It is our last day/night in Italy. We are staying in Amalfi one last night and having a spa day as a wind-up of our visit. Tomorrow we head back to Naples and then to Amsterdam, where we have a long layover, about 19 hours. We’re going to explore the city a bit. A friend on the tour we’ve been on asked, with wide, excited, eyes, if we were going to explore the Red Light District.
I hadn’t even considered it, tbh. It’s like when we used to go on kinky/swinger cruises and other guests would get all excited about going to a nudist beach. When you live the life I do – and even more to the point, when you’re on a clothing optional cruise with 4000 other kinky, sexually open people, what’s the draw of being or seeing people naked in public? The Red Light District doesn’t do much for me. But who knows, we’ll have a lot of time both day and night. Never say never.
Now that I think about it, I wonder what it would be like to purchase someone’s time? Or have my time purchased. (There was that time I was paid, but I was so inexperienced it was intimidating. And when W let men buy my favors with Tryst dollars…well, that didn’t really count, although it was fun.)
I had the worst time sleeping last night. I have had very little anxiety since we started this trip, even including the loss of our luggage; we were too exhausted at the end of each day after hiking for miles up and down the ridges, steps and cliffs of the Amalfi Coast. This last day of the hiking tour was no different, but still I woke at 2am and didn’t get back to sleep until after 5am.
It was the most unusual anxiety I have ever had: it felt almost dissociative, or like a fever dream. I woke in the night with my mind racing, the four walls of our little room feeling cagelike. This place felt not only foreign, but alien. This crevice that Amalfi crouches in, its buildings clinging to the cliffs, felt unreal and alien to me, as though they existed only during the day and night while tourists are here, swarming the shops and restaurants. I was afraid if I went outside our little hotel room I’d find nothing out there. I was missing Sir desperately, but couldn’t share my fears with him (I knew how insane they sounded) and Adam was sleeping soundly beside me. I wanted to get up and walk to the water, hoping that would soothe me, but was afraid of what I’d find. I finally asked Sir to play a long-distance game with me on the phone that we enjoy, and the familiarity of that helped quiet my anxious brain. I slept, but then had anxiety dreams.
Being without my anti-anxiety/antidepressant medication abruptly is not so good, maybe. (I carried a week’s worth in my carryon, but no more, assuming even if they “lost” my luggage it would be found and delivered by now. Stupid assumption, obviously.)
~ some time later ~
We are now sitting at the Monestero Santa Rosa, a 17th century Dominican monastery/ convent turned into a 5-star hotel and spa, where we have scheduled our last day as a spa day. Yes I am hoping all of the anxiety of last night and the annoyances of the lost luggage (still not resolved) will be massaged away. If nothing else, the view is helping.
Prior to arriving, however, I got yelled at in Italian by our bus driver because I asked him to confirm his bus stopped here. He never did confirm, but it did, and (surprisingly) we arrived in one piece.
And after 2 1/2 hours of pampering…
Anxiety nowhere to be found.
