"Audentes fortuna iuvat - Fortune favors the bold"

Tears cover my cheeks and my vision blurs as my eyes dart from side to side and my weary legs carry me across another Roman road, foreign to me. Why do I do this to myself? Haven’t you heard that you can’t escape heartbreak? My inner monologue tears me to shreds.

Audentes fortuna iuvat, I whisper repeatedly to myself - Fortune favors the bold. I had envisioned having no one to call (and no phone to call them with) to feel more like freedom. I had envisioned walking through the streets of the eternal city to be more like a dream. My feet somehow seemed to know the way, convinced before my mind was that I, the girl who hadn’t stepped onto a plane until the age of 18, who had left everything (and everyone) she knew behind, made the right decision by flying to Italy all alone, where she didn’t know a soul.

But suddenly there it was. Like a break in the clouds, a star amongst the darkness, a familiar face in my loneliest moment – I could see the dome of St. Peter’s Basilica in the distance. I had no idea I was so close to the Vatican, to the place where St. Peter himself and Pope John Paul II lay for eternity. My heart seemed to stop in my chest and my weary legs broke into a jog. Despite everything, faith has remained a constant in a fickle life.

Stepping into the square feels like coming home. I breathe in and feel my faith pulsing through my being, a real part of me brought to life by the glory of this place. My mental and physical exhaustion seems to cease, leaving behind the past three sleepless nights. Tolkien certainly knew a thing or two about this life – “Not all those who wander are lost.” For I decide then and there that I will wander on, looking for myself in the church steeples, in the sunsets, in the eyes of strangers whose gaze stays a moment too long on the Roma Metro.

I wander on, looking for that moment of peace for other people, eager, somehow, to share the hope of that moment with those around me. I wander on, a believer in a world full of skeptics, with that memory of the first time my eyes found true solace in a piece of architecture, for the first time I knew beyond any reasonable doubt that what I have always believed is really true – that this life as we know it, this is not the end. I need only return to that foreign street in Rome to be reminded.