time is an ouroboros, or I'm in Sicily again.

Why are we obsessed with some places?

Palermo, again. Again, the wildness, with Etna erupting and the waters getting warmer by the day and the city like a breathing body. Here, a city of the dead, a city of life—on an island that has seen the hands of the Phoenicians, Romans, Greeks, Normans, Spanish, and Arabs. And more. They say it’s the most conquered place on Earth.

I've been here four summers now. Last summer, I married the love of my life here. Four summers of fever-dream heat and the clobbering of bodies and retreating into quiet sidestreet bars or vaulted cathedrals. Four summers of trying to understand why I'm so hungrily drawn to this place. What does it want to tell me? What is it that I want to hear? What is it I haven't heard yet?

Even my husband says, “You keep running back to the island. One day you’ll want to go somewhere else, right?” And I do. I do want to go somewhere else. But there’s something here I just can’t ever be done with.

Some people hate Palermo, viscerally. They really hate it here. It’s the garbage, the graffiti, the chaos, the screaming markets. Whatever, I get it. But I see past all of that. I see the beauty in the decay and wildness. I see myself in its grit.

Where else do you see an ancient temple turned basilica turned mosque turned cathedral, or find the waters of Isis?

And I see my family, my face, my names: Basile, Lipari, Mastroianni, Di Marco. Somewhere in the streets along the port, in Kalsa, the ghost of my grandmother trods along, alongside all of her people who led to this moment by making me. People who left only for me to return. Time like an ouroboros.

The ghosts are perhaps what lure me back, with their outstretched, salty hands, with the same love of ancient waters and those rituals which compel me and always have—something that is cellular and inherent in me—the strange things I do and always done and have never named before. They come from this island.

Maybe this is what it is? I am looking for a reflection. I am seeking an origin point.

But I also feel comfortable in the unknowableness, that the mystery of it all is enough. That the search is the process, and the process is the lifeblood of meaning. That I am not at the center of the mystery at all.

But I am not only of the island, with its Saharan winds, Lo Sirocco, and its weeping saints and prehistoric grottoes of ritual dance and sacrifice, and its mountain secrets.

My grandfather was from Calabria, on the mainland, from a small comune with ancient Greek roots, destroyed at least once by an earthquake. Recently, I was given documents from a distant cousin about my grandfather's family:

My paternal great-grandfather, Domenico, was a man of the earth. He was a gardener, a man of soil and flowers. I've been told he was kind and loving.

He and my great-grandmother secretly married against the will of the family (which was rare in those days!). When they emigrated to the US, they lived on cemetery grounds. I imagine him pruning tombstone flowers and trimming hedges, making pathways. Speaking a dialect of dirt that spans the sea.

Those records say he would make my great-grandmother garlands of love, strung together from graveyard flowers. (She wasn't a fan, it seems; too macabre). And yet, he did so because that was the language in which he shared his love.

I suppose I inherited a heart that could find beauty in the flowers of the dead. I suppose I am here to pluck the flowers of the dead, to wear them as garlands, to channel them into language.

Fittingly, I am here co-leading a writing immersion with @radicisiciliane. I am here to write about life and death and the sensuality of time, the eroticism of decay, the gorgeousness of memento mori. My bloodline is but a blip in time, yet it is time itself. As we all are. I find comfort in this.

Maybe I will write an answer toward myself. Maybe I’ll find a bit more of the answer.