I fly often. Too often. And I always write mid-air—perhaps because it’s the only moment I’m suspended from everything: gravity, timelines, expectations.
Back in 2016, when I first started flying regularly, my writings were painfully romantic. Not Disney-roses-and-happy-endings romantic, but gothic romantic. Think The Nightmare by Henry Fuseli—I was the woman lying limp under a demon of my own design. Tormented, theatrical. I’d obsess over boys the way Goethe’s Werther did, minus the literary finesse to immortalise my suffering.
Then something shifted.
Like the end of the 18th century, I too transitioned from Romanticism to Realism—or Verismo, since I’m Italian and Verga runs in my bloodstream. I stopped being the mythologised heroine of my own drama. I was no longer the Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog. I became the sea. Foggy. Still. Unimpressed.
I started noticing the ugliness in things. Not just my heartbreak, but the actual social landscapes around me. But unlike Pellizza da Volpedo or Tolstoy, I didn’t denounce injustice from a canvas or a pulpit—I argued with strangers in the smoking area of parties, high on weed and whatever else was floating around. Sometimes older men, dazzled by my fury and looking to bed a younger storm, would tag along. They didn’t change, nor did I. No revolutions were born on those nights—unless you count internal ones.
So, naturally, I entered my Decadent phase.
If I were a painting, I’d be The Young Decadent by Ramon Casas. If I were literature, I’d be the first chapter of The Pleasure by D’Annunzio—verbose, embroidered, a little pointless, but tragically self-aware. I numbed myself with YouTube shorts, lazy gym sessions, unceremonious life. The fate of the overeducated and underinspired.
But maybe something’s changing again.
When I quit my job, I cracked the shell from the inside. I chose stillness. I chose uncertainty. And I promised myself I wouldn’t fall back into the same abyss of aestheticised despair.
This time, I want my own Avant-garde. My own -ism.
I want to weave together all my past selves—the gothic tragic, the realist observer, the decadent drifter—into something coherent, maybe even meaningful. I want to be nostalgic without being naïve. I want to fight for fairness without trying to save the world, only to spiral when the world shrugs back. I want to reflect without drowning. Speak without performing. Change without self-erasure.
I want to figure out what kind of woman I am without defaulting to whatever hashtag feminism or aestheticized rebellion is trending that month. Use the narrative, sure—but don’t get swallowed by it. I want to follow my curiosity without always monetising it, chase my joy without asking it to pay rent.
Recognition? Yes. But not as a footnote in someone else’s movement.
Just me, in all my contradictions. Me, as a dot in this absurd, dazzling constellation.
And if that sounds humanistic—sure. But not human-centric. Because I want to keep God and nature at the centre of all this. Not just my search for meaning, but my surrender to it.
Because sometimes, when you’re sitting in seat 20A, halfway between a city you never loved and a home that doesn’t exist yet, that’s all you really have: a shaky hand, a notebook, and a sky that doesn’t care—but lets you write anyway.
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