by: Gabriela Rose Proietti
In a city that is so unapologetically itself, I began to understand that what I admired in others was never about clothing or physical beauty, but about the permission to take up space without asking.
I was halfway down a tightly cramped alleyway before I realized I’d been holding my breath the entire time. It had been a mere 20 minutes since I stepped off the sardine-packed train into the old city center.
The tension wasn’t caused by the exhaust fumes from a rickety street bike or the fishy stench of the morning market. It was something tighter, twisting directly beneath my rib cage and locking my jaw. The heavy July humidity didn’t help, nor did the third sugary espresso I had just shot down my throat.
Only a month prior, I had decided to escape the exhausting heat of Rome to seek refuge by the coast. I landed in Naples, a city that famously refuses to pretend to be anything but what it is.
I loved the way the city moved, but mostly, I envied how its women carried themselves.
Ten minutes before at the bar, two locals had stood next to me, clouding the air with linen and about ten-too-many spritzes of perfume. One wore a long cream dress, the other navy shorts and a crisp white button-down. Their freshly blown-out hair moved like feathers in a light breeze. They possessed a magnetic, poised certainty that felt like everything I lacked.
After dropping off my luggage, I ascended the hills of the coastal Posillipo neighborhood toward my favorite beach club. Even wrapped in my favorite robin’s-egg-blue dress — with the sleeves rolled perfectly to my elbows and my sunglasses adjusted just right — I still felt entirely hollow.
I am an outsider, after all. No matter how many years I live in this country, the self-doubt always shows up in the same small, agonizing pauses. Felt in the half-second hesitation before I speak or the hyper-aware scan of a room before deciding where to stand, and the way my body tightens as I gather Italian vocabulary in my head.
I finally claimed my turquoise beach chair right by the sea. I sat there fully dressed, sweating through my clothes and sticking to the hot plastic net, too busy overthinking to even lay my towel down. Around me, the locals darted effortlessly from the sand into the waves, entirely aware that they deserved the space they occupied.
“Ue bella. Bentornata, da tanto tempo non ci vediamo,” a sharp voice called out”.
It was Susy, a beautifully bronzed woman I had befriended the previous summer. She greeted me with a contagious smile and a double-cheek kiss.
“Sei nervosa oggi, tesoro?” she asked, noticing my rigid posture.
I laughed and admitted that I always was. She tapped my shoulder with a smile. “You don’t have to be.”
As she walked back to her sun chair, I watched her move with the exact same unbothered ease I had witnessed at the bar. It wasn’t a posture, it was just how she inhabited her life. I realized I didn’t need to compete with her ease; I just wanted to stop working so hard at my own.
I peeled off my damp, sweaty button-down and tossed it into my beach bag. And, for the first time all day, my lungs actually expanded.
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