THE BEGINNING: VENICE (FEBRUARY)
The full moon is in Pisces, and the water sign’s chokehold has the city enveloped in even more drama and mystery than usual. The rhythmic lapping of the canal matches the pace of our stride as we weave, lost, through eerily quiet alleyways littered with post-Carnevale confetti.
We’d come to Venice “for research”—a thinly veiled excuse that we didn’t even need—to take ourselves away, alone together, to a place that oozes romance out of every crack in its weathered bridges. Finding our way to St. Mark’s square, throngs of people dressed to the nines in 19th-century costumes sip spritzes and gossip, setting an uncanny backdrop for what already feels like an overwrought period drama. She hooks her arm into mine to lead me into the bar we’ve already picked, one that promises good natural wine and fresh-caught seafood cicchetti. I’ve never been so acutely aware of every nerve cell in the crux of my elbow.
We haven’t spoken about what’s happening between us, although nothing has actually happened yet. But tension hangs thick in the air as we muse about our plans for the future, the idea of staying in Italy, of starting the next chapter together—strictly professionally, of course. We make empty promises that I don’t know are empty, and clink our glasses of Vin Col Fondo. I try not to stare at her fingers as she coaxes a prawn from its shell, parting its legs away from its body so she can slurp the flesh.
Back in the room, sprawled on the bed in silky nightgowns, I let my lips brush against hers for a second too long as she swallows the smoke I exhale into her mouth.
MILAN (MARCH)
We’ve crammed ourselves into what I think is a refurbished telephone box in the middle of a gay club. “I think this has been a long time coming, my love.” She pulls me in.
“When did you first know you wanted me,” I cajole, tangling my fingers in her hair. In my drunken haze, the strands feel like water running through my grasp.
“Since the beginning.”
“Me too.”
Our handprints stamp the condensation-painted glass of the door like that scene in Titanic. Wandering through Chinatown the next day, my body has floated up out of itself. It takes all my concentration not to roll over my own feet on the cobblestones of Via Sarpi, to remember to taste the brothy “ravioli cinese” aka xiao long bao, hand-folded and passed to us from a window, that are the main reason I tagged along on this Milan trip. I wrap her arm around my waist, as much to steady myself as to make sure that this was really happening in the cold, sober, light of day.
SICILY (APRIL)
My bus clings tight to the curves of the coastline, the sea still and shimmering. We ascend into the hills of the Madonie Regional Natural Park, slick with morning mist and perfumed with the sweet, milky scent of steaming fresh ricotta, which, as we disembark, is being doled out into fuschella (straining containers) and then onto our plates by the calloused hands who have practiced this craft since decades before most of us were born. I haven’t heard from her since before yesterday. Back on the bus, the midday heat breaks through the window pane, vibrating under my skull, a backbeat to the embarrassingly on-the-nose album I’ve had on repeat.
“We say I love you but we ain’t together.”
Skip song.
“We’re friends at the party, I’ll give you my body at home.”
Under the streaky glow of twinkle lights in the piazza, my fourth glass of Marsala drained, I kiss somebody else.
SOMEWHERE IN NORTHERN ITALY (MAY)
I pull her away from our crowd of friends singing along to mid-aughts pop songs in front of the bonfire, spitting and crackling with the fat from pork ribs and oil-slathered, pre-season tomatoes. The sun is just going down over the top of the Piedmontese hills, orange with smog. We splice through pine trees into a private nook, where the shadows are long and we can’t be seen. Four nights prior, we’d resolved to just be friends. She wasn’t ready; it was complicated; I was getting hurt.
“I haven’t been able to take my eyes off of you all night,” she says.
I suck in my breath.
“Can I kiss you?”
She already knows the answer to this, fixing me in a gaze that makes me want to go back to Venice and throw myself in the Lagoon, as she eases my back into the trunk of a chestnut tree. The spiky fruits shake off of their branches and crunch under my spine, my thighs, as they and we tumble to the ground.
“I want you to want me the way you want her,” she confesses into the hollow under my ribcage.
This seems to me an insane thing to say, because she’s well aware that I’ve never wanted anybody more. Looking back, I think that’s exactly what she meant—that she wanted me to want her, but just a little less.
ROME (OCTOBER)
“I really do love you,” my head is resting on her chest, and she tilts my chin up to look at her while she speaks. Her eyes, liquid and deep, are like pools I could drown in, have drowned in, would weigh my pockets down with rocks to drown a thousand more times in.
“What if I stayed?” We sign an apartment lease and celebrate with thick slices of rectangular pizza, straddling the wall of the bridge that buzzes with tourists. Below, seagulls bob along, letting themselves be washed away by the current until they reach the precipice of a steep drop-off, then turn back around to do the same thing again. It’s sisyphean, but they don’t seem to care. In this moment, they’re happy.
THE END: ROME (DECEMBER)
At the enoteca where I work, I feed her the heart of a Venetian songbird, skewered on a toothpick. We swig back too many glasses of wine, and my boss teases me for being too in love to do my job. The Neptune Fountain at Piazza Navona glows golden under the streetlamps, everything quiet at this time of night except for the continuous pour of water and the whir of traffic in the distance. We stop to admire it, and I marvel that we live here now. She stiffens when I go to hold her hand.
A few days later, we have the same conversation we’ve had a million times before, but this time the word “friends” feels like an assault. I tell her this isn’t how friends act, by which I mean, a real friend wouldn’t do this and I’m not just your friend.
I tell her to let me go.
She packs her bags, and I drop her at Termini. I keep her sweater and the pair of vases we’ve just bought, thinking they’d go well over our new fireplace. Ghosts of the life we almost lived together. On the street, confetti, soggy and trodden on, floats in a puddle of slush.
