Love, From Amalfi
Just some scribble scribble about love. Yellow Brick Road.
Welcome to Yellow Brick Road, an exploration of the guided path!!
Greetings from Italy!
Maybe listen to this song while you read the newsletter? Could be cute for us.
I think it’s worth noting that today is my 22nd Yellow Brick Road essay. 22 is a sacred number, a number that represents the highest embodiment and mastery of intuition and one’s soul purpose. I feel grateful to be on this journey with all of you and your beating hearts, guiding this work to something we can all savor. There are not enough words for the gratitude I feel, but in true Kendra fashion - I will fucking find some.
From Tuesday: This morning I woke up and journaled for the sixth day in a row on the Amalfi coast from our study, which conveniently and romantically faces the piazza. Most of what I’ve written is incomprehensible because my brain is sun-bleached and still somewhere on cloud 9. Somewhere dreaming of love in all of its forms.
Love in Colour, Darkness, Light and Truth
Between dips in the sea, ferry rides, and countless gelatos, I’ve been reading Love in Colour by Bolu Babalola. In the introduction, she writes:
To say that I love love would be akin to me saying that I am quite fond of inhaling oxygen. Love is the prism through which I view the world. I truly believe it binds and propels us. This isn’t a naive denial of the darkness that we know exists in the world, rather it is a refusal to allow the devastation, the horror or the heartache to consume us. It is affirming the knowledge that there is light. Love is that light. Romance sweetens the casual bitterness we can encounter; it heightens the mundane and makes the terrestrial supernatural.
Love is truth
I wholeheartedly agree with every word of this passage, which is why I’ve chosen to explore one of the most romantic landscapes of love in the world to uncover a bit more about it. To make my terrestrial supernatural. What I’ve found so far is more complicated, more jarring, more honest than the one dimension of love we sell for $14 a ticket at the movies, but it is love nonetheless and that is what makes it so incredibly human.
On that note, I’d like to add that love does not seem to exist in opposition to our darkness. Much like light, darkness is the backdrop for our love. Love is truth. It is not only a balm, but a messenger of the yet-to-be healed parts of ourselves. Love is a fairytale - not in an intangible, heteronormative, whitewashed fantasy kind of way, but in the way of the fable. In the way that love is the greatest teacher of the human condition. It is best observed rather than contorted or manipulated. Love, the tale as old as time, is what it is. It existed before us, will exist when we’re gone, and will consume us like the most common of natural disasters while we’re here and that is why life is worth living.
Anyway, here are some stories about love from Amalfi:
Lorena
Lorena tossed my 50 lb suitcase into the trunk of her car like it was full of wafers, and I knew she’d been carrying baggage for quite some time. She was born and raised in Naples and worked three jobs - one as a private transport driver from the airport which is how I had the pleasure of making her acquaintance. She was an Aries. Her passion was singing, which she could do beautifully in three languages. Her favorite genre to sing was 90’s R&B, and we listened to it the hour long drive to Amalfi.
She asked me what I’d planned for my trip, following up with a dozen suggestions (the Blue Grotto at Capri her most endorsed), tips (don’t eat pizza on the coast and if you do, only margherita), and a full itinerary on how to make it happen. A nurturing spirit, I asked her if she had any kids (no) and if she wanted to be a mother. She said she wants to be a mother very badly, and has been trying for several years but it just hasn’t happened yet because her boyfriend refuses to get his sperm checked. He has two kids, the youngest being 12 years old, and doesn’t get that “his swimmers are not the same.” I completely agree with Lorena on this one.
Her boyfriend, who is a 46 year old lifeguard with two children he seldom spends time with, told her she has the most beautiful face in the world - but she needs to lose weight.
“I look at you from face to boobs and from waist to feet because I hate your stomach,” he said.
Thus certifying that men are gifted with audacity and committed to emotional terrorism all over the globe. And women are grateful to be in any version of love - even the kind that ruins you - all over the globe, too. Lorena chuckles while telling the story, the telltale sign of someone resigned to maintaining status quo as the butt of the joke. Her whole family told her she needed to lose weight, that she’d be more beautiful, that she’d be happier, that life would be easier. She told me that all of that would be fine and dandy, but then she would have to give up her own true love - food. And she would never sacrifice love or food. My kind of girl. It occurs to me that she probably wouldn’t know how to identify love with someone who doesn’t hate her commitment to just being herself.
Winding down the side of the milky colored mountain, she told me she had a surprise for me. We stopped at a small lemon sorbet stand, my first treat since touching down in Italy. She handed it to me; “Welcome to Italy.”
Caroline
I was pissed when I later discovered I didn’t have to take the earliest ferry to Positano to meet the shuttle at Parcheggio Mandara, but then I wouldn’t have met Caroline. She was the only person in the shuttle bus when I hopped in, sweating profusely at 9am from the 20 minute hike up a steep incline to get to the agreed pick-up for the day’s boat tour to Capri. She was a woman traveling alone, like me. Something, she remarked, that was quite rare.
“All of my friends describe me as crazy, and recently I decided I am a bit crazy and I like that.”
Caroline said what sets her apart from most of the people she knows is that she does what she wants before she thinks for too long. Which is why she had no problem making a huge career shift in the last year. She was once a marketing director at a very successful video game software company that was sold by a huge American business - which is how she had been to America enough times to decide New York was her favorite city in the world. She took the acquisition of the company as her cue, and became a photographer.
Her beloved son, who she shares with her ex-husband every other week which allows for her travel several times a month, is named Adrien. After Adrien Brody because he’s “very hot.” Absolutely. Apparently, he takes after his mother because he hates rules that are not intuitive and doesn’t listen to anyone for any reason, and Caroline loves that about him. I’ve never met Adrien, but I love that about him too. Adrien for President. She shows me a pictures of him in the park, at school, on trips around the world, and he looked like such a picturesque, European child. The kind of kid that would be cast as Charlie in Charlie and The Chocolate Factory.
Caroline and I swam in the clearest water I’d ever been in - so clear I could see my white pedicure looking down - searching for schools of fish through goggles. Big white, small red, striped - many kinds of fish burrowed near the rocks of the island to avoid the many tourists luxuriating in the crystal seas while on indulgent boat tours. Caroline was a Cancer, and she really, really, really loved water.
Once we docked, we decided to explore the Gardens of Augustus and enjoy a spritz or three on Capri. On our walk, I asked Caroline if she had been on any dates since she and ex-husband separated.
“Well, no. It’s only been since January that he came home and told me he had fallen in love with someone else.”
She said she thrived in change and he dreaded it. He was unhappy, not with the marriage but with himself, and thought another relationship would make him content. Caroline felt the split would’ve been easier if her ex was abusive or horrible, but he was a good person. She can’t and won’t try to reason with why he did what he did, because it’s too painful, but she decided to start seeing a therapist. Because when men meet personal crises, they try to evade it with distraction; and when women meet crises, they run head first into the eye of the storm like the wild beckons for them again.
Caroline’s heart breaks for Adrien, who sees her alone and his father in love once more. Who asks her if dad will ever come back and if she is lonely. She says she hopes her ex husband has found his true love. I ask her if she considered that maybe her marriage has dissolved so she can find hers too. Caroline stops in the middle of the piazza we’re strolling in and says, “I think I have. I think maybe it’s me.”
Enza
When I booked my stay in Amalfi, Enza’s bed and breakfast was considered a “rare find.” She certainly was.
To get to Enza’s home, I lugged my suitcase up four flights of ancient steps, and then about three more in the building. When I arrived, I felt complete relief to see the small but mighty woman in the doorframe - the town’s center just beyond her shoulder. I settled in, went for dinner, and when I came back, found Enza sitting in her living room watching The Closer starring Kyra Sedgwick. I joined her.
Enza was born in Ravello, a much slower and greener city. Amalfi’s city of music. She was born and raised in a convent, where she got married to her late husband with over 100 guests. She grabbed her photo albums and showed me pictures of the extravagant event. In one photo, her 7 siblings stood under the vineyard vines, the grapes ripe and vibrant at her October wedding. She wore a simple, elegant dress that fit her like a glove, and three fresh orchids in her curly, brown hair. When I asked her where she got her dress, she smirked and said, “It was made just for my body.” Period, Enza!
Enza was someone who loved herself, was proud of the person she was, and so she had many people in her life who loved her with pride too.
She had been running her Airbnb since her husband passed way and she retired so she could keep up with the cost of owning a very old home bearing many stories in its creaking foundation. She and her husband met at university studying pharmacology in Naples, and they’d spent nearly every waking hour since attached at the hip.
Together, they had three children - one son, one daughter - their third child, the pharmacy just beneath our feet in the heart of Amalfi. “My pharmacy,” she pointed directly to the storefront below the balcony with such a boastful glimmer in her eye that I couldn’t help but giggle in delight. I had visited the pharmacy twice to get tested during my stay (her son was now the head pharmacist and director there). Each time, Enza fluttered about the store, shaking hands, granting kisses, and signing prescriptions she shouldn’t be simply to pass the time. Above her head and the register at the back of the shop was a mounted oil painting of her beloved, like he never left. I think when she was at the pharmacy, Enza felt her heart settle back in her chest again.
37 years. Enza and her husband spent 37 years together. “It was 37 years too little,” Enza remarked. He was “beloved by all of Amalfi,” and when he passed away, the whole city went dark in his honor. I asked Enza what her favorite thing about him was. Translating Italian to English to the best of her ability, she said:
“He was so sensitive. He could go inside another person to find out how to heal them.”
I nodded, my eyes welling and a frog in my throat. Her favorite thing about her husband was his empathy. He was the best person she ever knew. And when I asked when his birthday was? Valentine’s Day. February 14. An Aquarius. They both were.
Every morning, I woke up to Enza making espresso, setting out 4 homemade marmalades and fresh pastries, orange juice she’d squeezed just moments prior. We’d go over my plans for the day. Every night after my busy day, I came home to Enza and we’d talk about philosophy, architecture, art, jewelry, everything under the sun - her stopping occasionally to grab her iPad for google translate. And at the end of each night, she’d look at me with a coy smile and say, “Would you like a limoncello?”
And I knew then she’d invited me into more than just her home.
My trip felt like a living prayer to love. Its messiness. Its courage. Its pain. Its purity. Amalfi is known for its paper, produced from cotton instead of wood. Your words, when written on Amalfi paper, become art on a canvas. So I solidified my prayer to romance with pen, and said goodbye.
I love your style of writing. These stories brought so much joy! Thank you for sharing !!!
Beautiful ❤️ Thank you for sharing