“I hope Venice will recognize me,” I think, as my train pierces the silver lagoon and carries me across the bridge that hooks the fish-shaped marsh to the mainland.
In the thick of winter, I’ve traded sub-zero temperatures in Montreal for bone-chilling fog. I’ve come back to this place that has known me since my teens the way a first love does. I can’t hide anything from her—she knows all my tells.
The problem is, though, I’m not even sure I recognize myself.
It’s barely been 10 years since I lived in Venice during grad school and only 2 since my last visit, but they’ve been marked by what my psychologist refers to as “a series of life-altering crises” and what an editor recently described as “too many plot points”.
The version of me that Venice first met hadn’t unraveled from a full-body illness, or walked out on her dream career as a scientist to protect her well-being. She hadn’t had five surgeries for endometriosis or three miscarriages or a hysterectomy or a stillbirth with a surrogate who was meant to circumvent further loss. She didn’t have 14 seams etched on her abdomen or a double chin or glitching nerves or a bloated belly that is just as easily triggered as her sorrow. Her laugh sounded different then—not waterlogged, but free. That version of me never doubted that she could persevere.
At home, since our stillbirth last Christmas, I’ve felt paralyzed. By 3 p.m. every day, I’m invaded by darkness. In the throes of grieving two boys in one year, my husband Ethan and I must decide if we’re continuing with surrogacy. Our love story is as irreversibly altered as my anatomy, our conversations dominated by bowels and bladder and baby. I can hardly look at him because he reminds me of all that we’ve lost and all that we may continue to lose.
So I’ve come to my lagoon for some melancholy me-time. Where better to nurse a severe depression than here, where I’ve always felt most alive?
I haven’t told my friends—either here in Europe or back home—that I’m hiding out in Venice. I no longer want to perform positivity to spare them the discomfort, or to pretend it helps when they tell me I’m strong. Mostly, I don’t want them to expect that I’ll be cured. Grief is hauling a suitcase with a broken wheel that is packed heavy with things you can’t leave behind. Being here won’t be a reset, but maybe it’ll jolt my senses awake. Still, I’m afraid of traveling solo when I’m barely functional. The most mundane choices have felt daunting. I can’t imagine making plans, deciding how to fill my days, or what to eat. Sometimes bravery feels foolish.
When I arrive, the palazzi look crestfallen in their winter light and the emerald canals are rippled by rain. Venice's mood is as volatile as mine, and I’m grateful for it.
All I do for days is walk. I take every artery and vein of the city that I can, obsessed with tracing them all for safekeeping. I walk the Fondamente—the long banks lapped by the lagoon—and stare into the fog at the fragmented glow of boats humming past the wooden piles.
Reactivating my memory of her maze of streets and canals is more difficult than I want to admit. As a teen, I’d learned not to rely on a map in Venice. You have to trust your instincts and know your dead ends. I once knew the way through a chain of associations, from campo to calle to campanile—which pasticceria to turn at, which belltower to keep at my back. Now, this chain has kinks I have to find the patience to undo. My intuition is rattled here as much as anywhere—grieving has made me unconfident. With every turn, I glance over my shoulder to note how to get back, because everything looks different in reverse, especially at night. Venice after dusk is her own shade of black; even the shadows have shadows.
I let Venice wash over me. Her dampness clings to skin and stone, and there’s a minerality in the air when it hits the lips, like the sediment at the bottom of a glass of red. My ears fill with squawking gulls and the pulse of church bells and echoes of footsteps over wet bridges. Dialect spills out of the dimly lit bacari where locals stand packed like sardines with their spritz and cicheti in hand, and I wonder if I’ll have the courage to join them. I eavesdrop on families and on kids who make Venice their playground and race each other on acqua alta planks, secretly wanting in on that togetherness and mourning my boys all over again. I watch elderly women climb bridges with their canes and grocery trolleys. My chest tightens at the thought of my body never making it that far, of how my sciatica already torments me in my thirties, of how I’ll probably never be a grandmother or make my mother one. When I struggle to picture my future, I give up trying and let her fog become tangled with mine. There’s relief, sometimes, in only seeing the next immediate step.
What Venice never conceals are her stains and scars. She’s not ashamed of her algae-eaten limestone, revealed when the tide pulls back, or her brick underbelly exposed from beneath peeling layers of peach skin. So many parts of her have been dismantled and reconfigured over generations, bones bracketed, blood vessels stented. Doorways have been filled in like they never existed and were never meant to be walked through. With every return here, I smile lovingly at the zig-zagging fissure down the face of the San Pantalon church, still un-mended. Her grief isn’t hushed; her flaws are flagrant for all to see. This tells me that decay is also survival—maybe we have to stop expecting to remain unchanged.
Venice's salt-battered façades stand on timber piles driven deep into the swamp. She’s been made stable on unstable soil. She is strength and softness in equal parts. But when the lagoon swells, she is at risk, proof that resilience and fragility are not opposites. What is brave is still vulnerable to sinking, and stability requires maintenance. I let her show me what I missed the first hundred times—gnawed piles that somehow still stand, greenery sprouting from crumbling walls, water surging from beneath street tiles. She is everything that cannot be. She is splendor built on mud.
She reminds me that ache and awe can coexist.
As the weeks unfold, I match my breath to the city's and become better at inhabiting my body. I rest and recharge the way I never did as the tireless grad student who lived life on triple-speed, as though she knew she’d be bedridden soon. Locals begin to address me and seek my gaze in the street—I must be alive. At the Rialto market, I’m given life advice with my produce: “Fai l’amore e mangia bene e non si va MAI al dottore, signora!” Make love and eat well, and you’ll never have to go to the doctor. If only it were that simple, I think, but I hear myself laugh. Standing at the counter in a crowded bacaro at the fish market, I sip my spritz and savor baccalà and sarde in saor cicheti while I hear a man tell his friend: “La vita è come una marea.” If life is like a tide, I can hang onto the fact that there must be calmer waters ahead.
My lagoon has felt soothingly familiar at a time when everything—even my own mind—has felt foreign. Practicing this form of micro-planning has helped me restore my sense of agency and control over my thoughts. I chip away at my decision paralysis one meal and one crossed bridge at a time. My hands become steadier when I take pictures. People ask me for directions. My accent in Italian goes undetected for longer. Confidence is steady recalibration, tiny gears that click into place.
The way starts to reveal itself in the shadows; what seems to be a dead-end or a canal is in fact a left turn when I dare to go a little further. I start to find the secret sotoporteghi passageways with ease. I’m surprised that this instinct has returned; it was always within me, I just had to unearth it. Still, when I do get infuriatingly turned around, I’m comforted by the arrows that point both left and right to get to the main squares—there’s more than one way to get there. No steps are wasted here; every detour leads to another unforgettable view.
Venice knows all that I wanted to become. I think she would tell my younger self that she will dare greatly for love and pour her full self into everything she tries. She would tell her that what will not change is her ability to find joy in uncertainty, and that there’s so much to be proud of, even in altered dreams.
Leaving will be hard, but I’ll keep her bravery in my pockets.
The fog suddenly smells like marsh and fish and hope.
