“No Day But Today”

A Harvard developed sentence for mic checks:

Two blue fish swam in the tank.

One would think with the number of passport stamps I collected in 2024, being a traveler is something I don’t think much about anymore but I am still shocked to remember:

This is my story. I get to swim. 

There will be a night this week I am not at my apartment because I will be in Italy [again].

I moved here for the 2018 school year and 10 weeks into the term, I was preparing for a half-term break, writing the next learning intentions on the board because I wanted everything to be set for when I got back from Italy … when I realized with full awareness that I’d not be sleeping in my own bed that night because I would be sleeping in Italy. 

My realization expanded, wondering who were “the people who” said that casual factor sentence of a regular normal day occurrence - 

“Just nipping to Sainsburys for a few bits…” 

“Oh can’t tonight, going off to Italy…” 

Lucky me, really, as the past 7 years I have continued to meet “the people who”. 

Last week I met one more. Just too late. 

Unbeknownst to us both, 3 days later his company cancelled the contracts after 4 months work here and he’s returned back to Spain, on a flight, Jan 31st. 

What luck. 

Hope and Luck brought me this far and Hope and Luck remind me why I started this journey. 

Taking months to say hello to someone is not the standard style of your Lucky Casey. 

She didn’t walk 280 km through Portugal and Spain without a large amount of confidence, so what has she learned from these years as a student of the universe?! 

To study more, apparently. 

I felt so relieved saying, “Hola! ¿Te gustaría un café después de clase?”

[heart pounding, hands shaking as I got on the bike]

“Sí, claro”, from direct, clear, hazel eyes. 

Hours later we met and talked for hours and hours and hours. 

Half in Spanish. Half in English.

Pages of conversation until the sun said hola also. 

He was shy to say hello also - for language and time and factors that make us “the people who” - trying to focus on cycling 30km is a challenge to say anything, thinking if he shifted closer to me for a few weeks he could relax into speaking - but no go for him - and me cruising on as usual not thinking of myself as a stand out - 

He said the day I danced into the studio, he saw how much I radiated light and he was bewitched. 

To be called radiant and light… No hay palabras más verdaderas ni más perfectas. 

[There are no more truer or more perfect words]

Meeting him was kismet. 

Kismet for the courage to tell my stories again, get back on my journey of wanting to feel the sunlight, smell the ocean, taste the spices, hear the stories of “the people who” sing, speak, fight, dance, and live. 

This week, I am off to Italy not as some great writer like Jane Austen or Frances Mayes with her Tuscan Villa and inspiring story about friendship, strength, and feeling alive [more relatable than Liz Gilbert IMHO], but as me, writing stories of friendship and strength and feeling alive, walking the streets of Italy as my great-grandparents did. 

[sorry, not Madrid, because the deadline passed to refund bookings and realistically my life is a series of 1300 choices not funded by Hollywood at this time]

So, what have I learned from the universe? 

Telling your story means you’re not ever alone. 

Stories make every one of us “the people who”.

Someone will come across your story and you will be remembered as one who lived. 

Some people have one long story but my life is filled with many short stories. 

Little quips of bright lights that when seen from a cruising altitude shine a picture of life as “a person who” embraces the everyday occurrence of being alive. 

With the recent airline occurrences, there is no sense waiting for the normal day when you’ve confidence to do something.

There is only today. 

Shine into it, and swim on. 

To Rachel, and her American Airlines crew, with my whole heart of our kismet story too.

Sláinte.