Life abroad, attempting to carve a niche into a foreign place, amidst foreign people is a difficult and ever exhausting task. Every day is a struggle, one of the best struggles I have ever been blessed enough to take part in, but still a struggle all the same. Every day is a battle, some more successful than others, but even the battles lost are they in themselves a victory. Making the leap over seas is a thousand steps forward, to lose a day is maybe ten steps back. No matter how many days don’t go my way, I am still over 6000 miles successfully out of my comfort zone. Every step I take treads new ground. I am stretching and growing and that can be a painful process, but one I gladly undergo knowing I will emerge a different person forged by fire.

Exhausted is a word I don’t think I have ever used as much as I have this last week. Mentally, physically, and emotionally exhausted. It is easy to say that, but hard to explain that I have probably never been happier. It is the exhaustion of a day well spent. Bone tired, fall into bed with your clothes still on exhausted, but all the while knowing, deeply satisfied in your heart that the exhaustion comes from not a second wasted. This is my everyday.

Today is the mark of my first week completed in Rome. Today was the third day of my intensive Italian Practicum class. Today was the first time I got to take a break. It has been raining almost all week and today I decided to just take a breather. Go home, make myself a cup of coffee and read Moby Dick while watching the rain fall outside. It was a glorious day.

It is so easy to forget to breathe when there is so much to do, so much to see, and so much homework waiting to be done. Sitting in my living room, in my apartment on Cola di Rienzo, leaning on the window sill looking down the street that I now call home with a cracked tea cup full of coffee, I am able to sit back and realize how great the exhaustion is. It has been hard at times to feel excited about being so drained, so tired at the end of everyday, fighting to stay awake and go out and explore. But running my finger across the coffee stained crack in my tea cup I began to understand. This mug was used before me by the previous owner of the apartment, Americans, Romans, I do not know. The remnant of their presence left in the few dishes they left behind, in the earthy colored crack that scarred the porcelain cup. It had seen hardship, it had been marked by whatever had made the crack, some experience unseen and unknown to me that I now saw the aftermath of in a slender mark. It was changed, altered, by what had occurred, but it did not break. It survived as I will survive, even when it gets tough and I feel like I am falling apart at the seams, I will be changed, but never ruined.

So it is with my coffee in hand and a week in Rome behind me that I continue forward excited and anticipatory for what is to come. For now the rain will fall and I will sit, taking in every raindrop as a token, a well appreciated gift.

Ruffled feathers, folded wings tucked neatly away against a lithe black and grey body, a raven sits atop a wind bent tree. The long slender tree sways under the pressure of the coming storm looming in the distance, yet so close on the dark horizon. The raven sits unheeded, the sentry set to duty atop a watch tower made before the brick buildings and red thatched roofs knew their beginning.

It was a cry, a melancholy call that caught my attention. Pulling my gaze away from the landscape to the fellow watcher, the other who gazes beside me posted in his sentry tower like a soldier at hand to a distant calling war. I could barely make out his shape against the dark green of the tree he had made his home in, it was his call that rang clear like a gunshot across the sky. Head thrown forward to utter his wretched cry. But he had the same vantage point as I, as I leaned against the wrought iron railing of the Villa Borghese garden overlook. I had paused in my wanderings around the city of Rome, having traveled from Piazza Navona to the Spanish Steps, finally finding my way to Villa Borghese to stop and watch the sun be swallowed up by the returning storm at sunset.

Rome lay before me in all of its sprawling glory. It is hard to contemplate a scene such as that. A vast city full of endless wonders viewed from a single vantage point that is far removed from the hustle and bustle of every moment happening within that view. Every building, every street, every shop, every alleyway has a separate and entirely unique occurrence in that very moment that I looked upon all of the Historic City Center. Moments I will never see, never know, and never have the pleasure of understanding. All across this city lives are being led. Lives as equally important, if not more important than my own. Not lives like those depicted in movies or reality TV shows; just normal everyday lives like the one I am leading here. It is strange to stand at a viewpoint or an overlook because it is not just a view, and you cannot quite understand what it is you are overlooking. Yet I return to these overlooks all the same because somewhere inside you can feel the heartbeat of every single person in Rome if you just close your eyes and breathe in the breath of a city that seems to be ever exhaling.

It was this multitude of heartbeats that rang out in the cry of a crow. We shared that moment, an animal and I. Strange enough as it sounds, I could not help but look at it and wonder,

Do birds sit on treetops for the view? 

Every moment, for a bird like the one that cried to me, is constantly caught between living a life from the most pristine of vantage points to the squalor of the dirtiest streets, rushing back and forth between uncaring human feet. Did it appreciate the view? Did it see what I saw, did it know the magnitude of what lay before it? Did I?

Tourism is myopic, living is the widening of a vantage point to include the lives of all those around you. To consider the heartbeat of every stranger that may never know, nor care to know yours, in a city that pulses with movement like the pumping of blood through your veins. I keep climbing to the tops of mountains thinking the farther up I go the more I will understand about this labyrinthine city. But what I am beginning to understand is the vantage point of the crow that cries to me. The juxtaposition of the highest trees to the dirty streets, and living unperturbed by elements battering up against me.