In a field, in a countryside sugared with a freshly
fallen snow, I lay, my breast to the sky, the stars
and a sliver moon. I am warm by decision, comforted by
design and encouraged by this taste, this vastness in
the boundaries that construct my freedom.

Yesterday I shopped the stalls on Via Dante. Christmas
bells ringing from the first Church - Duomo. Cobbled
streets, marble steps, and two story doors. The Sforza
Castle rising in the twilight at the end of via Dante.
I wondered how I had started out and why I had
chosen to arrange this. To stand in the Italian air on
at Christmas time.

But it didn't matter, I was there and as I turned on
my heel to see what was playing at the Teatro Piccolo,
I thought I saw myself. Nineteen years earlier,
startled by the images I was seeing, lost in a world
not yet familiar, trying to contain my excitement in
the pockets of my jeans. Turning and turning trying to
catch everything, hear everything, see it all. A boy
with dreams.

I was being sensitized by memories that clung to the
walls of the buildings, that took shape in the lungs
of my dreams. Maybe I needed to know why I had come,
maybe my search wasn't over, maybe all that I have
done is only a beginning, a small length of the road
that will lead me to another Christmas, turning on
another heel.

That answer I'll know then, but now I know this,
beside me stands a boy that wasn't here when I first
came to this Italian city, a boy that holds his own memories,
his own dreams and the hand of his father. A boy that
has made every step of this journey the answer.

I have traveled far to be here this Christmas day. I
have traveled a lifetime.