So I'm standing in the Campo de' Fiori in Rome. I like this place, a lot of the time. Like right now...I like it right now. It's a market right now, its open space occupied by stalls selling fruits, vegetables, spices, and thingsthingsthings to locals and tourists alike. The stalls are covered by enormous, square, white umbrellas, the likes of which I'd never seen until I came to Europe. Looking down from my apartment window, I can't see the ground for these umbrellas.
So I'm standing under one of them, talking to a stall-owner in my broken Italian, handing him coins for the onions I'm buying, and I can see, behind his head, the shaft of sunlight that comes down through the place between two of the huge white umbrellas. And in the sunlight there are raindrops.
And just for a second my lungs are not pulling in air. And then I can breathe again and I'm shoving money at the man and shouting "Grazie" and runningrunningrunning, out from under the umbrellas, past the front door of my apartment and I can see that it's open and spilling out people and that their eyes are full of the longing desperation that's rapidly replacing the blood in my veins. Seeing them, I can't help but to stop and laugh at them, with them. They're saying things to me, shouting things, my name and also other words that were already jumbling through my head.
And then everyone's putting up umbrellas and we're all rushing, slipping across newly-wet cobblestones together, heading northeast along familiar streets, our excitement bubbling up through our lips in the form of inane comments about where we're going and why.
And then we're there, it's there, right in front of us, looming and beautiful and glowing with an unshakable glory that has stood the test of two thousand years in a city that knows no end of turmoil. And our hearts are poundingpounding in our throats as we push through the crowds clogging the entrance and slide across the marble floor with our eyes lifted in anticipation.
And, oh gods, it's a building that never lets me down. On any given day, its majesty pulls my heart up into the air with an indescribable soaring leap. But that feeling hardly compares to how I feel now, staring up at the rain falling in through the beam of sunlight let in by the enormous hole in the ceiling, the oculus. The rain straight down, the beam of sunlight at an angle, shining a spotlight at a place on the inside of the coffered dome. Seeing this fulfills a longing I didn't know I had, that's been in my heart since my life began, fulfills it in a way that completely surpasses any expectation I've ever created for anything.
So I ignore the tourists chattering in a dozen different languages around me. I ignore the wooden barriers that have been placed around the very center of the circular room to stop these same tourists from slipping on wet marble. I wiggle through a gap between two barriers, slide into the center of the enormous circle, lift my chin, and let the rain fall on my face in the most beautiful way it ever could.