There is a kind of exile
in growing older while the soul remains unruly.
Not the exile of distance—
but of containment.
There are evenings when I feel my life
tightening around me
with the quiet, civilized restraints
upon which society prides itself—
duty, decorum, endurance,
the disciplined choreography
of being necessary to others.
And yet the soul remains magnificently disobedient.
It continues reaching
toward beauty with both hands.
Toward art.
Toward eros.
Toward transcendence.
Like Yeats, I have begun to feel
the indignities of time gathering at the body—
the slow betrayal of bone and skin,
the strange grief of discovering
that the spirit remains feverishly young
while the flesh acquires history.
But unlike him,
I do not just wish to abandon the mortal world
for some eternal and bloodless permanence.
First, I want
to be consumed by it completely.
In the narrow Florentine streets
where stone remembers every century,
I imagine myself unfastened at last.
I imagine Florence at dusk—
the streets burnished amber beneath the dying light,
cathedrals ascending like acts of devotion,
their ceilings swollen with saints
who look less holy than lovesick.
There, even stone appears sentient with longing.
Art is not decoration. It is survival.
The architecture does not merely endure;
it aches upward.
Every corridor narrows into intimacy.
Every piazza opens like revelation.
The Arno moves through the city
with the languid authority of memory itself,
carrying centuries of poets, lovers, martyrs, painters—
all those who understood
that beauty is not ornamental.
It is salvation.
And I think I would become dangerous there.
Not to others—
but to the careful life I have constructed.
Because my soul does not wish for goodness alone.
It wishes for magnitude.
For a life flung open
like cathedral doors at vespers.
And like the center of a holy city-
the Piazza del Duomo calls-
Making Florence an ornamental refuge
where a woman might finally cease apologizing
for the opulence of her inner life.
Where desire is not treated
as something unbecoming in a woman grown older,
but as evidence that the soul
has not yet surrendered.
I grow weary of the expectation
that age should refine women into restraint—
that we should become quieter with time,
less ravenous,
less luminous,
less willing to ruin ourselves
for love or art or ecstasy.
As though wisdom were synonymous
with diminishment.
Society prefers women preserved.
But my soul has become only more extravagant
and wild.
It wants candlelit windows thrown open to midnight.
It wants conversations that wander until dawn
through poetry and philosophy and grief.
It wants the sacred recklessness
of being profoundly known.
And, yet, beneath all of it
is the unbearable awareness
that the body cannot follow forever.
That one day these streets—
whether Florentine or imagined—
will continue without me.
The bells will go on tolling above the terracotta roofs.
Lovers will continue crossing bridges at twilight.
Someone will stand before Botticelli
and feel their heart split open by beauty.
And I—
with all this terrible wanting still inside me—
will have vanished into silence.
Perhaps that is why Florence calls to me so relentlessly.
Not because it promises escape,
but because it reminds me
that the soul was never designed
for mediocrity.
Yeats wished to escape the dying animal body
and become immortal art.
I want both/and.
I want, just once before I vanish,
to inhabit this temporary body completely
And if the body aches—
let it ache.
If time marks me—
let it tell my story.
And if I must remain bound—
by duty, by time, by the failing architecture of the flesh—
then let me at least remain in my longing
just once more..
