the Italian: a letter to yourself

Your mind is racing as you throw all of your dirty valuables into your open 72-liter backpack and all of her shit into her bag, too. You look up and your best friend is rifling through his nightstand and has just picked up a handgun and a picture book. 

“Woah what the Fuck you guys, what the fuck!” She yells, hands trembling she slowly looks around the room, surveying the dungeon you have found yourselves in the past three days.

“We need to get out of here as soon as fucking possible. Put that shit down and help me with the rest of her clothes!” You say.

She looks down at the book of pictures in her right hand and quickly flips through the first three pages. 

“They’re all of girls. They're so young, Mads.” She says.

“I bet they are. Sonovabitch.” You say.

She puts the book and the gun back inside the bedside table and moves toward you. You are both stuffing a bag so fast it’s a whirl of clothes, colors, make-up and postcards. You hear her moan and your attention is drawn to the corner of the room, where she sits slumped over on the floor, leaned up against his bed. She is drooling. Her eyes are closed.

“Fuck,” You say. “Lily she’s not doing okay…”

“Alys!?” Lily walks over to your best friend, and grabs her limp wrist. She is overdosing on roofies and as much as you wish you could go back in time, you can’t. You look on and watch this terrifying scene unfold as you continue to throw the last bits of her belongings into her baby blue backpack with all the various airport tags hanging off the thing like festival wristbands.

More moans and slurred vocal attempts.

You start to feel nauseous as your stomach constricts into knots. Fighting back the urge to puke you put your head down and suck in a deep breath. Breathe. Okay. Breathe again. In and out. We’re going to be fine. Just count to ten. You hear your father’s words in your head. You girls are going to find yourselves in dangerous situations if you're not careful, he said. You can’t accept drinks from strange men out at night, he said. This is different! You protest to nobody because you're six thousand miles away and he's not here to help right now.

“The guy in Venice wrote us back finally. He seems safe… I guess.” Lily looks up at me, in consideration.

“We can stay with him tonight—he says it’s a long day of travel to get there though,” she says looking down at your cracked iPod screen, replying to a couch surfing message.

“We gotta go, now.” She finishes.

You weren't sure if you had managed to collect all of your belongings at this point. It didn't matter much to you anymore. You just wanted out. One of us was going to have to grab her bag, the other would be holding her, making sure she would make it. You knew it was about to be a shit show, taking the entire day to relocate yourselves—with a big handicap. Hoisting your fifty-pound pack on your already aching shoulders, you grunt and reach for her bag.

“I’ve got her pack the first leg, you need to help her walk, Lil. We’ll switch halfway through,” you say.

“Alright honey, you’ve gotta pull it together as much as you can. We’re getting out of here, and were going pretty far. I’m gonna help you walk so you just need to stand up now, okay?” She calmly instructs to Alyssa. 

She impresses you with her wealth of patience and tenderness even in the most stressful situation. You envy that. You? You are hurried, anxious and too focused on getting everyone safely out to maintain composure and compassion.

Alyssa looks up and nods her head in confused consent and begins to push herself off the floor. She is having difficulty doing just that. Her arms give out under her weight and she capitulates back to the floor. This worries you, and you doubt if you will make it there before night.

“Alright, here we go,” you say, opening his bedroom door for them.

All three of you make your way out of his room, peering around the house, holding your breath. 

“What if he sees us? What if he gets home early?” Lily asks, her soft voice strained. You navigate through the dimly lit apartment, through the labyrinth of odd hallways and makeshift couch-beds. You find the door and push. 

“He won’t,” you offer in hopeful finality.

Down four flights of stairs, past two large double doors, a walk to a bus stop, a bus to a train, a trip, and a fall, a fast ride into a city, a long walk up the metro stairs.

Alyssa falls over five times, tripping over her own feet, barely making it out the metro doors in time. She works to keep up with you as you work your way through the maze of humans, undergrounds, signs, strange looks, and language you don’t understand.

“Come on babe, you need to try to keep up with us!” You call after her. She looks up from her floor gaze for a second— long enough for you to see the deadpan look in her hazel eyes.

“Dude, this is bad,” Lily whispers to you. “We should carry her.” She runs back to Alyssa and grabbing her, she lifts her arms over her shoulders and drapes her body around her own. They walk astride the rest of the way. She looks so little and fragile to you then, like a child who is too tired to walk back on its own. You continue to navigate, still carrying Alyssa’s pack, and desperately wish for this all to be over. You try hard to not let on how terrified you are and silently pray that the guy you are about to stay with next will not be the same, or worse than the one you just came from.

That's the reality of staying with complete strangers while on the road, you really cannot fucking know for sure. There are no safe security checks, stamps of authenticity, or legitimate screening ensuring that your Couchsurfing hosts are not serial rapists. The fact is, you are essentially gambling your life to create these genuine experiences and travel cheaply through foreign countries and all it takes is one wrong decision to ruin your life.

Another train to a taxi. A taxi to a water taxi. Through a canal, across the waterway to the other side of Venice.

You sit on the outer deck of the ferry and you take the deepest breath you can manage. The first full breath you’d taken since the night before. You reach for her curly hair and pull her head into your chest. The same curls you had known since you were three years old.

“It’s gonna be okay Alys,” you say to her, knowing she probably can't understand you anyway. 

“We’re alright now,” you convince yourself.

If there was one thing you regret the most out of all of your years traveling, it was that day. It was not being able to come to terms with how terribly fucked up she was during those 30 hours. It was not leaving warning signs or letters for the other girls still staying with Dino and the hundreds yet to come. It was deleting your online scathing review on his Couchsurfing profile after he blackmailed you. It was not taking photographs for later evidence. It was being too scared to call the police because he was the police. It was your naivety at nineteen years old that caused your passivity with the situation. It was emotionally removing yourself from what had happened and not seeing that in that moment, you had the chance to save some lives. It was fear.

Because that day, you couldn’t predict that what had occurred during those 65 hours in Italy would follow you for the next ten years of your life. You couldn’t predict that you were just a few out of hundreds of women down the line who would also eventually be systematically drugged and preyed upon. You couldn’t predict that three years later while living in Latin America, you and your two best friends would be contacted by the IRPI requesting formal written statements because a massive investigation was finally taking place. How could you foresee that years later Alyssa would fly back to this very city to testify in court for hours and stand next to Satan himself during formal questioning? That your story would wind up becoming part of the reason he made it to prison for numerous counts of rape, abuse of power, and serial drugging. You couldn’t predict that the majority of the damage had yet to come. No, you couldn’t predict that then.

So you sit there on that ferry, with the fleeting view of the ancient city juxtaposed against the setting sun, and you hold her little curly head in your hands and you start to cry. And you think to yourself, “How the hell did it come to this?”