voce del verbo: "Tornare"
Or a weirdly in depth talk about Italian verb analysis
Choosing a title is a funny thing.
Anyone who has ever tried writing or creating knows how daunting it is to finally name the project that has been haunting you for god knows how long.
Naming feels final. It’s a label. You are giving something the word by which the world will recognize them. The succession of letters that will define them as an “Existing form”. Names are conveniences that humans use to speak about themselves and their things, their places. They are necessities to define where I end and where You begin.
I’ve always had the impression that names shape us more than we shape them. We tend to fit whatever label our guardians assign to us. When your best friends give you a nickname, that is a new label as well. One made of love, that bends us towards new shapes. Choosing your own name is a reshaping of one’s form. A rejection and retelling of your whole person.
So… it’s kind of a big deal. Fear comes and Her presence is expected, when it is time to name something.
And it’s been a while since I’ve started a project. Writing. And the big part that I always avoid: Sharing it. Putting it out into the world. I am scared. Fear has been waiting for me for a while. Our meeting was long overdue.
Substack doesn’t let you make an empty-titled blog. So a choice is inevitable. A ritual of naming, if you’ll allow me some mistification of blogging.
Knowing myself, how paralyzed I can become faced with endless options, none of them clearly wrong or right, I made a choice: whatever came to mind first, would become the title of this substack.
It only took a few seconds for my neurons to fire something up, so here it is:
A mezzanotte torno.
Literal translation from Italian: “At midnight I return”.
Pretentious enough for an artist out of work. Cool looking enough to me. Probably not that memorable. But what does it mean?
It’s a play on words. My name is Alice Mezzanotte. Shortened to A. Mezzanotte, you get “a mezzanotte”… “At midnight”. heh.
But what about “Torno”?
Torno, voce del verbo Tornare.
When you learn Italian grammar and verb analysis this is one of the first things you are taught to do: to recognize the “Voice of the Verb”, also known as the base form of the verb. So torno is a shape taken by the verb Tornare: “To return”.
Verbs in Italian change shape according to who is speaking, and at what time the speaker’s action was completed.
So from the shape of “Torno”, we can understand that the speaker is a single person. Io (I) Torno. Prima persona singolare. First Person Singular.
And what about the time? This person is returning now. Tempo Presente Indicativo. Io torno, which in English roughly corresponds to the Present Simple tense, I Return.
But are they really returning now? We have a time-defining particle beforehand, don’t we? At midnight. At midnight I return. I didn’t use the Future tense.
In Italian it sounds very mundane, like a routine: at x time I do y. It’s not special, I do this every day. Or it might sound like a moody teenager leaving before dinner, reassuring mom and dad that “I’ll be back jeez don’t worry! Let me go!”
In English to me, it sounds more foreboding. At midnight, I Return. Inevitability. A promise. You shall see me again, My Love.
And now that I’ve lost every reader I had by using what little remembrance I have left in my brain of Italian grammar from elementary school, let’s talk about returns.
I’m departing soon. By August I’ll be on a plane to a country I’ve never seen, to stay there for two years.
I’m not scared. I don’t think my brain has fully processed that I won’t have a lot of the things I rely on now. At the same time, I’ve never needed much. I thrive with books, some paper, a good pen and my internet access.
Now looking at the battlefield that is my room, furnished by years of depression, the objects that I’m leaving and others that I’m bringing are showing me what kind of life I want to live. What kind of life I want to leave behind.
I’m trying to leave a tidy room, because I will come back here.
And I am relieved that I'd left my room tidy…
When I tell people that I’m leaving, the question that has been coming up more often than what I’m going to do in this foreign land— is when I’m going to be back. Mom speaks of me coming back for Christmas, for summer. That once I’m done there, two years from now I’ll bring what I’ve learned back to Italy. I’ll be able to live and help here in a new way.
Others have told me that I’ll never come back. That if I can find a way to stay, I will.
It is as if they already know, Cassandra has seen it. If i stop and think about their wording it almost scares me: “You won’t come back”— sounds like an omen.
I know what they mean: that life in the northern parts of Europe is better. The work is better, the pay is better. If I can bear the cold winters, I’ll be set for a better life than what Italy can give. I'd be lying if I said I hadn’t thought about it.
But right now, I’m only thinking of how many books I can bring with me in one suitcase.
Tornare comes from Tornio, the machine called Lathe in English.
Tornare in Latin used to be about “moving in circles — turning”. A cycle, as the lathe does. You can see where Tornare and Turning might have crossed paths etymologically.
It is in later usage that Tornare became the verb we know now as “Going back to where one came”. Re-turning.
I spend a lot of time looking at google maps, at the streets that I’ll traverse in my new town.
I have already saved in my neat google maps lists the restaurants and shops that look most interesting. I have already found the local cinema, and saved the google page for their English-speaking screenings.
I worry, that I am making a mistake. That I’ll just be wasting time, money, and that I won’t find anything here. That I’ll still be the same old depressed girl that wastes her chances and can’t do anything of what she sets out to be. That is my lathe, the thought that always comes back.
I always return to my regrets.
I am worrying now, writing this, that trying a substack is useless. that sharing these pointless musings will be useless. That I’ll regret doing this because I’ll fuck it up. Because something else will come back up to haunt me and I’ll—
Well, this is it. I’ll make this fucking mistake.
I try again. I share myself again. I return. And see where I land.
All of my worries are based on half attempts, half mistakes, that I didn’t really see through. Fear paralized me. Insecurity stopped me. It’s time I let them pass and go through with something for once.
And if it sucks, so be it. The internet is dying anyway.
See you soon, see you around. Subscribe to see where I go next.