After an intense two-day excursion to San Marino, a tiny country within the territory of Italy, I was glad to return to my apartment in Venice. I was physically exhausted from having spent Tuesday evening waiting for our infinitely delayed train to arrive, then realising it most likely wouldn’t, and quickly organising our night’s stay in Rimini so we could rest some hours before taking the morning train. Having spent months in lockdown in the bliss of my own company and that of my partner’s, it has been somewhat difficult to handle being with more than a few people. It’s like having to re-learn how to be social, especially when one is meeting those with whom one feels digitally intimate. It has been immensely rewarding, being around a group of emotionally literate people who behave responsibly and with respect and affection towards each other. The level of conversation and the ease of laughter have felt delightful. Still, when I finally returned to my apartment in Venice and cooked myself a pasta lunch, I had to crash on the sofa from sheer exhaustion, both physical and mental. I had the windows open to allow for maximum cross-ventilation and despite occasionally sweating from summer humidity, I fell into  a deep slumber. I allowed myself the luxury of resting until I felt ready to be awake again.

The last week hasn’t been easy for me. Remember how I had written about conflict resolution and finding the courage to address hostile situations and resolve them amicably? Some hours after I wrote the column, I found out that I had been manipulated by the person with whom I had addressed two instances of inappropriate behaviour, both involving her making comments that directly referenced my skin colour and that of another person of colour. She expressed ‘doubts’ about the first instance, and blatantly denied the second. She did it with so much confidence, she had succeeded, during our interaction, to convince me that I had fabricated my memory of it. Thankfully, I was not the only person to whom the comment was addressed. There was another who had the exact same memory of the incident as me. 
It was when I was debriefing her about my confrontation with the white woman in question that she seemed alarmed, because her memory aligned with mine. Two of us couldn’t be liars. The comment, too, had been so absurd and random, we couldn’t possibly have invented it.