Sunset in Milan

The New York City skyline looks smaller than I thought it would from above.

As I lift up out of JFK into the autumn streaked clouds, I think about how overwhelming and magnificent it is when you’re in the city, and how inconsequential it seems when you are miles above it.

Although I know it’s impossible, I stare into the lights below me and imagine I can see the rooftop of my Queens apartment. I can almost convince myself I can make out the shape of the hospital from here, and I can nearly feel the preternatural chilliness and sterile air. I pretend that I can see coffee shops and offices and people the size of ants.

I think this might be what it’s like to die, to see your life spread out below you and know with certainty that you are leaving it all behind for the unknown.

I feel it in my bones then: electricity. Maybe it’s the elevation change, sneaking between the metal flanks of the plane, or fear- quicksilver as lightning. Or maybe, I think, as the plane lifts above the clouds and it’s as though New York City and my old life doesn’t exist at all, it’s pure excitement, nearly forgotten and shocking in its brilliance.

In Milan, the streets smell like money and patinated leather. People move differently than in New York City- still with haste but with the subtle inflection that even if they don’t get where they are going on time, it won’t matter, since they are the ones everyone else is waiting for.

I feel dirty from the plane, and tired, but as soon as I see stucco and stone rising up in place of the glass and concrete I am used to, a thrill of energy moves through me and I feel my step quicken. My Uber is waiting for me, and I open the door hesitantly, as though the rules may be different here, everything more sophisticated in ways I don’t quite understand yet.

The Italian that I learned during countless hours of chemo slips from my mind, and I hear my “Hello,” hesitant and American and tiny before I have the chance to stop myself.

My driver is a woman who looks to be about my age, with long black hair, gold jewelry, and lips three sizes bigger than organically possible.

“Chiao!” She says, and reaches into the backseat to help me pull my suitcase and carry on into the car. Then in perfect, although heavily accented, English she says, “My name is Isabelle, where would you like to go?”

“Città Studi,” I say, and climb into the backseat, feeling the air conditioning wash over me and making gooseflesh rise like a tide on my arms.

“Are you student?” Isabelle asks, still looking at me expectantly.

“No,” I say, smiling hesitantly. “I’m sub-leasing an apartment from a professor who is on a six month sabbatical.”

Isabelle smiles widely and nods enthusiastically, but I can tell by the glazed look that comes over her eyes that I’ve said too many words too fast, and her English, although precise, has its limitations.

“Very nice!” She bubbles, and then she reaches out a hand and adjusts my hair. “Your clips,” she says, gesturing with her hands to where my extensions start, “They show, I fix them. In Milan, we don’t show our clips.”

I feel a flush rise from my stomach all the way to my scalp. Embarrassment tastes bitter, like medicine, and I look away, studying the people bustling past the ancient architecture as though it isn’t breathtaking.

My hair, although now several inches long, is so thin that in places my scalp is visible through it, and so I paid more money than I would care to admit to once again have the long, honey blonde hair that I used to cherish so much before chemo took it away from me overnight. I feel like my disguise has been ripped away, that not even thirty minutes into my fresh start, I’ve been discovered as a fraud.

“Hey,” Isabelle says, and I look at her, heart caught painfully beneath my ribs. She pushes aside some of her hair to show me the weft underneath, the layer of false hair hidden neatly away. She winks at me, and I feel absolution, as sweet and unexpected as the first day of spring after an indescribably long winter.

My apartment is tweed and chrome and metrosexual, shocking after the sun-burnished stone and red roofs outside.

It just adds to the feeling that this is all a dream, that I am not really here at all and I am going to wake up in the hospital any minute with my central line throbbing and a nurse coming to check my vitals.

I unpack slowly in the bedroom, hanging up my clothes in the huge empty closet. They look tiny, and I imagine that in six months, it will be bursting with new pieces, there will be no space left for even a single camisole.

In the bathroom, I put my toiletries in the cabinet over the black marble sink, (there’s a matching tub that I can’t wait to soak in), and when I close the mirrored door my reflection stares back at me. My eyes look too big and I can tell that I’m pale under my foundation and my hair is hanging limp. I press my face closer to the mirror, and I see a bit of eyelash glue has crept into the corner of my eye, an occupational hazard when one's own natural lashes are microscopic, and false ones are a necessity.

“You’ve got this,” I whisper to myself, and watch my reflection give me the same encouragement back, confidence pulled from an invisible well.

Milan came to me in a dream after my second recurrence. I had just moved to New York City after graduating from college and leaving my hometown in New Hampshire for the first time. I had been living on my own for only four months when I started to find the bruises scattered across my body; thumbprints that showed up overnight and made me think about aliens and home invaders that never made a sound. I denied it for a while, convincing myself it was a thousand things except what I knew it had to be. This wasn’t, after all, my first rodeo. I was six when I went into remission for the first time, eight when it came back, and eleven when I thought it was gone forever.

When I told my mother she burst into tears on the phone and said I should never have moved away, as if my thirteen years of reprieve was only thanks to the fact that she was there monitoring what time I went to sleep and what I ate and what my moods were on any given day.

When I made the decision to stay in New York City for treatment, she resisted fiercely. I wasn’t sure how I would be able to go through it on my own, but all I knew was that this was a hill I had to, hopefully not literally, die on. One afternoon when I came home from work my mother was sitting on the floor outside my apartment surrounded by suitcases. She had smiled at me grimly, and informed me that I may refuse to come home, but that wouldn’t stop her bringing home to me.

In retrospect, I wouldn’t have made it without her. She reminded me of that the morning I left for JFK, sitting on the couch with her arms folded and refusing to see me off in protest.

“I don’t know what you think you’re doing with your life, Hanna,” she had said, and I saw the tears waiting behind her mask of disapproval.

“I don’t either, Mom,” I had exploded, “But I’m doing something, and honestly, that’s enough.”

In the end, she hugged me goodbye and pressed a kiss onto my forehead, a gesture of love that was rare from her and that I held close to my heart like a precious gem.

I hugged her back and tried to tell her in the hug all the things I couldn’t find words to say. That for once, I wanted to take my life into my hands. That she was my home, but I needed to be a stranger somewhere for awhile to figure out who I was. That although an outsider looking in may see it as though I had already been given my second chance, I didn’t count anything that I hadn’t really claimed as my own in the first place.

I call my mother as the streetlights turn on outside my open window, and the murmur of Italian from the sidewalk below has grown more sporadic.

“Are you finding what you’re looking for?” my mother asks, and I hear the dishwasher in the background and I imagine her in my tiny apartment, doing the dishes and keeping it clean and waiting for me to come back.

“I don’t know yet,” I say, and then I see the sun sink below the domed rooftops in the distance and stain all that white marble a deep autumn.

“I take that back,” I say. “I think I’m looking at it right now.”

During my second week in Milan, I get a job at a boutique in the Brera district. I don’t have to work, my mother puts money into my bank account every week, and I have saved every penny I could while I was working in New York in preparation for this move.

For these reasons I’m not planning on applying anywhere; my first weeks in Milan I drift through the streets eating cornettos and soaking up the foreign sun on my face with something close to reverence. I find myself in antique shops and boutiques that sell everything from vintage American Coca-Cola bottles and Louis Vuitton purses that cost more than all of my stem cell transplants. I try on leather jackets and berets and stilettos and strike poses in dressing room mirrors. I post on my Instagram pictures of me standing on the breathtaking terraces of the Duomo di Milano and smiling behind my sunglasses in front of the Basilica di Sant’Ambrogio.

I stare at the 4th century church for a long time, imagining the people who worshiped there all those centuries ago. It makes me feel simultaneously unimportant and also timeless, and I wonder if the Buddhists are right and reincarnation is real, I might have been one of those people who prayed here. If, in that lifetime, I had known sickness too or if I had been healthy and strong.

Standing in the thousands of footprints of those who came before makes my own suffering seem smaller, and there is comfort in knowing that someone has stood on this very spot and perhaps also whispered a prayer of gratitude to get to live another day.

I get texts from my family and friends telling me how proud of me they are. I fight down the guilt that rises up in me when I get texts from fellow patients who I’ve met during treatment, many of whom I know are currently hospitalized. I feel a rush of shame that I am here under an Italian sky drinking cappuccinos and sleeping until noon when hundreds of miles away, friends are laying in hospital beds with IVs in their arms, pale, bald and with prematurely stooped shoulders, laden by the weight of their pain.

It is during one of these attacks of guilt that I wander into the boutique and am flipping through a rack of beautifully flowered sundresses when a woman comes up to me, clearly harried and with a crying baby on her hip.

“Hi,” she says, and then catches herself and greets me in broken Italian, asking me hesitantly if I need help finding anything. It takes me a minute to register that she is American, and when I reply in English, a smile slips across her face, transforming her features into something truly beautiful.

“Oh my gosh,” she says, “I love when American tourists come in here, it means my brain can go from about a million miles a minute to just ten thousand.” She laughs, and the baby on her hip cries louder. “I’m so sorry, my daughter has a little fever and daycare wouldn’t take her. I’m Libby, the owner. Gosh, that sounds really presumptuous doesn’t it? It’s not really that great, I ask myself every day why I decided to open a boutique in a country where I seem to be uniquely gifted in not understanding the language. It’s my fault for marrying an Italian man and being so blinded by his sexy accent that I woke up one day and realized I had given up my American citizenship and accepted a life as a perpetual outsider.”

The words pour out of her in a rush and I feel for the first time since moving to Milan that just maybe someone else here is as lost as I am.

She blushes, and apologizes, “I’m so sorry, I am rambling. Please, let me know if I can help you find anything.” She turns to walk away and then as an afterthought faces me again. “You aren’t looking for a job by any chance, because if you are you might just be my hero.”

And so that’s how I find myself ringing up tourists and locals and men who ask me to gift wrap silk scarves. My Italian improves every day, and I wake up each morning looking forward to the smell of perfume and fabric and lavender that permeates the boutique. Within a week, Libby has entrusted me with a key, and after locking up I walk back to my apartment feeling a sense of elation that almost allows me to ignore the ache in my legs, and the pain in my hands from the register.

I call and tell my mother that Milan was the best choice I ever made, and send her pictures of me holding Libby’s baby.

She replies and tells me that I look pale, and asks if I am taking my medicine. I respond with a picture of myself in a vintage wedding dress that arrived in a shipment and that Libby insists I try on. I am too thin for the dress, and the neckline shows my scar from my port, but Libby doesn’t mention it. Instead she tells me my collarbones are stunning, and she says I have the neck of a queen.

I think of myself at ten, when everyone thought the treatment wasn’t working, and I overheard my mother sobbing on the phone to my aunt that I may never wear a wedding dress, never walk down the aisle. With Libby cheering me on, I walk through the store as though it is the Sistine Chapel, as though instead of a cash register, there is a smitten man waiting for me, crying at the very sight of me.

I meet Gio when I have been in Milan for two months, and my Italian is finally becoming passable. At first I assume he’s buying a gift for a girlfriend or wife, and so I only partially register his dark hair and olive skin, the five o’clock shadow that brushes across his jaw like a secret. It’s only when he stands in front of me at the register and asks me in accented English to gift wrap the necklace for his la sorella that I allow myself to fully appreciate his chiseled chin and liquid eyes.

He is upfront and yet impressively suave, and it’s only after he’s left that I realize I have given him my phone number, and agreed to dinner with him that very night. Libby is squealing behind me, and I think that it’s been so long since I have seen myself as desirable that I cannot reconcile the woman Gio has just asked out with myself.

Gio has been stolen from the script of a romantic comedy. He picks me up on a moped and takes me to a rooftop bar near the Navigli canal. He pulls back my chair and gives me my jacket when I shiver. He asks me about myself, and although I promised I wouldn’t, I find myself telling him about the cancer, about this second chance city.

He tells me about his own life, but mostly hangs on my every word as though it is the most interesting story he has ever heard.

The sun sets, and I know that it is turning my hair gold. Gio tells me I look like an angel, and I almost feel beautiful.

I think about the food we are eating, the man in front of me, the way the air feels on my skin. I don’t think about the way four months ago my doctor took my hand as he told me that the treatments weren’t working. That while we were fighting a battle in my blood a war had started in my bones. That although there is always something else to do, at a certain point the outcome had become fixed. I don’t think about my mother, waiting for me to come home and perhaps praying I won’t have to.

I eat caviar and drink wine and think that although there will be a thousand sunsets I do not get to see, I am getting this one right now, and that is enough.

“So now that you are healthy, you make sure life is big and beautiful?” Gio asks me, and the candlelight turns his skin bronze as a statue.

“Yes,” I agree, and breathe in this night until it is stored deep in a part of me that never dies, until Milan is an indelible watermark on the bravest and most eternal part of my soul.