Amalfi Coast, Time Alone

The bus climbs the coast road in second gear, hugging switchbacks cut into rock that has been falling into the sea for longer than anyone has bothered to name the town below. I have a window seat and no plan past tonight, which after months of scheduled travel feels less like freedom than like something I have to relearn.

I had pictured this trip in company. Most of the trips I take now, I take alone, and I have stopped apologizing for it. There is a particular attention that solitude asks of you: no one to confirm what you just saw, so you look twice. No one to translate the day into conversation, so it stays raw a little longer.

The coastline refuses to be photographed properly. Every overlook promises the view and delivers only part of it.

In Praiano I take a room above a shuttered restaurant, its terrace facing nothing but water and the shape of Capri on a clear afternoon. The owner, an older woman named Concetta, tells me the season hasn’t started yet and that I am the only guest for at least a week. I tell her that is exactly what I wanted, and she looks at me the way people do when they’ve decided you’re either very wise or a little sad.

Mornings, I walk the steps down to the water before the day boats arrive. Six hundred and some steps, uncounted officially, worn smooth by two centuries of use. The town wakes up underneath me: shutters opening, a moped taking the switchback too fast, someone’s radio playing something in Italian I don’t try to understand.

By the second week I’ve stopped counting days, which is usually the sign a trip has done what I came for. I still don’t have a plan for tomorrow. I’ve started to suspect I never will, and that this, not the itinerary, was the actual point.

I leave on a Tuesday, on the same bus in reverse, and Concetta stands in the doorway until the switchback takes her out of view. I don’t know if I’ll come back. I know that I’ll think about the steps, and the water, and the particular quality of being unaccountable to anyone, for a long time.