My last Roman day. I had my macchiato. I bought some expensive deodorant, perhaps anticipating love. I took a three-hour, slightly masturbatory nap in the ridiculous glow of my sun-strangled apartment. And then, at a party thrown by my friend Fabrizia, I met Eunice-

Wait, no. That’s not exactly true. This chronology isn’t right. I’m lying to you, diary. It’s only page seven and I’m already a liar. Something terrible happened before Fabrizia’s party. So terrible I don’t want to write about it, because I want you to be a positive diary.

I went to the U.S. Embassy.

It wasn’t my idea to go. A friend of mine, Sandi, told me that if you spend over 250 days abroad and don’t register for Welcome Back, Pa’dner, the official United States Citizen Re-Entry Program, they can bust you for sedition right at JFK, send you to a “secure screening facility” Upstate, whatever that is.

Now, Sandi knows everything-he works in fashion-so I decided to take his vividly expressed, highly caffeinated advice and headed for Via Veneto, where our nation’s creamy palazzo of an embassy luxuriates behind a recently built moat. Not for much longer, I should say. According to Sandi, the strapped State Department just sold the whole thing to StatoilHydro, the Norwegian state oil company, and by the time I got to Via Veneto the enormous compound’s trees and shrubbery were already being coaxed into tall, agnostic shapes to please their new owners. Armored moving vans ringed the perimeter, and the sound of massive document-shredding could be divined from within.

The consular line for the visa section was nearly empty. Only a few of the saddest, most destitute Albanians still wanted to emigrate to the States, and that lonely number was further discouraged by a poster showing a plucky little otter in a sombrero trying to jump onto a crammed dinghy under the tagline “The Boat Is Full, Amigo.”