The second person I fell in love with lived in Munich. His mother was from Nigeria and his father from Germany, or vice versa. It didn’t really matter, because in the parking lot in the small village in northwestern Sicily, I knew from the second our eyes met that he wouldn’t be hard to get hold of. The fact that he was a tourist meant that the odds were against me, but would he really choose one of the large shopping baskets at the entrance of the supermarket if he was planning to leave within the next few days? I was sure he wouldn’t.
During our remaining five days on Sicily, we went to various secret beaches, each one with a sea and sky brighter and more blue than the last. We had our last dinner; I ordered spaghetti alle vongole, and he had squid ink pasta. Somewhere between eating and paying for our dinner, he looked me in the eyes and told me that I was the one he had been waiting for. He was now ready to let someone in. It was the happiest I had ever been, but my self-esteem made me question how he could really want me just the way that I truly, truly wanted him. That night, the sky was dark, and it cried as loud as I would later because of him.
Our first kiss was on my initiative. The tension between us was almost painful. I asked him to sit down on a bench facing the cliffs. I wrapped my hands around his soft neck, and his hands gently but firmly embraced my waist. “I’ve been meaning to do this since the first time I saw you, but I’m too shy,” he revealed. At that moment, I could have paused life and never experienced anything ever again. I didn’t need to know what was going to happen between us. I didn’t need to know that in the end he would turn out to be an unreliable soul with a talent to make me feel special. The only thing I wanted to encapsulate forever in a necklace was that feeling that occurred right before the first kiss, during the first kiss, and the relief afterwards.
The scary thing is that once you’ve experienced being in love with someone who made you believe they were in love with you too, you want it to happen again so badly but also never again. I will always feel the pain of not being for him what he was for me. His name will always reflect the memories I never want to forget.
