Time has caught me up

I was having a bad day. We all have them, whether we live in paradise or purgatory, Venice or not, somewhere we love or somewhere we hate everybody has bad days. Perhaps I was having a bad day because I was having a bad week. Small things were piling up and it had begun to feel like important things were crumbling around me and falling away from me, slipping through my fingers. I let these small things grow and allowed the negativity to overwhelm me; I will admit I am guilty of that. I let my own sad negative thoughts overcome the magical beauty of this place I now call home: Venice. But then Venice saved me, embraced me, and showed me the beauty of life that cannot be ignored.

I went for a walk. I wanted to stretch my legs and clear my mind. Somewhere between my apartment and the historic Rialto market I stumbled upon a little piece of my personal heaven. Tucked between a mask-making store selling hand made masks and a store with barrels full of delicious cheap wine I found the most chaotically quirky and enchanting bookstore that I have ever seen. I walked in to a big room with piles of art shrouding the entrance. Books were piled up to my waist along every wall, without any order or category. Some were English, many were German, a few were French and most were Italian. Every genre, every size, every age. Some books seemed older than me and some were books I recognized from my child hood. In the very centre of the room was a large antique gondola, sinking under the weight of even more books piled within it, the pages spilling over the sides. The next room looked almost the same, except in place of the antique gondola was a large bathtub, equally full of books. In the very corner of the store was a doorway. The short double doors were rotting from the bottom up. They opened onto three short smooth stairs that led straight into the blue-green water of a Venetian canal. If it weren’t for a barrier made of an old oar blocking the way I could have walked straight out of the store into the canal, away from the comforting books into the cold water. I sat by the doorway onto the water. I browsed every shelf (and bathtub, and gondola) overflowing with books and then I found the small simple cure for my bad mood: I found a note.
On top of a book inside the gondola in the first room of the small store a little loose sheet of white paper caught my eye. I picked it up, surprised to realize that the messy purple hand-writing scrawled across the top of the page was not in Italian, but in English. I read the words that danced in my brain and crawled into my heart:

“time, which behaves differently for each of us, has caught me up.”

I couldn’t help but smile, I couldn’t help but be filled with happiness and I couldn’t help but slip the loose-leaf paper into my purse before I walked out of the store. I felt as though the note had been left there, written in my language in my favourite colour, for me to find and fall in love with. Suddenly I wasn’t alone, my troubles weren’t troubles at all and life was beautiful again.

Small coincidences- that may not be coincidence at all, but fate- are the greatest reminders of the beauty of life. That note meant to me that nothing was more important than I let it be and nothing could ‘catch me up’ unless I allowed it too. It meant that I wasn’t alone and that I was entirely independent and in control of my own feelings as well as all the small things falling around me and the bigger things building up.

What does it mean to you?