We cannot forget what we loved. For this reason, I will tell you about myself and a good friend of mine. About us. It all started almost by accident. As all beautiful things do.
Me in that house that I continue to call the home of tourists (but aren’t we just tourists in this life?) I have been many things: very sad, happy, rebellious with a wandering and disconnected life, with braids, with straight hair, I had the torments of a fifteen-year-old girl, I did the stupid things of a sixteen-year-old girl, then my mom passed away and it was just me and my dad in that huge house, then my dad was transferred to another country, I adopted a dog that I found (serious mistake: he is the one who adopted me), the only trustworthy being in the world, I enrolled in university, I fell in love, that feeling first was shared, then it wasn’t, I was hopelessly lost, foolish, but with an insatiable desire to make sense out of my dream: open the house to tourists.
My father wasn’t for it at first. A twenty-year-old girl alone in the house helpless in the hands of some weird foreign traveler, he thundered. Then, after long considerations and reconsiderations, he finally gave in as long as I told him everything the smallest detail because it is necessary to assume responsibilities to become an adult in real life.
The fact is that on a cold November afternoon an unlikely Greek Orthodox wayfarer named Grigoris for the first time crossed the threshold of my house with his torn sleeping bag from which a small ax popped out (a small detail that I was very careful not to report to my father…), and in few years my house became a whirlwind of thousands of colors, voices, and flavors in the useless noise that Milan can make if you don’t know well what you are, but always in that state of mind “I did the dumbest thing I could have”, then, little by little, things got better.
People came back to me and the fact that some of them insisted I traveled with them gave me a little bit of confidence, well, maybe I wasn’t so crazy or maybe there must be some good in me.
It’s been a long time since I was unaware and meek, but, when I remember how it all started, now that my thoughts are clear, I genuinely think hosting was a good friend of mine who broadened my mind and filled the void inside and outside me, a beautiful experience of interior renewal, I mean: learning to fly with my wings.
After many troublesome years full of fun and carelessness, I also think that hosting, beyond the economic return unexpected, was a beautiful game, a different way of enjoying life to whom I’d like to sing an OM that slowly now becomes a raga or perhaps a blues to the unforgettable hosting of the beginning (it is pure archaeology) etcetera, etcetera.
So I don’t know, I did this thing. I opened the doors of my house to the world, a transit of distant existences, slipping into distant thoughts and cultures that I immediately like, giving up all those thoughts that you hear at the bar and in common sense people.
For two or three months, just starting to understand what it meant to be a good host, I often asked God in whom I believed every other day, if by chance he existed and, therefore, being God, my hosting career was already known to Him, begging Him to warm me if it was already written in His intentions that hosting people would turn out a failure to me, so I was sitting at home studying the treatment of nephritis, cystitis, and gastritis or I dedicated myself to glorious days of idleness and vice in the open-air and I didn’t expose myself to unnecessary toil, but God, as usual, was silent. This did not surprise me because I think He prefers to keep it that way. He likes we discover things for ourselves in our lifetime.
Well, with a little bit of fear on, I plunged into this beautiful adventure, and I saw my little river turned into a lake. The short story is that I was meek, then I’ve turned dynamite and I have learned that hosting, no matter what may happen, means never getting lost, because hosting can really turn the water of the encounter into the wine of friendship.
My job was and is to host travelers coming from all over the world.
After a long and tiring journey, my good friend Hosting is still here.
After a long and tiring journey, I am here, too.
Him.
Me.
Us.
