Rose Tinted Venice

I remember my first trip to Venice years ago, a holiday from literally another decade when I had just finished school. They say Venice is a city that can make realists into romantics, what it did to an already romantically minded twenty-something was nothing short of magical. One of my most vivid memories is of the pink tinted lanterns that line the Grand Canal near St Marks Square; to me the rosy light cast by those lanterns reflecting on the dancing waters of the canal epitomized everything the city was. Magical, ethereal, seeped in history and mystery, and a place like no where else in the world. On that trip I would fall asleep with my headphones on, listening to a mix given to me by a friend I wished to be more than a friend and dreaming of a time in the future when I might return with a love. Lost one night I got directions from a chic American lady walking her dog who had moved to Venice a dozen years prior and had no trouble navigating the maze of alleyways and canals around the city. She seemed like some vision from my imagined future, the type of woman I dreamed I could one day become living in a place I didn't even dare dream of living in. It was bittersweet to return now, older although perhaps no wiser and far from the starry-eyed girl who had first wandered through these twisting streets. Venice was everything I remembered, rose-tinted and opulent and alchemistic, but it was also strange to walk those same paths as a different person chasing the echoes of who I was before. It was a beautiful trip, but it reminded me that no woman can step into the same canal twice, for it's not the same canal and not the same woman. I thought perhaps I'd recapture some of those previous dreams on this trip, forgetting how many I've already realized or abandoned for new ones. When I was younger Venice seemed like a promise of a rosier future, a physical manifestation of fevered dreams that made anything seem possible, today it's a reminder of how far I've come...