Rome, nightfall

A conversation with my favorite ghost

Rome is vibrant and far from empty this time of day, though there are no other people in the street. It is a different creature, this city, when the dusk comes. We walk up toward Teatro di Marcello, setting light catching your face. I focus on keeping my breath even up the incline. You look around yourself, pleased with your surroundings. Rome was always your crowning glory, and she adored you right back.

Teatro di Marcello, as the sun sets.

“I’ve missed this place.” Your hand flutters, taking in your home. “Nothing quite like it, you know, not anywhere else.” You shoot over a meaningful look. “Not anywhere else.”

“How is she?” I start, not sure what I can ask.

You try to catch my eye. “I wish you two had fixed things, in time.”

“Seems to be a reoccurring problem in this family, running against time.” I don’t meet your gaze, instead speaking to the ruins that dot this road, that are everywhere here, flung like crumbling coins.

“Everything’s alright now,” you allow.

“That’s good.” I want to meet you halfway, more than halfway, if I can bear it.

“How are you?” you try.

“I’m fine.”

This time, you step in front of me to stop my steps.

“You don’t have to tell me you’re fine.”

But I’m already tearing up. It’s always been this way, since I was a little girl. I sensed a fraction of your dispiacere and the tears came, even if I felt calm and wanted to exude only cool confidence.

“A father always knows,” you continue. But we were never good at talking to each other, even when you were alive, and we both still know it.

You are translucent in the light of a city so eternal it couldn’t erase you completely, not ever.

Imperial Fora at dusk, looking up toward the back of the Vittoriano.

“I wish I knew what to say. What I needed to know. What I should ask.”

You’re smiling, your hand reaching out, passing through mine. Your gaze is steady. We have the same eyes.

“I can’t say much. But what you need to know, you already know.”

I want you to tell me that you are proud of me, that I’m headed in the right direction, that you love me, that I am forgiven for all the little transgressions and maybe even for the bigger ones. But I don’t say it to myself, so you don’t say it either.

“I love you,” is what I say, as the night sweeps into our city, because it’s cliché, but it’s true, about it being the only thing that matters, the only thing that encompasses everything else.

You go with the fading light, ochre replaced with deep blue night. I turn to go too, retracing our footsteps and then farther. I am heading for home, past la Bocca della Verità and then Circo Massimo, the only sound my sneakers hitting the pavement.

I love you too, sighs the evening breeze. I see all your adventures, rustles the Roman pine above my head. I’m there when you cry but it’s my favorite when you laugh, when you are full of joy.

Your city, she speaks for you.

Evening aperitivo with the Arco di Giano (Arcus Quadrifons) in the background.

Pictures of Rome at night would always be incomplete without Its Majesty, the Colosseo.