Dear Ma,

For the past couple weeks I've been having intense synesthetic episodes. Simply admiring a photo of our old Tuscan villa will send me into a dizzy spell in which I am taken by the scent of figs, pines and those crunchy sun-soaked rocks that lined our driveway. The odor of your mother-in-law's house will suddenly overcome me while I do the most mundane of tasks. I try to concentrate; my forehead will tense as I desperately cling to what is left of the smell. I'm sure I look like a damn idiot. What is it that sets this off, Ma? I will leaf for hours through my music collection, trying to find that song that most encompasses my time in Italy, but I always come out empty handed.

There is no home in this country. There is no familiarity. Every year I am here I disappear more. The girl I am sculpting is no product of historicity. Ma, I have become every bastard woman who has ever been deserving of blasphemous poetry and the scorn of a million evil eyes. Bastards find it easier to mold themselves into the what an other might wish for. Grotesque, unclean, coo-cooing ghosts. Men and women whisper fantasies of leaving their lovers for a ghost-- grandiose tales of never leaving the confines of a tiny studio, feeling their bastard writhe under their hand as she is crafted into a perfect new lie. We are not people who feel, we are people who inspire others to feel, to create. The artist constructs for us the perfect world of disinvolvement, and we float in it.

Ma, you have been left for another woman, so tell me: What would you think of me now? Am I an idealistic fool or is there maliciousness behind my acts? Is it too late to come back home? Would I even recognize our old house if I saw it in a picture with others?

Please help me shed some light on this matter as soon as possible.

Yours,
GCB