I remember the first time I saw him.

It was the first day of my one-year master program in Piedmont. He was walking in the empty classroom, talking about something of extreme importance, something that was completely absorbing him and the guy who he was walking with. It seemed as if something very bright and loud just appeared magically from a smoking Marlboro cigarette. He was the most Italian person I’d ever seen, with a thick southern accent, wavy blonde hair, a jungle of hand gestures, and the constant sound of moving keys. The smiles and the whispers of the surrounding girls were his marching beat, a beat born by the strange confidence given to those who are attractive from a young age. 

His mother used to call him the sun–“Sole, sole mio”–dazzling, piercing to the point to burn you. Around him, I felt like a distant star, orbiting in the same galaxy, but never close enough to touch. He was one of the loudest, noisiest, and most annoying classmates I’ve ever had. 

We spent the first months talking a lot, sharing too much but never enough, and it was when we started talking about sex, I realized I desired him in a way I never did before. After a few months, we started something that was supposed to be just bodies touching other bodies–a “no strings attached” policy–just the electrifying feeling of staying with each other almost every night. The love affair began to look like a relationship when we started yelling at each other in the middle of the night in front of the Modica cathedral. It began to look like a relationship when we were kissing and chasing shadows in the streets of Cremona. It began to look like a relationship when he told me he loved me after a candlelight dinner in my small apartment, Mina playing in the background and his trembling hands reaching for his packet of cigarettes after my long silence. It felt like a relationship when he bought me flowers every Friday, when we slept in the same bed till the late morning, when he cooked his Pasta ai Pomodorini for me, saying, “Questa la faccio sempre per mamma” (“I always make this for mom.”). It felt like a relationship when he brought me to the South to meet his mother, his father, his friends, when he showed me where he grew up, when we swam in the clear Ionic Sea and kissed under the summer sky. 

I remember the last time I saw him. He was waving his hand just outside Milano Centrale, the rain pouring down on his loud persona, and I was walking inside the train station. I didn’t know then how much I would miss him in just a couple of days, almost breaking myself with grief. 

Now I just listen to the song he sang to me, to that Mina song that was playing the first time he told me he loved me.