, right there. Yes, now I remember. Milan is motor memory—a sequence of dance moves that primes the next, lyrics that form on my lips before my brain even wipes off their dust. I’ve tripped here, on this tram line, on this raised cobblestone. I’ve written in my journal here, laughed with friends there. I’ve photographed this angle, these shadows, that door. But I ached less then and my heart had fewer locked rooms.

Who knows how many times these shops and restaurants have changed before this iteration. I recognize the awnings and logos of the mainstays, but for all that’s new, only the structure of the space seems familiar—the bones, not the body. A whole new neighborhood has sprung tall with buildings that show no bruises or wrinkles. Milan is more vibrant than it was a decade ago. Am I?

I notice the uncertainty around my eyes in my selfies. I catch glimpses of my body in store windows—hunched, soft, off-kilter. I imagine the younger me reflected, slender and serene, maybe even sexy. I can feel traces of her lingering on these same street corners and in the routines I settle back into. I feel like I’m acting, playing her part.

The story of city and self is often intertwined; where we loved, where we lost, where we came alive. When my nostalgia swells, I wonder what I’m missing: the back then of Milan, or of me? I’m resistant to changing my rituals, to deviating from the script. I order the same gelato, take the same shortcut, sit in my same spot on the fountain and on my bench in the park. I want to stick to what I used to do and who I used to be.

My Italian is an atrophied muscle. I realize, when I meet my friends, that it has serious gaps: surgery, ovaries, miscarriage, egg donor, surrogate. These words were not in my dreamer’s vocabulary at 22. I also don’t pass as Italian anymore. I used to shock locals by revealing that Italian was not part of my mixed lineage. Here, I was a chameleon with my dark features and my accent, my otherness strangely more visible at home, in Québec, a province obsessed with monolingualism.

Sadly, though, French has changed my vowels and endo has changed my bowels. I can no longer repeatedly eat bread or pasta without consequences. I need more bathroom breaks and more downtime. I travel with my hot water bottle. My clothing is looser, longer. I’ve traded my heeled suede boots for sneakers that fare better with Milanese puddles and my tingling feet. On days where rain is imminent, I take pleasure in leaning on my umbrella for extra support. Before I unpacked, I moved a dining room chair into the entrance so I can sit while I tie and untie my shoes. When I go to the market to buy myself flowers, they call me signora instead of signorina.

I’ve aged before having aged.

But my Italian friends claim they don’t see it. “Ma non sei cambiata! Sei sempre la stessa!” They marvel at how I haven’t changed. I admit, that makes me happy. There’s a strange sense of pride in staying the same—consistent, unscathed. We are conditioned to grow, but not to age, to blossom, but not from wounds.

When I meet my friend Stella for lunch, we share our shortcomings over orecchiette. Stella has her own invisible disability to accommodate—a crippling fatigue that has been her shadow for years, wedging itself between her wants and her cans. With the Italian lunch hour whirling around us, we are cradled in a confessional safe haven. We talk about how foreign our bodies feel sometimes and how our truth inconveniences others. The need to draw boundaries to nurture ourselves is often isolating. Stella is more practical with her grief than I am, at least today. “When people ask, ‘how are you?’ I say, ‘I can tell you, but you won’t like the answer!’” We laugh, though we are both unsure how to navigate a society that conflates being real and being negative. Fifteen years ago, we had academia in common. Now, this.

The way I dreamed up this quest was fueled by my internalized ableism—to check if I can, to be disappointed if I can’t. My grandmother’s resilience is entrenched in my concept of self-worth. That life is meant to be endured with a brave face, and that rest—much like praise—is earned by plowing through pain. “Look what I managed to do at 92” is the underlying message of our evening chats when she tells me about her windows, floors, and thriving plants. “That’s more than I can manage in a day at 38,” I chuckle, secretly worried about getting to 92. My own look-what-I-managed-to-dos are photos texted to Ethan. I get a thrill when he’s proud of me, when he sees me on my own two feet, doing what I love. The snapshots don’t show the abandoned climbs, the turn-backs, the breathlessness.

Milan is my timepiece, my meter of selves past. I was prepared for my return to sting.

But I remind myself of what it is taking me a decade to unlearn: it’s not all or nothing. There’s triumph in staying in, in saying no, in resting before feeling floored, in getting groceries in three trips, in choosing the later train or no train at all. My limits make me more intentional. I start to send Ethan pictures not only of the things I did do, but also those I deliberately didn’t do and felt at peace not doing. I shift my attention to being instead. I can’t shake my limitations, but I can shake the shame and the inner turmoil. I can let my joy take the edge off the grief. It’s not about testing my wings, but about recalibrating them. I was and still am free.

I swing by the pasticceria for my usual brioche oozing with custard cream. I stand at the bar, face-to-face with a large mirror. I don’t like what I see, so I look down. No, that feels cowardly; I force myself to meet my gaze. I’m on this trip to spend time with myself, after all. Between sips of my cappuccino, I study the lines, the signs of swelling, the double chin that belongs to my mother. And when I least expect it, my insecurity melts into a smile.

I lean into Milan. I feel my posture lengthen and my jaw muscles soften. I was afraid the now would override the then. But her Milan coexists with my current Milan; my new rituals won’t erase hers. We are two selves, threaded close.

It was never supposed to be the same; I’ve become too much to go backward. Though I’m still reluctant to pick a new favorite gelato, on my next train ride, I make sure to choose a forward-facing seat.

Kristina Kasparian (@alba.a.new.dawn) is an emerging writer, neurolinguist, and health activist advocating for social justice in health care, especially for disabling conditions like endometriosis. Her writing on identity has been published by Roxane Gay (Emerging Writer Series), Catapult, Newsweek, Fodor’s, the Globe and Mail, and a number of travel and literary magazines. Visit her website at kristinakasparian.com.

Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands
Copyeditor: Krista Stevens