How to Suffer
A Guide for the Lovelorn Traveler
I’m traveling this week, so that’s my excuse for posting a piece that’s been published elsewhere (sorry!), which I’m justifying because it’s about travel (so, like, you know, a theme, right? Right? Never mind). Anyway, I promise I’ll do this rarely, or very possibly never again. The story was first published in the online magazine After the Pause, and if you’d like to read the issue, you can find it here.
This story is a type of prose called flash, meaning short (in this case, the limit was 1,000 words), and it’s a particular type of flash called “hermit crab,” because it takes on the form of something else—in this case, a set of instructions. And if you end up wondering whether it’s based on personal experience, the answer is yes. Oh yes. Emphatically yes. So, please, if you think it’s funny, laugh with me and not at me, k?
And now, the story.
How to Suffer: A Guide for the Lovelorn Traveler
Let’s be honest. You’ve dreamed of putting thousands of miles between yourself and your ex-honey and the memories that pop up everywhere you went together (or, if your memory has developed a cruel streak, had even talked about), but you aren’t ready to stop suffering. We get it. The good news? You can do both. (Note: change the gender as needed; misery doesn’t discriminate.)
Step 1: Plan Your Trip
Book a flight. An international flight. To be specific, book a flight to synonymous-with-romance Italy. Optional but recommended: buy a center seat. (Misery points: 5)
Step 2: Pre-Flight Trauma
Arrange, by communing with the gods or fate or whatever, for your boomeranging ex-honey and his recycled girlfriend to be on your flight. (Misery points: 50) Discover this on arrival at the gate (plan ahead so you have time to call your friends, sobbing about the goddamn irony), then panic when you realize your ex and Recycled Girl could be your seatmates. If you bought a center seat as recommended, add 45 points for the added trauma of imagining yourself sandwiched between them.
Is Recycled Girl wearing a diamond ring that blinds anyone within a twenty-yard radius? Add 75 points.
Step 3: Location, Location, Location
Make your first stop Verona, for two obvious reasons: Romeo and Juliet. Plant yourself outside the house that wasn’t Juliet’s and gaze at the balcony that wasn’t Juliet’s and fondle the supposedly fertility-inducing right boob (on second thought, better not) of the statue of not-Juliet while you sob over their tragic love story. (Misery points: 15) But for real anguish, head over to Via Mazzini for the passeggiata, an evening stroll/excuse for flirting and socializing. Envy the grabby teens, parents snuggling toddlers, couples pausing to kiss. The groupings will vary but the minimum number won’t. That number is two. You, however, are two minus one equals alone. (Misery points: 25)
Step 4: Share Your Misery
Meals are for conversation, camaraderie, kickstarting romance, and so far you’ve been smuggling groceries into your hotel room or surviving on mini-bar snacks. It’s time to suck it up and find an expensive, romantic restaurant where solo diners are anathema.
Found one? Good. Now ruin a waiter’s evening by asking for a table for one. Note the dismay in his eyes when you order not a glass of wine but half a bottle. Now pretend to enjoy yourself: sit back and “relax,” sip your wine, and resist, at all costs, your waiter’s efforts to rush you through your mushroom risotto. Order dessert, coffee, a digestivo. When you leave, if you’ve done your job well, your waiter’s sigh of relief will equal yours and you’ll dash back to your hotel room to down the rest of the mini-bar booze. (Misery points: 45)
Step 5: Desperately Seek Attention
Head to Naples for a waterfront stroll, where a grizzled relic smoking on the seawall will leer at you, muttering thoughts that need no translation. Exult that someone has acknowledged your existence. (Misery points: 5, unless you’re offended, in which case add 10.)
Next, find a pizzeria and eat a slice in the street. When a graceful man thrusts a napkin into your hand before disappearing into a drove of Vespas, be bewildered yet thrilled. Is there sauce on your chin? No? Then napkin-giving must be a Neapolitan form of flirtation! Don’t worry, misery is still yours—after all, Graceful Guy didn’t stick around. (Misery points: 20)
Step 6: Salt in the Wound
For seriously intense misery, you must visit the romance capitals of Venice and Capri.
In Venice, walk through Piazza San Marco on a crisp winter night with your lonely hands stuffed in your pockets and trails of fog whispering at your feet. Could this scene possibly be any more romantic? Why yes, yes, it could. (Misery points: 25, + 2 for each fused-together couple you see.) Next, buy a ticket at La Fenice, Venice’s tiny opera house. (Any show will do.) Pre-curtain, and for all 185 minutes of the performance, remember in agonizing detail the pillow-talk plans you and your ex had made to tour Europe’s jewel-box theaters. (Misery points: 65)
On to Capri, home of iridescent grottos and cobalt waters, perfect for solo traveler self-flagellation. Want proof of your solitariness, your invisibility? Take the boat tour that passes through the arch of the Faraglione di Mezzo, where kissing your lover brings good luck and where, at the critical moment, you should feign indifference and fiddle with your camera. (Misery points: 35) Afterward, squeeze your solo self into a peapod boat, helmed by a chiseled young man whose jeans fit just right, for a spin around the Blue Grotto. Hope for a boat with not one but two clingy couples. (Misery points: 95)
Step 7: Fuck This Shit
Decide to move to Italy, which, sure, sounds counterintuitive at this point. But you can be miserable anywhere, so why not Italy? Prepare to be surprised: in your adopted city, you see solitary women—invisible to you on your travels, just as you believed you were—but now you see them everywhere, in the streets, at the market, having coffee, eating lunch.
Open your eyes. In Italy, the past is very much a part of the present. Take your dog to a park that was once an Etruscan necropolis, stroll along a former medieval aqueduct, gaze at massive stone walls striated with history. See Catholic churches built on the remains of pagan temples, the footprints of stone walls deconstructed to be reborn elsewhere. Discover ancient traditions that still thrive, shared by young and old in fairs and festivals, ceremonies and competitions, art and music and food. Be alone but not lonely. Realize loneliness and solitude aren’t the same thing. (Misery points: 0)
You see, life goes on despite the clinging past, and ruins, sometimes hidden but always there, beg to be built upon. They’re waiting for what comes next.
Look forward to what comes next.
Book of the week:
The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone by Olivia Laing
Poem of the week:
“During Lockdown, I Let the Dog Sleep in My Bed Again” by Maggie Smith
loneliness and solitude are indeed NOT the same thing. I'm with you 100% (or points)
absolutely loved it... you have a gift!