The face of immortality

It was a day of firsts. I could not decide if my senses had taken a dive far deeper into the books than I ever had, or if I had finally lifted my eyes off the pages. I realized I should not have read Kerouac right before arriving here. Now, all I could think was “nothing is everything, everything is nothing”.
Early evening resembled the hours of fading noon back home. The golden rays illuminated a part of the white face of the curly-haired lad of the days of yore. Whoever thought, sitting in a study, reading about the genius of his kind could yield anything more than a fog of idea about what actually is, was mistaken.
At such pure a moment, I could only whip myself so long.
The music of a trio of violinists, sitting on the steps opposite the Palazzo Vecchio, played music without stopping, as though it were a part of the moody air that sometimes threatened to blow me off my feet. A few steps away, amid the quadrangle of statues of Dante, Vespucci, Galileo, a saxophonist played a sassy tune. I could not ignore the loneliness in its liveliness, echoing off the outer walls of the Uffizi Gallery, as if the stone commemorations of Florence’s prophets sang the wordless song in a haunting choir.
The sun, from outside the massive doorway, dancing off the river Arno, lit up the streets in a blinding flurry, as if a mystic force awaited me on the other side; like the world responded to my awakening. Such a world I knew everything yet nothing about.
Nothing, everything; everything, nothing.
Perhaps I would not have seen Florence the way I saw it if I were ignorant of its history. Perhaps the hands that sculpted David and Neptune and the Sabine women wouldn't have defied the principles of then and now and wouldn't have stood before me, sublime like early dawn, but real nevertheless, if I didn't know them.
All of Florence seemed to have painted itself the way it looked that day for me.
That day might have marked the first time I drifted around a foreign city on my own, or the first time I understood the permanence of fairy-tales and how they grew up with us – Cinderella to the Renaissance.
Most importantly, however, the day marked the first time I found concrete hope for faith, that there indeed was magic, “once upon a time, in a land far away” and still is.
The sun set over the red-topped houses, as I journeyed back to the hotel. I was burning to express. It was time to hit the journals again, but this time, things were different. Imagination was a stranger.