Alix: Nothing matters but love—and the smell of wild fennel

In July, I went on a sabbatical. It was four weeks long and often boring.

Not in a bad way, nor a good way—just in a plain, boring way. I had expected it, planned it to be so. 

I held off from taking my sabbatical for a while, as I would with an item of clothing that feels too special to ever wear. I fantasized about it during the lockdown: I wanted to do the month-long Camino de Santiago in Spain, go on a flower arranging retreat (does such a thing exist? It feels like it should), visit a new country. I wanted to do Vipassana meditation, write poems, visit friends.

A month is a long time, and I felt a responsibility to make the most of it. But a month is also a short time—nothing I could realistically do with it seemed quite enough.

Annoyingly, underneath my anxious desire to architect the perfect month off ran the sneaky discomfort of having time at my own mercy—an oyster for myself, and myself alone. Whatever plans I made, they would be for one; that was, perhaps, why they ultimately felt unsatisfactory. The line between independence and loneliness is thin. Holidays, I find, smudge it easily. 

But earlier this year, when I got vaccinated and the world began to thaw, I found I didn’t want the wild vax summer everyone seemed to be rushing toward with boundless pent-up energy. I felt deflated, aimless. What I wanted was: nothing. 

So I scheduled my sabbatical, though I had not come up with a good plan for it. I bought tickets for Sardegna—a Mediterranean paradise—where my sister had booked a holiday for her family and my mother. And I planned nothing.

I don’t mean that I left myself open to whatever surprising adventure might come my way. What I did was travel towards weeks of a predictable, uneventful seaside routine with my family, where all rhythms were dictated by the needs of its most perfect member, my baby nephew. 

My days went by all alike, punctuated by a sunny commute between our apartment and the beach. Sometimes, my mom would come with me, for a couple of hours; in the cooler time of the day, my sister would join, too, with her family. But mostly, I was alone.

I had left with a somewhat romantic idea of seeking boredom, and I found it. It was not fun. There were times I felt a void rise in my stomach like a tide, drowning me in restlessness. I could hear my thoughts after a long while, and they weren’t so great. I knew it was a luxury to spend all that time with my family, and no joy compared to seeing my nephew's excitement at my sight grow bigger by the day, a reminder that love needs presence, and time. Yet sometimes I felt acutely aware that being home—home away—was my only option not to plan a month alone. And it embarrassed me. 

So I thought about a lesson I recently learned from kō, Japan's traditional micro-seasons. Each captures a moment in nature—mist starts to linger, rotten grass becomes fireflies, hawks learn to fly—framing time not as an emptiness that derives meaning from our doing, but as the unconcerned movement of the world around us. 

Irises blooming. Fog descending. Salmons gathering to swim upstream. It is routine, uneventful occurrences that define time. I clung onto this comforting perspective as I tried to endure boredom, and quiet the voice inside my head telling me I had failed at not being alone, and at planning much of a sabbatical, because I had failed at having much of a life. 

Because life, it is not a discrete entity. It can’t be much, or little—it either is, or it isn’t. 

Getting too hot in the sun, eavesdropping on other people’s gossip, marveling at the size of the rubber trees, getting lost in a memory and drifting away from my book, becoming familiar with the earthy, slightly sweet smell of fig trees, deciding to get ice cream, deciding not to get ice cream: this all was life, I eventually realized, no more and no less than some big adventure or important achievements. 

So when people ask me what I did on my month off, I still answer not much, but the truth is

The water was crystal and I swam in it; for the first time in forever I went into the deep water, far away from where I could feel the bottom of the sea under my toes
and wasn’t scared

My mother asked me if I remember when we went to Sardegna with my dad, and I was six.
And I remember, don't I, but mostly
her 
sunbathing, ageless, a young mother, a happy wife
a shop, where she bought a bag

I bought a bag 

My brother-in-law treated us to a hilltop dinner. I watched the sunset—a tiny fluorescent dot drowning in the sea—with my nephew in my arms, holding onto me like a baby koala. The live band played a song that was the soundtrack of my childhood, crackling from my parents’ record player

On the roadside, baby sun rose hugged a cactus, its gentle leaves unperturbed by the thorns
because love finds a way

One evening I ran to the supermarket to buy tonic water—my mother and I drank big bottles of it
two clerks absentmindedly sang along a feminist song that came on the radio as they restocked the aisles
it could have been a movie 

I boarded a boat with dozens of strangers
the crew served us pasta and an old sailor fed the leftovers to seagulls; he just stretched his arm out of the dock and emptied a bowl in the water
a faraway flock flew over and ate up the penne in an instant.
Birds have excellent eyesight
seagulls, undiscerning appetite

A woman passed me on a bike and greeted me with joy, then told me she thought I was Elisabetta but I was not! Indeed I was not 

On a white island beach framed by thorny bushes, facing a sea of melted turquoise
I was reclining on my towel when I noticed, right at my side, 
a wild boar
looking at me, looking at it
walk away

The face recognition software on my phone kept confusing my mother my sister and me
The highest praise

I fell asleep on the beach even though I had slept plenty
I had no good dreams left, only ones that woke me up, breathless
stranded in the crowd
I was still laying on my belly when I felt little feet on my back
I turned to see my sister holding my nephew above me
we all smiled the same smile 

I watched my sister be a mother

I found a house that looked abandoned
the garden was overflowing 
fig trees heavy with ripening fruit
citrus plants
bougainvillea
I pictured a life in it
like happiness, it smelled of wild fennel

Daily, for an instant at least, my baby nephew’s face reminded me of someone I hadn’t seen in decades. My dad

📸: Aida Muluneh, WaterAid (backstage)

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🖊: T. S. Eliot, Ash Wednesday

Because I know that time is time
And place is always and only place
And what is actual is actual only for one time
And only for one place

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🎼: Colapesce Dimartino, Musica Leggerissima
In Italian, the name for pop music is musica leggera; it means light music. This one is the lightest. 
 

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📚: Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook

What’s terrible is to pretend that the second-rate is the first-rate. To pretend that you don’t need love when you do; or you like your work when you know quite well you are capable of better.

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🌿: Wild fennel, foeniculum vulgare, is a native Mediterranean plant. Its ancient Greek name was μάραθον (marathon). The Plain of Marathon, where 490 BC the battle between the Persian and the Greek occurred, after which the first-ever, one-person marathon was run, was covered in fennel. 

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🐰: This issue of Alix was brought to you by warm beverages drank from a bunny-shaped mug, courtesy of Anne Quito. Like any and all bunnies, and like this newsletter, it actually belongs to Lauren Alix Brown.

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