Sicily — On Late Night Loneliness

Manhattan is supposed to be the city that never sleeps but there’s a difference between never sleeping and always being awake. Palermo is always awake. It’s a city that opens when it should be closed and closes when you expect to find it open. Nothing operates on Mondays but at midnight, the tables at the trattoria will still take patrons while at 8 pm. they’ll turn you away because you’re too early. The markets jostle when the sun rises and when I wake up from the club music beneath me, I see the fisherman on their boats long, long before the waves roll in with the tide.

Time in Palermo is arbitrary. Night and day do not create a standard. Instead, the Sicilians create their own timelines. It’s not that Palermo never asleep but that this city has an infectious, 24/7 energy impossible to exhaust. You can’t distinguish between night and day when everything blurs.

Awake. Alert. Vibrant. Enthusiastic. Energetic. Filled with life and love and people and community. I find this thought comforting even if I haven’t fully thought it through. If Palermo is the city whose eyes are always open it means I’m never truly alone. If I live in the center of a city of commotion do I actually live alone? The dynamic between self and community is a contradiction this city hinges upon, a contradiction I’ve started to embrace.

I live on Via Chiavettieri, Palermo’s party street, and though I don’t know my neighbors, I sit on my balcony at all hours of the day and have yet to find the street beneath me deserted. Below me sits the elderly man in a broken plastic chair, carts of vegetables before him. Bruised apples, sour grapes, a few heads of cabbage. I see the waiters with the menus who shout “prego, prego” whenever I pass and I wonder if they’ve stopped shouting at me because they’ve learned to recognize me as someone who isn’t looking to dine there but to get home. I can hear them now, even three floors up. There’s the man with the crooked glasses who sold me ten flowers for a Euro, flowers now wilting on my kitchen table, folding over the water-filled prosecco bottle I’ve used as a vase. And there’s the woman straight across from me whose blinds are always open, whose cigarettes are always in hand so smoke blows across her balcony to teeter at the edge of mine. I wonder if she is lonely when she hears the music pounding beneath us. I wonder how long she stays awake. I wonder if she too looks down at the street and never sees it change.