It is day 2 in Bologna. I have not written anything here in … I don’t even know how long. It turns out that if you want to keep notes on process / a work, on how something is coming together, you also have to go away and do the actual work. That has been taking up all of my time, along with a side hustle as I can’t freelance until book work is done and advances don’t cover costs of writing, researching, field work. In the time since I last wrote here, I signed with Faber and Picador for this second book, which makes me so so happy. Alhamdulillah for that.
What a dull start. Are you still here? Let me show you where I am writing this from.
I can see the bus stop from the window. I imagine that if I lived here in this little apartment, I would be able to spot friends walking up or getting off the bus and I would buzz them in through that small gate.
Why am I in Bologna? I came to Italy in October last year for a solo trip and went to Milan, Florence and Bologna. I was given a Schengen visa for a year – totally unexpected, a bounty, as I’ve only gotten that visa for 15 days or 45 in the past – and I decided that I would try and do as many trips as I could in 2025 with that visa. In the past, I have made some cities my home because of a man in the picture. This year, I wanted to become familiar with a place on my own terms: I wouldn’t be there for work or study or love, but only because I wanted to indulge myself. I wanted to prove to myself that I could financially support such an indulgence as a working writer and freelancer, with no man – a husband, a father – giving me a soft landing if I blazed through my savings. I loved the idea of Italy being the place for such a quest. I’ve been saving since I started working, always saving for a wedding or a home or bills or “an emergency when I’m old”. I’ve always had a complicated relationship with money, and being a freelancer only feeds on a scarcity mindset. So, what’s the worst that would happen if I didn’t penny-pinch for a year? Exposure therapy using Italy – sure, why not? This is a very privileged thing to do, I know.
I felt safe enough to come here alone. I wanted to see if I could do Italy differently – to stretch every euro as far as I could while still having a good time and living and eating well enough (I am too old now for bad beds). I wanted a place with another language, but not one so complicated that I would panic (in Sofia in 2013, I had to carry around a printout of Cyrillic alphabets and, without Google Translate or a working SIM, piece together each word on street signs or menus). I bought tickets on sale, used up miles, stayed at out-of-the-way Airbnbs, and this is my third trip since October 2024. In March, I went to Milan again, then Turin and Rome. This trip is the shortest one yet – just a week – and I’m in Bologna and Milan.
I’ve noticed that some people are vexed by this plan of mine. I’ll get “again???” and “isn’t this your fifth time?” (no, third in eight months) “just a week?” and my fave “how much money do you make, dude?” (see: side hustle). I think some people find it odd that I come “all the way to Europe” and mosey around two or three cities in one country versus a trek across multiple countries (see: stretch every euro). I ask a lot of ‘why?’ on these trips. Why should I cram in so many countries? Why shouldn’t I just get away for a week? Why shouldn’t I shop at local markets and supermarkets and cook for myself? Why should I eat pasta every day? (people get very stressed by this last one in particular – I don’t eat pizza and pasta every day in my normal life, and I don’t here either. Yesterday’s dinner was salmon and a black rice and edamame salad bowl. On one trip in Milan, a friend and I split a frozen tuna pizza from the supermarket. Why the fuck not?)
I wanted to have finished a chapter I’m working on before I came here this time. I couldn’t meet that deadline – a bit of it was the side hustle taking up more time than I anticipated, but another bigger part was that this chapter is more nuanced, more outside the realm of my experience than any other I’ve worked on. (Another ‘why’ got added to the mix: why should a trip only be a ‘reward’ for working to the point of exhaustion?) I spend more time thinking about the chapter, a constant processing going on in the back of my mind, than writing it. I try to come to the page prepared, and then I falter. I worry about getting it wrong, about criticism, about it falling short. I’ve done this for enough time to know that when the writing becomes stilted, the word count increasing along with my doubt that any of what I’ve written is good enough, it is time to step away and stop fiddling with the work, trying to force it to come together. I love that my brain is puzzling away at it in the background and I’m curious to see what surfaces.
So here I am, thinking and reading and leaving that writing alone for a week. I’ve learned that my first day on a solo trip is always a bit wobbly. There’s a flavour of loneliness when you travel alone and only speak to another human to ask for a coffee or say ‘thank you’ and I wanted to become accustomed to that flavour this year. I didn’t go to any restaurants yesterday, preferring to cook for myself in this very cute kitchen, so I didn’t have any interactions with wait staff – that usually accounts for a couple of sentences. I am so aware of the sudden silence. This is exactly what I wanted and hoped for, but it is jarring: I don’t have the dogs to chat to, the constant din of the generator during the Karachi heatwave power outages, no overhead fan, no Zoom calls, no one I’m living with to speak to, no noise of the house throughout the day as it wakes and then settles in for the night. The sun sets here at 9 p.m. and its so quiet in this neighbourhood by that time that last night I sat in the apartment’s tiny balcony and just listened to a bird – like I was in a goddamn movie or something, no phone, nothing. My hearing suddenly feels supersonic, tuning into everything, even the shhhhhh the leaves on the tree outside the bedroom window make in the wind. In the park, I take a nap and wake to a group of girls sitting under a nearby tree that they’ve strung pink balloons on singing tanti auguri. Would you like to listen to what I’ve been hearing? Here.
I found myself going silent yesterday, nervous to use the rudimentary Italian I’ve been practising for this year of visits. The first day I’m always really self-conscious, so I slip back into English and being shy. I know how to order a coffee with a splash of milk, but I’ll say ‘cappuccino’ instead. I know ‘Hugo’, as in a Hugo spritz, is pronounced ‘oo go’, but I’ll Americanise it even more when I open my mouth, surprising even myself. I say the Italian words for things to myself and marvel at how totally useless they are for me now – negozio, camicia, zaino, rosso, nero – only letting me describe strangers’ shirts and backpacks to myself under my breath. In the supermarket I practice the words I’ve been learning – tacchina is great because I get turkey to make a sandwich for lunch, but when the checkout guy asks me if I have a loyalty card, I have to say, ‘English please’, like a stupid tourist. Not even inglese per favore.
At one point yesterday I scolded myself for staying shy and gave myself a challenge – why? So I walked into Sephora to find a skin tint and asked a staff member to help me find my shade. She doesn’t understand something I ask and my accent becomes even more Americanised the more nervous I get and I’m using gestures like I’m smoothing out a coat of paint on my face – what the fuck is the word for ‘coverage’ – until I say, ‘It’s ok, never mind’. She replied, ‘No, why don’t you try to explain yourself, I can help if I understand.’ Which just made me want to step out of my skin and walk away. In the end she suggested something, a different product, and said, ‘If you trust me, you’ll get this.’ So I felt very rude saying, ‘No that’s okay, I’ll keep looking.’ I know it was a translation thing, but imagine essentially saying to someone, ‘I don’t trust you.’ It’s only the price tag that forces me to not slip into default pleaser mode.
On my first trip, I did the tourist-y things so on these trips, I set myself little tasks and wander around a neighbourhood with the task as the end goal. I do things I cannot do in Karachi, like napping in the park. My sister wants holy basil seeds, so I spent some time searching for that yesterday. Today I want to get coffee beans to take home, and to read in the library and find more parks. I do one fancy-ish sit down meal on each of these trips, and this time, I’m going here in the evening.
Time for a turkey sandwich lunch. I hope you enjoyed this little dispatch. All of this too is process – I just never thought it could be.