Out by the Sicilian pier, the fishermen call out to each other in a language that only grandfathers and fishermen understand anymore. Five of them washed on shore after a shipwreck the other day. We saw the funeral on the news from a cafe.

We talked a little about the news, about America, a little about the war.

"What war?" Lilly asks. She has been an expatriate for about six months now.

She is looking the same as she always has, a high school senior on foreign exchange, now in Italian boots.

We laugh.

"There's a war."

Down an empty street is the skeleton of a church, burned and gutted, but left standing after an American invasion during World War II. There is a hole in the ground that exposes the catacombs underneath.

"Dove sono i corpi?" I ask an architecture student who has come to take pictures. He doesn't understand my American accent and poor Italian.

He points at the name of a saint in the book he is carrying, and shakes his head.

We walk on. Some boys are playing soccer on a concrete court. They lose their ball and I throw it back to them. One boy whistles and winks. He wears a red jumpsuit and stands about 3 1-2 feet tall.

"Oh, bambino, io ho un ragazzo Americano."

One of the first things we learned was how to say we had boyfriends in America.

We take a bus to the beach and drift in and out of sleep in sweatshirts and jeans on the sand. The sea is green and black, and waves come in white onto the white sand.

"It's just like a bath," I say before I touch the water and run away. "It's just like a Russian bath."

Nearby, the fishermen sit in a circle and play cards.

A seagull screams at a fish and fights the wind.

We walk to a bistro near the shore and order. We eat with sand in our clothes and in our hair. We sip grappa after lunch like Hemingway, only without the madness or the genius.

Here, in this country, we are like 2-year-olds with southern vernaculars and surprising hand-eye coordination.

"I want go Pompeii," I say in the train station. "How much them costs?"

"Small!" I point at something small. "Small, small!"

There is nothing here from my real life. The people I meet know a bit about America and nothing about me.

I can only tell them a little: my age, where I am from, that I like it here.

All of my solid memories, all of my consistencies, run like a slideshow.

I am accosted in the street by a tallish, darkish character who wants to take me home with him so I can admire his helmet of hair gel and shirt so tight you can make out the size and shape of his nipples.

"I have go." I look at him like I mean business; he might not take my broken Italian seriously. "My friend sleep. I have wake her. I have go."

The last night I spent at home, I ate a bowl of strawberries and whipped cream.

I drank a little cheap wine and listened to "A Prairie Home Companion" on the radio. It too plays like a slideshow. I slept in my bed and didn't dream of anything special. I woke up in the same bed, at the same time, that I do every morning.

I washed my hair with the same shampoo. I can't quite remember the smell of it now. When I smell it again, I'll know that I am home.

In a few days, we will be blown back home again, and all the trains and holy water and honking horns will turn back into my same bed, and my same shampoo.

I can't say exactly that I want to go home. It's just that you can only lose yourself for so long. Then you begin to wish for all of your consistencies, for the humdrum of a life with purpose.

There is romance here, with the grappa and the side-street cafes.

The romance is enough to send one to drift out of the bathtub and off to see the world again. There is, after all, such a lot of world to see.