London - Milano

It was the weirdest sensation – I stepped out of the plane and smelled the air (that’s always the first thing I do when I step onto the stairs leading down to the runway – I stop for a second and take a deep breath). The air was warm and a little stuffy, not smelly though like in India – it actually had a sweet, sunny scent to it – Mediterranean, almost.
And suddenly I felt like I was 15 again, on holiday with my family – memories started flooding back – Sicily, Mallorca, Morocco – bus-guided tours to touristic hotspots, swimming pools in the hotels, yummy bread in baskets on the table before dinner and most of all… sunshine.
I had landed in Milano, but I was really somewhere else and had no real concept of time and space. Like on autopilot I went through the passport control, picked up my bags and got on a bus to the centre. On the bus, still lost in an odd place between reality and a movie or a still-life, I had to tell myself:

“You’re in Milan.
You were in London this morning.
You flew here.
Across France.
And the Alps.
Milan lies in the flat northern part of Italy, just below the Alps – the industrial part of Italy.
It has an old centre, but is mostly modern (so I’d been told).
You have never been here before.”

But one thing I was certain of: I had come to see my soul-sister – Olga (soul-sister isn't quite the right word either, but it comes close). And this certainty amidst all uncertainties kept me going, pulled me forward from deep within despite my confusion, tiredness and exhaustion.
As always I had hardly slept the night before the flight. I was up till 4am, finishing off things, wrapping things up, packing things – putting a definite end to the last 6 years of my life spent in the UK. Although slightly rushed, it was a definite, deliberate and (for some time to come) – a finite decision to leave. I spent the last 5 days in London, doing mainly two things: seeing and saying goodbye to old friends and getting rid of things that were making my bag too heavy, things that I’d had for months or years, that had been part of my life over there. I gave some to the friends I saw (a handbag, books, some clothing, two cans of paté, a few CDs etc.) and sold some on eBay (a dozen DVDs, 1280 extra-long pencils with rubber-tips and a few dozen lighters). So the last thing I did before I left my friend James’ flat this morning to go to the airport, was a trip to the post-office, to post the things I’d carefully wrapped up during the night. It was a very un-symbolic, straight forward process of closing a chapter of my life – by expelling the things that had played a part in the last chapter from the chapters to come. This process began when I moved out of my house and left St. Andrews in June, then sort of continued during the last month at the Fringe in Edinburgh and is now nearly complete. There is still a few things in my home in Bavaria, that I shall get rid of, then the feat is achieved and I can step into the next chapters with less baggage, less weight, more freedom and mobility, ready to take on new challenges.

Piazza Cordusio in Milano