I'm worried about my toe. It has a slice of purple, infected and swollen, right where I put pressure on it to walk.

 

I was skittering around barefoot at Six Mile Creek and cut it on something - a rock, a bit of rock shifting off a log like hard chocolate off a Klondike bar.

 

And my shoe feels tight - I'm not sure whether it's the swelling or the fact that tossing my shoes in the wash with the rest of my clothes and not removing them during heated dry made them shrink like Icelandic poppies cuccooning themselves at nightfall.

 

Mainly, I think I'm displacing my anxiety about going abroad for the first time. I've been out of the country before - if walking across to Naco, Mexico, counts. But I feel like I'm expecting more out of Rome than a tall bottle of vainilla and the uncomfortable memory of walking past peddlers hard-selling superhero backpacks.

 

The last time this kind of displacement occurred was on the way to the airport before freshman year. We were pulling up to the terminal when I abruptly said, “Where am I gonna clip my toenails?”

 

Back home, I clipped them on the back stoop, while fending off our dog, whose primary interest was not in my toenails, but in licking my face. But in Ithaca, in a dorm, with snow outside? My parents didn't answer - too amused and busy wondering if this whole moving-across-the-country thing was a good idea.

 

But I'm stalling again. It's difficult, both to express and confess to expectations. I imagine Rome will be rather photogenic, with soft yellow light and the kind of muted, unsaturated colors that are found in 120 film photographs of Radio Flyer wagons and sweater-vested kids from the ‘60s.