One month into my life in Rome, I met Daniele, whom I quickly began to refer to as an experience and not a person: “Then Daniele happened,” “Everyone wishes for a Daniele.” When it came to romance, this was the real-life Adonis. Each notch in our timeline was as implausible as the next: in February, we met outside a bar in Rome; in March, we went on our first date in Verona; and by April, we were spending weekends at his apartment in Rovereto, just beneath the Italo-Swiss alps.
Still, with my desire came equally potent fear. While I found myself swept away by Daniele’s heedless gestures–picking me up on his motorcycle and whisking me up to Limone sul Garda remains top of mind–I also sought the protection of calm and cool detachment. This was a skill I knew well and wore with pride: it had delivered me through countless dates and fruitless flings relatively unscathed.
Then, four months later, the time to say goodbye came. To Rome and to Daniele–words which now meant freedom, transformation and incomprehensible bliss.
The evening before I would fly back to Los Angeles, I held Daniele’s typed words to my face while my friends stalled a taxi driver in Piazza Venezia. “Mi sono trovato benissimo con te / I had a great time with you,” he wrote. “Un giorno, speriamo di riuscire a trovarci / One day, we will hope to find each other again.” I shook with tears, surprised at the depth of my pain.
On the dreaded 14-hour flight back to LA, I imagined myself moving backwards. Already, my memories were withering and changing, and they continued to for many months. At some point, they seemed to border on fiction.
Then in June, Daniele messaged me: he was interested in visiting me in California.
Though I simply couldn’t figure out the big question of my heart, I welcomed Daniele, this time, to my world. For a week we journeyed across California, touching, moving, exploring. I taught him how to use chopsticks over sushi with my Japanese father, and we slurped hot noodles alongside my Chinese mother. We stayed in beach towns and hiked through Yosemite and fell asleep fully entwined, exhausted, familiar.
Then there were the moments when we exited our bind–he’d call a friend, or I’d text mine–and I’d realized just how much we’d evolved since our days in northern Italy. These were the strange, sobering chapters that extended beyond “happily ever after.”
An hour before I dropped him off at the airport, we laid on my bed. The air was hot and the sound of cars outside was gentle, like a lullaby. I cried, and he wiped my tears; I knew this was our beautiful, final farewell. When my phone timer went off, telling us it was time to go, he held my face in his hands, whirring me back to all our moments on the crowded Rovereto train platform, to his bedroom in Italy where fresh snow floated outside.
“Bella.”
A word I had heard a thousand times to describe things like sunsets, gardens, a woman walking across Roman cobblestones in stilettos. Hearing it from his tired, handsome lips, all things considered, bella seemed by far the most fitting word for all we had experienced.
