"Adela", or "How I Almost Became a Househusband"

            By my sophomore year of high school, I had already come to hate my small school and the stifling environment I was living in. I figured, like any middle-class kid with supportive parents would, why not study abroad? So, in January 2008, I found myself on a plane to Italy to spend six months living with a family an hour outside of Torino.

            Towards the end of my stay there, after almost getting kicked out of my Italian high school and having the honor of being both Liceo Classico G.F. Porporato’s first and last exchange student, the organization that arranged my stay planned a getaway for all of the exchange students in the country. This three or four day trip took place in a town called Ivrea, which is old as sin and every year holds a celebration called the Carnevale di Ivrea, or more fittingly, the Carnevale di Arancia. The whole point of this carnival is to dress up in funny (medieval) costumes to throw oranges (arancia) at each other.

            I don’t remember what I thought when I first found out that there was going to be a weekend getaway for all of us students. I faintly remember being really excited (I’m sure I have the Facebook messages to prove it), but my memory is clouded by alcohol, hormones, little sleep, too much free time, and a girl named Adela.

xxx

            Saturday night, I assume it was, was the last night we were all crammed into our massive, salmon colored, nun-run ‘hostel.' In fitting 16 or 17 year-old fashion, we were allowed to go out on the town (an unsurprisingly sleepy place) to explore. Almost all of us went straight to the bars or bottle shops (there is no drinking age in Italy (wine, culture)) to get slammed. Oddly enough, the only free drink I have ever received was given to me by a (female) bartender that night. To this day I hold to it that, like everything that stemmed from that night, it was a simple misunderstanding.

            After we all marched back to the hostel, we decided not to go to bed, and instead to keep drinking. One thing led to another, and then led me to a small room with a handful of other k ids and a bottle of Sambuca. In that same room was Adela, a beautiful Slovakian I had met on the train a couple of days before. She was smarter than I was, she spoke better Italian than I did, and she both intimidated and amazed me. We ended up making out in a hallway for the rest of the night.

            We left the next day, and although I don’t remember the train ride back to Torino, I do vividly remember Adela weeping in the train station as we were all saying goodbye to each other. Along with being smarter than I was, she was also much more emotional.

            We traded Skype names, I think, and spoke and texted every now and then for a short time. Somewhere shortly thereafter we happened to fall in love, or as I see it now, develop a crippling and devastating need for each other. I had plans to see her in Alessandria, but she got sick, she had plans to come up, but something else happened. We didn’t see each other again before we left to go home, her to Popudinske y Mocidlany, Slovakia, and me to Gainesville, Florida.

            I dreamt of Adela, I thought of her endlessly, I wanted her more than anything. I would call her la mia principessa and she would call me il mio principe and we invented a future for ourselves that sprang up from nowhere faster than weeds in spring. We spoke everyday, for hours, and every now and then she would end up weeping because non possiamo starci insieme, ‘we can’t be together.’

xxx

            Anyone that has ever carried out a conversation in a second language knows that there is only so much that you can express; emotions are often truncated and generalized, desires become cliché and simplistic, and arguments become silly and repetitive. Maybe it was because we were too infatuated with one another, but it never dawned on me through the the never ending stream of ti amo’s and sei l’unica’s that we talked about almost nothing.

            Despite the uneven ground upon which we had built our castle together, our relationship continued to evolve and grow more serious. I spent entire class periods talking to her via instant messenger about her classes or her friends or her family. Her mother and father were unhappily married; when her mother found out that she was pregnant with Adela she was forced to marry Adela’s father, a grumpy and bone-crushingly silent man. This led them to force Adela to study and to achieve more than they had been able to. Even though we communicated in a foreign language, I could tell how much of a disastrous effect this had on her, but I couldn’t do anything because sei cosí lontano da me. She wouldn’t tell me until a year or two later, but she cracked under pressure and, had her father not come home from work early, she might have killed herself.

            Our desire to escape our homes fed the flames of whatever you would call our relationship. She received almost perfect grades, won a prize at the Model United Nations for the entire European Union, and got into the best university in Eastern Europe. I played Pokemon on my Gameboy in class, spent a record-breaking amount of time in detention, and got into a small liberal arts college far from home. We made plans to see each other the summer after I graduated; non vedo l’ora di rivederti, Adelina mia, I’d say over and over.

xxx

            Adela lived in a small farming village in rural Slovakia, near the border with the Czech Republic. Almost all of her extended family lived in this village, and I was welcomed with open arms by everyone but her parents. They were afraid that what had happened to them would happen to her, and because I don’t speak Slovakian, they put unreasonable amounts of pressure on her to get rid of me. Being an18 year-old, far from home, supposedly in love, this made us grow even closer. For three weeks I stayed with them, under the very close watch of her mother.

            I became close with her cousins and, although they spoke no English, they always invited us over and even threw a huge party for me. The cops ended up showing up at some point that night, and her older cousin, who went by Bucman, told the officer that he wanted to speak to his lawyer before he spoke to them. They made me feel more at home, siamo amici, I’d say, even though her mother mi odia.

            Eventually we went to Prague for a weekend, which allowed us to pretend that all had worked out well and we were actually the couple we thought we were. It was all a blur, at one point she ended up blacking out during a pub crawl and I had to carry her back to our hostel. That, I would say, was when we started to wear on each other.

            We said our goodbyes not long thereafter in Bratislava. She took me to the train station and watched me board my train for Vienna and cried the entire time. We talked of getting married because we didn’t know better, and parted ways.

xxx

            College changed everything for both of us. We still spoke frequently, but contact trailed off as we realized that the world was bigger than what we had previously imagined. She studied economics and got lost in her work and the newfound freedom she was granted living in Prague. I drifted through an aimless first year of college and met other women. We got mad at one another more and more often, and we stopped making plans for the future.

            At one point though, she told me that if I really wanted to be her principe, that if davvero mi vuoi sposare, I could come back next summer and we could be married. By this time, however, it had started to dawn on us that it wouldn’t work, that whatever we thought we had was an outlet for all of the frustration and boredom that we felt at home. She was freed from her parents, I was freed from my private high school in the South, and we had fallen in love with other, more accessible things.

             By now, I have almost forgotten her blue-gray eyes, her brown-blonde hair, the fragility of her voice, and that birthmark on her chest, right above her heart. We still speak every now and then, only now I’m no longer il mio principe, but instead ‘Mr. Smith,’ and we share less in common now than ever.

            In certain circles, Adela has simply become that girl I almost married that one time, which makes me sound much more interesting than I am, but undeniably she made me a better person. She made me care about school, she made me learn Italian fluently, she made me listen to others and talk about my feelings, even if it was in a second language.

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