When I was a young girl, about 6 or 7 years old, I had a recurring dream.

I loved this dream dearly. It was strange but in a magical and comforting way. I remember the droopy moments before sleep, wishing and hoping that this one dream would capture me as I fell away from the world.

In the dream I would sneak into the kitchen and open the cabinets under the sink. After making sure no one was watching, I would peek behind the plastic garbage can, to search for the secret portal hidden there. That portal, I knew, would transport me directly into la cucina della nonna. The portal didn’t just transport me there instantly though; it took me through a dreamy, floating kind of transcendental space before arriving at our destination.

The journey through the portal to la cucina della nonna brought a sense of pure contentment – like there was nothing else in the world that I could ever need in order to be happier in that very moment. I felt excitement, pleasure, and a sense of anticipation in the portal. And when I arrived nella cucina, well I think that was the end of the Dream.

Whenever I recall the dream, whatever happens nella cucina after my arrival is always randomly different. The end of the dream memory is automatically populated by my own reel of memories from that brief time of my life. I remember mangaivamo a tavola, or laying sul pavimento con un cuscino, drawing a picture with my legs swing wildly in the air behind me. Sometimes lavavo i piatti con lei, oppure preparavamo una tora di mele.

There was nothing special about what I did once I arrived nella cucina. What was special, though, was the Little Girl I got to be whenever I was there.

What I appreciate more than the actual dream itself is the conviction I have in knowing that I loved that dream more than any other dream. As an adult I am curious about why would I have longed hungrily for that portal to open up for me every night. I wonder about why my favourite thing to dream about was joyously travelling to another part of my present reality.

I longed to be transported to a part of my own world where I got to be my most loved version of myself.

I had a lot of questions about the portal when I was a little girl too. I thought it strange that the portal felt so long. It didn’t make sense to me at the time, because this version of my grandmother’s kitchen was actually in the basement of our house.

I remember many days calculating how many walls and floors and steps the portal would have to cover to physically get from under the upstairs kitchen sink, down the stairs and around the corner, into the basement kitchen. It must have been under the floor. Or maybe there was something special that happened in the laundry room that helped the connection…

As a child, this portal was not just a dream. I may have dreamt it up, but I pulled it into my real world. I needed it to be real, like maybe it was my version of an invisible friend. A figment of my imagination that came into my life when I needed it most, and I studied it into existence.

For a while I actually tried to prove to myself that the portal was real. I didn’t want anyone else to know about it. I remember feeling scared that someone would find it, and I didn’t want that to happen. I was overly careful to not spend too much time looking at the cupboard under the sink, lest someone suspected something and started investigating.

I remember feeling a bit uneasy and somewhat distrustful of the portal, too. There was always one thing I could never figure out: the end of the portal.

I was never able to completely comprehend how I arrived in the basement kitchen – only that I was suddenly there, caught in the middle of a moment that I don’t remember starting.

My young mind often juxtaposed the amorphous emergence from the portal into la cucina della nonna with the sharp, crisp image of getting into the portal. I could clearly see the white painted wooden cabinets opening before my eyes, and I remember confidently shrinking myself down to fit behind the round corrugated garbage can. Then I remember a sense of wandering in the dark cabinet with just enough amorphous light to feel safe and excited. And there I would sit, waiting for the portal to open, certain only in the uncertainty of whether it would actually come for me.

I couldn’t have had this dream for very long in my childhood. There aren’t very many memories of my time in that version of “la cucina della nonna.” The true story of my childhood only has my grandmother living in our basement suite for a relatively short time. I am baffled at why this is the combination of dreams and memories that recur time and time again so many years later.

There is one iteration of the portal dream that feels like it’s a long ways away in my memory – like it only ever happened once or twice.

The portal managed to stretch and reach over multiple city blocks and bring me nella vera cucina della nonna: The portal took me directly into the cavernous pantry of the kitchen that makes up the majority of my childhood memories with my grandmother.

In this version of the dream, arriving in the pantry was tangible and real. There was certainty that this life size, walk-in, closet style pantry was the true ending of the portal. Perhaps with that certainty came the dissolution of the portal. Perhaps it wasn’t needed anymore. Or perhaps it broke.

I feared that this pervasive memory served as a reminder that the desire to escape was something I’ve dreamed of since I can remember dreaming.

This dream, to me, served as a mark of my greatest defect: that it is in my nature to want to always run and hide. But why somewhere safe and familiar? Why somewhere that I loved to go? Why would it feel so good to be there, away from the rest of the world. And why, especially, would it feel like such a pleasure to get there?

The volumes of memories I have spending time with Nonna, in her real house, greatly overshadow the small volume of the memories of la cucina della nonna that appear at the end of my favourite dream.

It has taken me countless months and layers of small self discoveries for me to makes sense of why I’ve been so magnetically drawn to Italy since I first visited two years ago. It wasn’t until this last trip there, when I found myself needing to race across the world and get back to my family at home in crisis, that it finally made sense.

I had finally carved out time to take myself to Italy. A trip to take care of me. To rediscover me. And I just started to let myself sink fully and wholly into Italy, when I got a mother’s worst call – my child was hurt and he needed me. My family needed me. And suddenly, all that mattered was getting out of Italy as soon as possible.

When I was finally on the runway the next day, about to to take off, I let myself sag into the seat. My face was streaked heavily with tears, my heart feeling tired and sore in my chest, and my mind was oh-so exhausted.

I closed my eyes as the plane accelerated to take off. And at the exact moment I felt the plane lift off of the ground and into the air, I was suddenly afloat in the portal for the first time in decades.

I was impossibly grateful to feel the comfort of my beloved portal in that moment. I knew the portal was transporting me to where I needed to go. It may have been away from my place of inner-child comfort and contentment, but I was going back to the real world… the place I was so desperate and fervent to return.