Eat, Pray, Love

and maturity! I need you to grow into me!” And maybe it was this present and fully actualized
me who was hovering four years ago over that young married sobbing girl on the bathroom
floor, and maybe it was this me who whispered lovingly into that desperate girl’s ear, “Go
back to bed, Liz.. .” Knowing already that everything would be OK, that everything would
eventually bring us together here. Right here, right to this moment. Where I was always wait-
ing in peace and contentment, always waiting for her to arrive and join me.
Then Felipe wakes up. We’d both been dozing in and out of consciousness all afternoon,
curled in each other’s arms on the deck of this Indonesian fisherman’s sailboat. The ocean
has been swaying us, the sun shining. While I lie there with my head pillowed on his chest,
Felipe tells me that he had an idea while he was sleeping. He says, “You know—I obviously
need to keep living in Bali because my business is here, and because it’s so close to Aus-
tralia, where my kids live. I also need to be in Brazil often, because that’s where the gem-
stones are and because I have family there. And you obviously need to be in the United
States, because that’s where your work is, and that’s where your family and friends are. So I
was thinking... maybe we could try to build a life together that’s somehow divided between
America, Australia, Brazil and Bali.”
All I can do is laugh, because, hey—why not? It just might be crazy enough to work. A life
like this might strike some people as absolutely loony, as sheer foolishness, but it resembles
me so closely. Of course this is how we should proceed. It feels so familiar already. And I
quite like the poetry of his idea, too, I must say. I mean that literally. After this whole year
spent exploring the individual and intrepid I’s, Felipe has just suggested to me a whole new
theory of traveling:
Australia, America, Bali, Brazil = A, A, B, B.
Like a classic poem, like a pair of rhyming couplets.
The little fishing boat anchors right off the shore of Gili Meno. There are no docks here on
this island. You have to roll up your pants, jump off the boat and wade in through the surf on
your own power. There’s absolutely no way to do this without getting soaking wet or even
banged up on the coral, but it’s worth all the trouble because the beach here is so beautiful,
so special. So me and my lover, we take off our shoes, we pile our small bags of belongings
on the tops of our heads and we prepare to leap over the edge of that boat together, into the
sea.
You know, it’s a funny thing. The only Romance language Felipe doesn’t happen to speak
is Italian. But I go ahead and say it to him anyway, just as we’re about to jump.
I say: “Attraversiamo.”
Let’s cross over.