We're big on Freud

I posted pictures of the crazy house keys here in Italy, but there’s more to it. I have five keys but only know how or where to use three of them. This could be the setup for a fairytale about a nosy princess in an empty castle, but it’s not.

Last night, I had a dream. In my dream, a man, presumably my host dad, saw my key ring and declared that it was all wrong. My keys were out of order, and he decided to fix them. Satisfied with the new setup, he handed them back to me, triumphantly. All was right with the world. Except it was not. It took me a good amount of time to figure out how to remember which key was which, and suddenly I would have to do it all over again. What did it matter if they were in the ‘right’ order, so long as I knew how they worked?

Who knows what dreams mean, if they mean anything at all, but this got me to thinking this morning. More and more, ‘life in Parma’ has begun to feel like Life, without qualifiers and without quotation marks. While this is truer with every day that goes by, each one of those days also brings me closer to the close of this chapter. Now that I have finally figured out what to do with most of these keys, they will be changed up on me all over again. What's more, I still have two keys to figure out before I go.

I wish I had more time.