“Cin ciiiiiin!”, we chorused as our shot glasses clinked together, the green liquid of the homemade fennel liquor sliding down our throats like an old friend. I looked out at the sea and bobbing boats. We were at La Marina, a gem of a restaurant carved into the rocks of a crystal bay on the island of Ponza. Knick knacks covered the walls and ceilings like poison ivy. The owner, Gerrardo, took his turn sitting at tables, scribbling orders into his notepad as his team marched out pile-high plates of spaghetti dripping in vongole, lasagna made with fig leaves, and alici ponzesi–anchovies soaked in their own juices with garlic, tomatoes, and oregano. At the table next to us, a champagne cork exploded into freedom as a group of eight men, linen shirts open, tanned skin under board shorts glistening, celebrated being together. Two weeks ago, I thought, it was illegal to leave my country. Two months ago, in London, I was only allowed to see up to four people at a time. The simple pleasure of eating grilled fish against a backdrop of waves and excited chatter had been a distant memory. And now, in this moment, it was a delicious luxury. I was going to savour it all.
“Ciao Matté!” My friend Camilla cried out to a man walking past us. We had one of the best tables: right by the big glass-less windows, all you could see were the sea and people skirting up and down the narrow sandy path. Matteo turned and smiled at us through long brown curls. “Too handsome,” I thought. “Stereotypically so.” He was tall and sculpted, every sinew of his muscles pronounced. I envied his dark olive tan; I had some catching up to do. But I smiled back, despite myself.
Our shot glasses were refilled, and now Matteo was sat next to us, smiling some more. I thought about how all of us, just weeks prior, were on forced diets of limited human interaction. Being here, on this island, surrounded by different faces, familiar and unfamiliar—and how beautiful they all were (not something I would have said years before, oh but how beautiful faces are, they really are!). I suddenly felt euphoric. I looked back at Matteo, who met my gaze–he had dark beads for eyes. Maybe I could dabble in stereotypes once in a while.
Matteo would paddle board all around the island in the summer. “You should try it,” he said warmly. “I’ll take you one day. Maybe tomorrow.” I was rolling a cigarette, thumbing the thin paper between my fingers. Was he flirting with me? I wondered. Above us, Pino d’Angio was getting louder—l’ho beccata in discoteca, con lo sguardo da serpente—a chef in the kitchen had turned up the volume. Later, when my friend Camilla and I were given lifts home by two eager Roman boys on their vespas, I received a request on Instagram. It was official: Matteo and I were friends. And while I was combing through my damp hair, spraying a little perfume on my wrists in the same way I’d seen my mother do for years, a like came through on a picture of mine. It was official: Matteo appreciated my lilac get-up. I would wear that bikini tomorrow.
“I’m going to have to sit this session out,” said Camilla with a glint in her eye. “The teachers are calling me.” Matteo’s expression didn’t change–if anything, he looked a fraction more intrigued. Camilla was training to be a teacher to six year olds in Venice, and her colleagues had insisted she join a zoom at three o’clock on a hot June Wednesday afternoon. “You’re going to have such fun,” Camilla said affirmatively, ensuring I wouldn’t find an excuse to let my timidness at going solo get in the way. “Let’s go,” Matteo sang, getting up from the table. He’d tied his curls into a bun today, revealing more of his face. Both pretty and masculine, I noted, so very graceful. Was I really going to attempt standing on a paddle board next to this human deity? And did I, without any irony, just say the two words, “human deity”?
I made sure to wear the lilac bikini—a little wink to the soft social media flirting, but it was also the most forgiving to my unreliable curves. I’d gone through my Rolodex of options at dinner the night before, while one of the Roman boys insisted on calling me amore over sea bass carpaccio. All evening, I couldn’t recall his name, and when he’d tried to kiss me, I fumbled an excuse about wanting to remain friends. I’d only met him that day.
“You’re a natural,” lied Matteo. I was caught in my focus between attempts at sucking in my belly and staying upright on the board. I laughed easily, and to my surprise. I was relaxing in his company, still euphoric at being back in the ocean, free from the confines of working from home. We guided our boards around a battalion of rocks to be greeted by an ancestral grotto in the near distance, its mouth cavernous and open as turquoise waves lapped in and around, twinkling like uncut diamonds in the sun’s reflection. “We call it the lion’s cave,” Matteo explained. “Inside, the waves sound like a lion’s roar.” Without even a moment of self-consultation, grabbed entirely by instinct, I jumped off my board and into the sea. “I’m going in, let’s hear the roars,” I cried. We had all lost (and gained) two years to Covid, but in that instant, I was a young twenty-year-old again, my whole life ahead of me, waiting to be enjoyed like fresh spritz on tap.
I have never loved the sea as much as that summer. I wanted to lose myself to the water, my entire body demanded it—the motions, the movements, the fluidity. For fear of having it taken away again, I wanted to claim as much as I was in my right to, and I wanted to be fully present while doing so. My memory of that summer—the smells of the daily octopus catch and the familiar calls of the fishermen to the restaurant-owners, the first cold Biancolella wine of the day with the crunch of an aperitivo crisp, the sound of the male cicadas impressing their female counterparts—is one of the sharpest of my recent collections. And one of my favourites.
I was taking a mental photograph of the shoreline from inside the lion’s cave when Matteo asked me what I was thinking. We’d tied up our boards and swam into the cave in silence, but once I’d reached its heart and heard the roars–both mystic and majestic, regal in fact–I couldn’t stop expressing my incredulity. “Mamma mia! Sono senza parole!” I cried. The exclamation “I am without words” is an interesting one, I would muse later, for the very fact that words are being used to express a wordless state of being. “I am thinking about how grateful I am to be here, how strange it is to be feeling all these different and big emotions about life. How I’m here with someone I’ve only known for 24 hours. And yet the strangest thing of all is that it feels so very natural and… right. This is exactly where I am supposed to be.”
Is what I wanted to say. But instead, I fixed my eyes on the horizon in front and shook my head. “A few weeks ago, if you had said to me I would be in this cave, looking out at such beauty ahead of me….” I faltered. “I’m sorry, it’s quite emotional.” I could feel my face growing hot with shame at this vulnerable slip. I forced myself to look at Matteo and attempted a laugh to lighten the mood, but was surprised to see his own eyes slightly wet with tears, and, before I knew it, he’d cupped my head with his hands and placed his warm tongue in my mouth.
When we finally came up for air, he laughed brightly. “I couldn’t tell how that was going to go. I didn’t know if I’d misread the signs and was going to get a slap in return.” I kissed him in response, hungry. There was nothing around us except for the lapping of the waves and the lion’s roars. Before I knew it, and to his surprise, I’d placed him inside me. I felt total relief, cooled by the waters, the isolation, and this natural ease that was pooled between us. As we found our rhythm, his hips rocking back and forth, deeper and slower, our lips finding each other in their own communication, I realised that my hunger for this moment was a hunger for all the senses and sensations that had been stolen from me for two years. I wanted to be fully consumed by this feeling, for every fibre to be absolved through the exhaustion of over-feeling, over-activity, until I exploded into atomic particles in the air only to be brought back together in a kind of rebirth. Version 2.0.
In The Tempest, our very dear William Shakespeare coined the word “sea change”, when the sprite Ariel tries to make the prince Ferdinand believe his father perished in a shipwreck. It’s given literally, but quickly grew to be taken figuratively, to mark a shift in perception and experience. On that day, in the middle of my beloved Mediterranean, I had my very own sea change. As we rode our boards back to the shore, stopping every few minutes to share more salty kisses and knowing glances, I felt an unusual sense of the invincible: stronger, more content, more whole. As Shakespeare’s Ariel would put it: “rich and strange”. With my feet riding the waves, responding to currents underneath, I was finally rooted: connected to the present and responding accordingly. The Leo in me had somehow made love to a human deity, against a backdrop of her own roars. Grazie, Matté. Thank you for the sea change.
