12 years ago today (give or take a couple of days) I was in Venice. It’s odd the things I remember. I’ve been reading this book, The Art of Travel, which I am enjoying very much, and he talks about how anticipation of a trip is similar to the memory of a trip. When we anticipate a trip we look forward to the Grand Canal, and the gondolas, the color of the sky. When we travel, it is almost jarring to have to deal with the normal details of life (he puts it so well when he says that when he planned the trip he hadn’t thought about how he had to bring himself along). When the trip becomes a memory, it is those same things that we anticipated that we remember, the details fade back behind the snapshots of palazzo’s and lion statues.

I’ve been trying really hard to remember Venice. This is what I remember: getting off the bus at Mestre in a daze. Thinking where the hell is this, this ugly little town that acts as Venice’s gateway. I looked down the street and saw the train station. I grabbed my rolling duffle bag and dragged it noisily down the sidewalk, leaving my fellow bus-riders to their own confusion. Before I had left London two weeks before, I had made reservations at Youth Hostels in many of cities I’d be visiting. Despite the lack of spontaneity and adventure or romance bravado or whatever you want to call it, I’m glad that I had a reservation (that I had already paid for) at the YHA in Venice because it forced me to pick up my bag and drag it down to the Mestre train station, buy a ticket for Santa Lucia and go. I remember getting off the train and coming out of Santa Lucia, but I don’t remember what I saw. I don’t remember my first sight of Venice, or my second or third. I know what Venice looks like but I don’t remember what it looks like. I went up to the vaporetto ticket both and asked for a ticket for Giudecca, the nice man corrected my pronunciation, I said “Oui” instead of “Si” and I felt like an idiot. I remember it was warmer than the Tyrolean town in the Austrian Alps where I had spent the night before. The hostel was empty and had just opened for the season. I shared my room with a young American lesbian couple studying in Rome. I remember riding the vaporettos, I remember thinking that the canals smelled, but I can’t remember what they smelled like. There are a very few things I remember distinctly:

• The color of the sky,
• Standing on the Rialto bridge at six thirty in the morning for hours watching delivery men making deliveries from their boats,
• Little blown glass goldfish bowls in all the store windows,
• Splurging for my first hot meal since I left London at the hostel cafeteria. I think it was Salisbury steak.

I don’t know where the rest of the details are, and I can’t remember when I lost them. Were they gone by the time my two days had expired and I boarded the bus for Rome? Was I so caught up in those prosaic details of survival on my own in a strange land that I forgot to look around and etch the beautiful memory of this city onto my hippocampus, to commit those snapshots to glossy magazine pages in my mind that I could leaf through in my old age? Maybe it was easier to remember that I was supposed to love this city than actually love this city. I remember Venice as beautiful but I don’t remember the beauty.

Maybe I’ve lost the memories since then. 12 years is a long time to hold on to memories. I tend to think that most of our memories are of memories, and those keep building on themselves until you come out with something that resembles an impression. Sure when you travel you bring with you all those boring details of life–yes you have to move your luggage around and find a public bathroom. And maybe that’s why I remember those things more, because I have more practice in that. Whatever the reason, or whenever or however the memories of my last trip to Venice have slipped under the surface of that murky canal that is my brain, I’ve stayed away too long and I should have renewed this subscription a long time ago.