​It was spring when we met. The panna cotta colored magnolias were in full bloom in Milan and their sweet perfume seemed to come in waves, in little puffs of perfection. He paused and looked up at them for a moment, almost pink against the bright, bluebird sky, but then instantly regretted stopping. She used to love this time of year. Primavera. If she had been here now, holding his arm on the way to nowhere, she would have undoubtedly commented on the magnolias.

Flowers are a fickle thing, they are there in beginnings and endings and loyal to neither.
 
He thought back to the beginning, eight years ago that seemed like a lifetime and a second all at once. It was a Wednesday evening and he was in the classic mid-week rut, wishing he hadn’t already told his friends he’d be at aperitivo after work. The isolation of his apartment and a solitary Nastro Azzurro on the couch with the game on was tempting. But one of his pet peeves was cancelling at the last minute, so he begrudgingly buttoned his trench, popped the collar against the light breeze and headed off towards Piazza Duomo. As he passed his reflection in the Prada window front, he took stock of his reflection: tall, broad-shouldered, young enough to still be reckless on occasion, light brown hair a little too messy to pass for being intentional, hazel eyes that his carta d’identità decided to call “verde”, and a 5 o’clock shadow that already looked like he hadn’t shaved in days. No, he didn’t look classically Italian and the only thing that gave him away was his perfectly pressed blue shirt and leather shoes. As an art director, he was used to curating beauty. It was probably his downfall because beauty is always evolving and so did his girlfriends, to satisfy the peaks and valleys of a life inundated by beautiful things. Sometimes he blamed it on Italy as well, he was surrounded by beauty. If you don’t stop in your tracks to admire one church, you’ll just as easily find another, more stunning, a few blocks on.  At least this is what he always believed until that Wednesday evening in primavera when he saw her.
 
She wasn’t classically beautiful, she was like that first church that you could walk by in hopes of finding a better one. Especially in a town like Milan. Thinking about it now, it was something about her that was indefinable, a combination of things, a chemical equation that resulted in alchemy. Her long, dark hair falling down her back as she laughed deeply, her head thrown back as if she were laughing at God, her leather glove clad-hand gripping a book that he couldn’t make out. He would later discover it was a copy of The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Had he known how this would all turn out, he would have realized that the book was a sign. Yet, as so many men before him in history, a glance was enough. A laugh was all it took. He was entranced, spellbound by her presence. Not by her literal presence but the way in which she was present like no other woman he had ever known. She was living in that moment that he saw her across the via, not only existing like so many of us are. She was exuberant, radiant, and real. She made him want to live.
 
Those words were the beginning, and strangely also the end if read with the end in mind. She made him want to live. And so he left. 

Most recent posts:
​Creative Writing: Acqua e Sapone
​Creative Writing: Screw Soulmates
Creative Writing: The Romantics (Non-Fiction)
Creative Writing: All the Sunsets
Creative Writing: Happier
​Creative Writing: Whiskey 
​Creative Writing: The Perfect Day in Italy 
​Creative Writing: Call Me Baby 
​Creative Writing: The Butterfly Effect 
 
In the first eBook:
​Creative Writing: The Letter R (Explicit)
​Creative Writing: Dear Italy (A Love Letter)
Creative Writing: Airport Arrivals
​Creative Writing: Tanqueray and You
​Creative Writing: A Thousand Lives
​Creative Writing: A Sunday Kind of Love
​Creative Writing: Perfect Strangers in Switzerland
​Creative Writing: Rooftops and Rome
​Creative Writing: The Morning After in New York
​Creative Writing: Mulberries in Sicily

She’s beautiful, I’ll give you that. The kind of girl you might describe as acqua e sapone. That’s how Italians refer to girl-next-door kind of beauty, soap and water. It’s the kind of beauty that gets on your nerves if you’re like me and can’t bear to leave the house without a perfect jet-black cat’s eye. You always had a thing for blondes anyways, and even though boys might tell you they don’t have a type, they do. All my years of dating have taught me this. My ex-boyfriends are all with girls that look exactly like their first loves which makes me wonder, is love ever lost or are we just on an eternal journey to find a replacement for the one that got away?

We met in high school in small town America, you playing the perfect role of foreign exchange student and I, just one of the many girls that fell for you and your dark hair that would fall over your eyes in calculus, you and your leather jacket and All-Stars and the way you’d ask questions by inflicting the end of your sentences rather than invert the subject, you and your easy drop-dead gorgeous smile. Everyone knew you were leaving after graduation, back to an Italian small town that no one could pronounce and you’d just tell people it was near Milan because it was the only city we knew. It’s pointless, my friends told me, he’ll just break your heart. What do you expect? He’s Italian, that’s what they do. Plus, the first week after becoming official Facebook friends, all the girls in senior year had seen the one in your pictures and by the casual drape of her arm around your neck and the way you looked at her baby blues, it was undeniable she was the girlfriend you’d left behind waiting for you.

Basically we knew how this story would end before it started and I started it anyways by saying yes when you asked me out after your first soccer game. It was a brisk September night under the stadium lights, you had just scored the winning goal and ran straight up to me, sweaty and exuberant and probably full of the adrenaline-induced confidence that you needed to cheat on a girl an ocean away. It was a teenage dream. I just couldn’t say no though, despite my head, and it wasn’t to make everyone jealous or to prove my friends wrong or any of a million reasons, it was just the way you looked at me, as if you had to have me. And so it was. It was autumn afternoons skipping class, the slivers of golden light in your eyes, my cheeks blushed from the cold and from you; then it was Christmas with candy cane kisses (you had never had one before) and I made you wear red flannel shirts and you told me that America felt like home, as you strung rainbow lights around me and I tried to convince myself that you would stay forever. They say that it takes four seasons to truly fall in love with someone, but I fell for you the very first. I wanted this to be a different high school romance, but like all the good ones do, ours ended with a prom night promise and a flight to Italy in the morning that I wasn’t on. I've moved since then, you probably knew that. You always said that town was too small for me but you were wrong, I left because I couldn't escape the memory of you that haunts all my favorite places, I needed new places untouched by you. Actually, I needed a new you because the last time I checked, I saw that you're back with her and sometimes I think maybe you always were. 

If you love creative writing collections, make sure to head over to the Store where I have two compilations available:

​
The History of Love: An Anthology of Short Stories

​This Sweet Life: Creative Writing Collection

Most recent posts:
​Creative Writing: Screw Soulmates
Creative Writing: The Romantics (Non-Fiction)
Creative Writing: All the Sunsets
Creative Writing: Happier
​Creative Writing: Whiskey 
​Creative Writing: The Perfect Day in Italy 
​Creative Writing: Call Me Baby 
​Creative Writing: The Butterfly Effect 
 
In the first eBook:
​Creative Writing: The Letter R (Explicit)
​Creative Writing: Dear Italy (A Love Letter)
Creative Writing: Airport Arrivals
​Creative Writing: Tanqueray and You
​Creative Writing: A Thousand Lives
​Creative Writing: A Sunday Kind of Love
​Creative Writing: Perfect Strangers in Switzerland
​Creative Writing: Rooftops and Rome
​Creative Writing: The Morning After in New York
​Creative Writing: Mulberries in Sicily

​I don’t believe in soulmates. I’ve always loved the idea but I know they aren’t real. I have been all around the world and I can see the me and the him in every city I’ve ever explored. I close my eyes and I’m hand-in-hand with an investment broker on Wall Street, avid, thirsty, and career-driven with ecru pantsuits, understated statement pieces and a closet full of last season’s Jimmy Choos, then there’s the me with a broke artist living a kind of penniless perfection in Williamsburg, eating greasy Chinese takeout with yesterday’s chopsticks. I would wear overalls and plastic-rimmed glasses and braided crowns for days at a time and I’d be euphorically happy. And he'd paint my portraits and the portraits of other girls and we'd get in screaming, paint-throwing arguments and then make the kind of messy love that is art itself. Or I could have stayed in Berlin for more than one night, stayed with that trilingual German boy who wore scarves and thrift-store leather jackets with such ease and spent our evenings attending French poetry slams and doing whatever young, European intellectuals do which probably involves getting high on weed and philosophical ideations. But then what if I had stayed in the country I was born in, married a wheat farmer and sipped sweet tea on wraparound porches, wrapped in flannel plaid blankets. I would have been happy there as much as in Berlin and Williamsburg and Wall Street because I’m sure my soul was never looking for its mate, it was just seeking the past life it remembered the most and what it could never forget, despite a thousand lives, was the warmth of the Italian sun and the arms of a green-eyed, olive-skinned boy with the Mediterranean in his dark hair and in his veins.  

Read ten very short stories which are now available as a cute collection in my first eBook: This Sweet Life. You can download it for FREE in my store! Or read the individual posts in the Creative Writing category.
​
Most recent posts:
Creative Writing: The Romantics (Non-Fiction)
Creative Writing: All the Sunsets
Creative Writing: Happier
​Creative Writing: Whiskey 
​Creative Writing: The Perfect Day in Italy 
​Creative Writing: Call Me Baby 
​Creative Writing: The Butterfly Effect 
 
In the eBook:
​Creative Writing: The Letter R (Explicit)
​Creative Writing: Dear Italy (A Love Letter)
Creative Writing: Airport Arrivals
​Creative Writing: Tanqueray and You
​Creative Writing: A Thousand Lives
​Creative Writing: A Sunday Kind of Love
​Creative Writing: Perfect Strangers in Switzerland
​Creative Writing: Rooftops and Rome
​Creative Writing: The Morning After in New York
​Creative Writing: Mulberries in Sicily
​

I rushed onto the plane in three-inch wedges, a flowery yellow wrap dress that was near-falling-off, and a Kate Spade crab purse trailing behind me. My hair was stuck to the sweat on my neck and back and I was anything but the picture of grace in that moment. I had just caught the last flight to Milan from Toronto by a few minutes and when I went to find my seat, 33A, to my surprise, there was a young boy sitting there.

 I think you're in my spot, I said all at once in an exhale. 

He just stared at me. I knew I was quite the sight but I couldn't help but think that he hadn't understood me. He had that look of utter confusion about him so I just gestured to my seat and then to myself and he immediately jumped up without saying a word. 

I have this guilty pleasure whenever I travel and it's to first guess where people are from and then why they are going where they're going, all before we've exchanged any actual words. For whatever reason, I pegged this one as an Italian going home. There's just ways I can tell now, I can't explain how. It's not even that this boy looked classically Italian- he had sandy blond hair, a slight build, wide eyes, and was dressed more like an American with a sweatshirt, shorts, and black Nikes on his feet- he could have been anything but Italian if my deductions were made on looks alone. Yet over the years, I've acquired something else, a sixth sense you might say, in identifying Italians. I think it has something to do with the way they look at you, without any sense of shame or cognisance of crossing any social behaviour barriers. Unwavering is the adjective. 

I decided to test out my theory, so I accidentally kicked his backpack, said sorry in English, and waited for his response.

Nothing, he responded. I knew immediately that I was right. He was Italian. In Italian, "niente" would be a typical automatic reply to a similar contextual situation and the translation is "nothing" whereas a native English speaker would use expressions such as "no prob" or "no worries". I smiled to myself, triumphant until realizing I was in that precarious situation of which language to use. I always think about how I hate to be spoken to in English when someone is aware that I can speak and understand Italian and so I always try to keep this in mind when speaking to Italians so in this case, I stuck with English. 

Are you going home? I asked. 

Yes, the boy replied with a timid smile. 

Do you live in Milan? I prodded further. 

What? Can you repeat? he said, looking flustered. I took this chance to say something in Italian. 

Sei di Milano? Are you from Milan? 

Oh, parli italiano? Perché? he wondered out loud, his eyes opening wide with surprise. 

Abito a Bergamo, I explained. I live in Bergamo. 

And so began the eight hour plane trip over the Atlantic, an ocean that I've crossed innumerable times in the past ten years, but the first that I didn't sleep through. After I gave away my Italian, the boy who seemed so shy suddenly became the chattiest seatmate that I had ever encountered. He had just turned eighteen and gone abroad to Toronto to practice his English before returning home to enjoy his last real summer of freedom before the last year of liceo, high school. Something about him, his youth and innocence, reminded me of those high school years and of so many firsts. First love and everything that goes along with it. The kind of things you never forget. At a certain point, he told me about how he never understands when people talk to him in English and was visibily nervous as the flight attendant made her way to our row to give us the very difficult choice of chicken or pasta for dinner. 

For me, pasta, he muttered when his turn came. Immediately after he turned to me and said, l'ho detto giusto?  Did I say it right? 

I smiled and said sì, perfetto. 

He smiled back with his eyes. 

Later on, he taught me the noun edilizia, construction. He asked more about Canada, I asked more about Italy. We wrote our favorite Italian rap songs in each other's phones, me telling him about the lyrics in Mecna's "Non Ci Sei Più" where he references Lake Ontario: 

Al tramonto con due Bud ad agosto sull’Ontario
dicesti "sai, voglio andare via da Milano, vuoi venire con me?" 

At sunset, with two Buds in August on Lake Ontario
you said "you know, I want to leave Milan, do you wanna come with me?" 

And the romantic in me couldn't help but think how romantic this whole thing was. Two strangers raised by different cultures and languages, seated next to each other 35 000 feet in the air over an ocean, sharing a connection. Not romantic in its definition that would make my husband jealous, but romantic in its other definition: ​of, characterized by, or suggestive of an idealized view of reality. These kinds of moments, they are my reality and it is one that I have always wanted to have since my very first trip to Europe- the ability to sit next to a stranger, speak a foreign language, and laugh. I never in a million years would have thought that this idealized view of life, could, and would, become my own. 

Ce l'abbiamo fatta, he exclaimed as the plane soared over the Swiss Alps. 

We did it, I repeated. 

And we laughed, his hazel eyes shining.



Have you ever made a connection with a stranger, only to never see them again? I'd love to know, send me an e-mail or leave and comment and tell me all about it. 

Note: I apologize for being MIA these past two weeks, I've just returned back from Canada and will hopefully catch up with some blog posts soon! Thanks for stopping by and reading. ​I will be posting a new Love Story Lunedì at some point this week as well so stay tuned and don't go anywhere! 

Read ten very short stories which are now available as a cute collection in my first eBook: This Sweet Life. You can download it for FREE in my store! Or read the individual posts in the Creative Writing category:
​
Creative Writing: All the Sunsets
 Creative Writing: Happier
​Creative Writing: Whiskey 
​Creative Writing: The Perfect Day in Italy 
​Creative Writing: Call Me Baby 
​Creative Writing: The Butterfly Effect 

In the eBook:
​Creative Writing: The Letter R (Explicit)
​Creative Writing: Dear Italy (A Love Letter)
Creative Writing: Airport Arrivals
​Creative Writing: Tanqueray and You
​Creative Writing: A Thousand Lives
​Creative Writing: A Sunday Kind of Love
​Creative Writing: Perfect Strangers in Switzerland
​Creative Writing: Rooftops and Rome
​Creative Writing: The Morning After in New York
​Creative Writing: Mulberries in Sicily

There’s no manual for hearts. No cryptic, impossible-to-decipher IKEA-esque instructions that show you how to put the pieces back together leaving you with an almost-heart missing one screw causing it to sit slightly crooked in your chest cavity. I would take an imperfectly-assembled heart over the million and one pieces that feel like they’ve settled into the depths of my gut, sliding from side-to-side as I toss and turn in the pitch black of the night, seeming to come to life as my hand accidentally slips and touches the cold mattress where your heart used to be. This was all my doing, so I shouldn’t even be writing this. The spilt milk is mine. I loved being in love with him but at the same time, I couldn’t keep loving him. His goodness was never meant for a woman like me. He needed white picket fences and freshly cut grass and Sunday mornings. I needed planes and Friday nights in Hong Kong.  I was meant for little black dresses and little else. We were so happy until we weren’t, so perfect until imperfection became what I craved. I knew I had to go. The fact was, I didn’t love him more than all the sunsets in the world I hadn’t yet seen. And so he called me selfish, called me adjectives and nouns that I never knew he knew. He called me crazy for choosing sunsets over soul mates but what he didn’t know, what I never told him, is that my soul doesn’t believe in monogamy. She’s promiscuous, a hot mess, flitting from city to city for one-night stands and falling in love all over the world.
​
Read ten very short stories which are now available as a cute collection in my first eBook: This Sweet Life. You can download it for FREE in my store! Or read the individual posts in the Creative Writing category:
​
Creative Writing: Happier
​Creative Writing: Whiskey 
​Creative Writing: The Perfect Day in Italy 
​Creative Writing: Call Me Baby 
​Creative Writing: The Butterfly Effect 

In the eBook:
​Creative Writing: The Letter R (Explicit)
​Creative Writing: Dear Italy (A Love Letter)
Creative Writing: Airport Arrivals
​Creative Writing: Tanqueray and You
​Creative Writing: A Thousand Lives
​Creative Writing: A Sunday Kind of Love
​Creative Writing: Perfect Strangers in Switzerland
​Creative Writing: Rooftops and Rome
​Creative Writing: The Morning After in New York
​Creative Writing: Mulberries in Sicily


ALTERNATIVE PINTEREST IMAGE:

I love music just as much as I love writing, so in case you're like me, I'll provide you with a song that would be a good "soundtrack" for this story:

Sometimes, in the middle of an ordinary day, I wonder where you are. What city you’re in. What you’re doing at this very moment. If your eyes are still that light green, like springtime. Of course they are. Then I start thinking how we almost had it all until you fucked everything up by falling out of love with us. The last time I saw you, we sat across from each other at that place we used to go to, the one right off campus with the cinnamon buns. It reminded me of innocence and of how we thought life would always be there in that café, on that street, in that city. We never imagined that I’d be here and you’d be wherever you are and that there would be a continent between us. I’m actually not sure about the continent part, but something in my bones tells me I’m probably right. I heard you found someone new. I’ve seen her shadow in photographs on Instagram, the curve of her back and the angles of her hand. I even know her smile, have studied it trying to figure out what you said to make her laugh. I loved your wit, our banter, my dirty mouth and how you'd kiss me hard to shut me up. She’s beautiful, but you know that already. The worst part is that she’s nothing like me, the first time I saw her blonde hair, I felt like a fraud. As if all that time, all those years, I had been nothing but her stand-in. Do you read her Pushkin and buy her your favourite books? I still have them, dog-eared to mark chapters that you used to love. It’s those small things, the reminders of what we loved and lost.
 
The folded pages, the first notes of a song, the smell of cinnamon, and spring. 
 
I wonder if almost every boy in the world has bought more than one copy of his favourite book- one for you and one for her, the one that came after. The could have been and the will be. The past and the future. I hate to admit it, but you look happier, you really do. 

Read ten very short stories which are now available as a cute collection in my first eBook: This Sweet Life. You can download it for FREE in my store! Or read the individual posts in the Creative Writing category:

​Creative Writing: Whiskey 
​Creative Writing: The Perfect Day in Italy 
​Creative Writing: Call Me Baby 
​Creative Writing: The Butterfly Effect 

In the eBook:
​Creative Writing: The Letter R (Explicit)
​Creative Writing: Dear Italy (A Love Letter)
Creative Writing: Airport Arrivals
​Creative Writing: Tanqueray and You
​Creative Writing: A Thousand Lives
​Creative Writing: A Sunday Kind of Love
​Creative Writing: Perfect Strangers in Switzerland
​Creative Writing: Rooftops and Rome
​Creative Writing: The Morning After in New York
​Creative Writing: Mulberries in Sicily

​I hated showing up there with whiskey on my breath and that stupid smile on my red lips but you had that intangible pull on me, something invisible that could only be felt although people used to tell us that they could see it. I don’t know why I showed up on your doorstep that Friday night, we’d been over for months by then and I didn’t even have your number on my phone anymore. I’d purposely deleted it to avoid sending Jack Daniel-fueled text messages that said “miss you” or some version of it. But your apartment number, the street name, those things were ingrained in my memory as much as the ocean blue of your eyes and the feeling of your heart against mine and my back against the wall. You really shouldn’t have opened the door, but you knew that we needed it, the surrendering. Oscar Wilde once said that the only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it. So I did and so did you. I yielded to the version of us I missed, the us that laughed entire nights away clutching our stomachs in agony to make it stop so we could breathe again. The us that could never get enough of the rush. You driving fast in the Nevada desert, my hair a mess and that kind of impossible feeling of being lost and found all at once. That's the us I miss the most. 

I love music just as much as I love writing, so in case you're like me, I'll provide you with a song that would be a good "soundtrack" for this story:

Read ten very short stories which are now available as a cute collection in my first eBook: This Sweet Life. You can download it for FREE in my store! Or read the included pieces as individual posts in the Creative Writing category:
​
​Creative Writing: The Perfect Day in Italy (not in the eBook)
​Creative Writing: Call Me Baby (not in the eBook)
​Creative Writing: The Butterfly Effect (not in the eBook)
​
​Creative Writing: The Letter R (Explicit)
​Creative Writing: Dear Italy (A Love Letter)
Creative Writing: Airport Arrivals
​Creative Writing: Tanqueray and You
​Creative Writing: A Thousand Lives
​Creative Writing: A Sunday Kind of Love
​Creative Writing: Perfect Strangers in Switzerland
​Creative Writing: Rooftops and Rome
​Creative Writing: The Morning After in New York
​Creative Writing: Mulberries in Sicily

I'm woken from my Lambrusco-induced sleep by the sound of Lorenzo attempting to balance a tray filled with cappuccini, cream-filled brioches, and hand-squeezed spremuta from Sicilian blood oranges as he walks precariously towards me. The juice looks like a sunset in a glass and he looks like a dream. I'd found him the other day in the middle of the Mediterranean, I was swimming and he was shirtless fishing, the latter of which is my new favorite hobby. Lorenzo doesn't speak English, which suits him perfectly seeing as he wants to do everything but talk. He has eyes the color of home, the dark forest green of pine trees that cover Alberta's Rocky Mountains, with flicks of amber as if someone had splashed a bit of Italian sunshine into them. It's the height of summer in Italy, the air thick with a certain kind of wanting that emerges at this time of year. I'm languishing in a morning stupor, the cotton sheets draped on me and off the Californian king. Lorenzo has drawn the bath on the veranda, so I take my brioche in one hand and him in the other and step out into a cloudless blue sky with the rainbow colours of Positano beneath us. We spend another hour soaking in the bubbles and each other until the church bells start to chime below us, signalling that we are already late to our lunch date in town. I throw on my favorite white cotton dress from Antica Sartoria and strappy sandals that are completely impractical for Positano's winding cobblestone paths. He's in full white linen, the kind of outfit that every woman adores but so few men can actually pull off unless they're born by the sea. My still-wet hair is hanging down my back and I can feel the tickle of the beads of water as they slip down my spine. The mid-day sun will dry it in no time so we head out, Lorenzo's bronzed arm hanging lazily over my shoulders. Lunch is at Chez Black and I order spaghetti ai ricci di mare because they bring it in an dish shaped like a sea-urchin and I've always loved the spectacle it creates as the waiter lifts the cover. I practically drown myself in the fizzantino and am nursing a euphoric drunkenness when our group decides to take a boat out for the afternoon. We laze the day away on the yacht between swims and impromptu kisses while the sun scorches the coastline. Back at the apartment, Lorenzo puts himself to work on dinner as I wash the sea and the day away. I leave the salt in my hair though, because nothing can imitate the waves from a day spent in the water. Candles light the entire terrazzo, competing with the stars on this clear night. There's something about the way that Italian men look at you isn't there? As if there is nowhere else they would rather be than caught in a moment with you. Lorenzo is tracing Italian words on my back, telling me to guess each one. Bellissima. Perfetta. Ti voglio. I intentionally get the last one wrong because I know if I say it aloud, the night of dancing that awaits us will never come to fruition. I pull him out into the midnight and we make our way towards the music and the stars.

This is part of the April #DolceVitaBloggers Linkup.


Past #DolceVitaBlogger Link-Ups:
​#DolceVitaBloggers Linkup - #4 March 2018 - International Women's Day
​#DolceVitaBloggers Linkup - #3 February 2018 - A Love Letter to Italy
#DolceVitaBloggers Linkup - #2 January 2018 - Favourite Italian City
​#DolceVitaBloggers Linkup - #1 December 2017 - 'The Italian Connection

Read ten very short stories which are now available as a cute collection in my first eBook: This Sweet Life. You can download it for FREE in my store! Or read the included pieces as individual posts:


Creative Writing: Call Me Baby
​Creative Writing: The Butterfly Effect
​Creative Writing: The Letter R (Explicit)
​Creative Writing: Dear Italy (A Love Letter)
Creative Writing: Airport Arrivals
​Creative Writing: Tanqueray and You
​Creative Writing: A Thousand Lives
​Creative Writing: A Sunday Kind of Love
​Creative Writing: Perfect Strangers in Switzerland
​Creative Writing: Rooftops and Rome
​Creative Writing: The Morning After in New York
​Creative Writing: Mulberries in Sicily

I used to hate it when my boyfriends would call me baby. Don't call me that, I'd say. Don't call me baby. Now I'm writing this four thousand miles from home, across the Atlantic Ocean where the boys don't speak my mothertongue and they say things like bella, tesoro, and amore. And I loved it at first, the swirls of each familiar letter that placed side-by-side morphed into something so foreign and delectable, I couldn't help but fall. So fall in love I did. And the days became months that became years and I became someone's treasure, someone's love, but little did I know, I would never again be someone's baby. Italian doesn't use that term of endearment. You'll hear it but not with heart. You'll hear it but not in that easy, unrehearsed way that a native English speaker can use it with pure nonchalance and every cruel or honest intention in the book. So I tell myself there's nothing to mourn, nothing to miss. But there are still nights when I dream of that unaccent, the one that belongs to a past life. The sound of a voice saying "hey baby" with an aspirated H that comes from a practiced mouth that grew up around a letter which doesn't exist here. This is such a small and insignificant thing but there is also the stark realization that you can never know when the last time someone calls you baby will be. You can never know when the last time for anything will be. Maybe, just maybe, you'll move abroad, find yourself on a peninsula flanked by the Mediterranean and the Adriatic, and meet a boy and it will dawn on you like it did me. You'll wake up in the pitch black of the night and you won't remember the face of the last boy who could find "baby" in his vernacular but his voice will somehow come back to you with perfect clarity. Sometimes I worry that it's not the word I mourn, but the life that could have been had I planted roots rather than grew wings. I worry about missing out on that life where I was someone's baby and not someone's amore.


Read ten very short stories which are now available as a cute collection in my first eBook: This Sweet Life. You can download it for FREE in my store! Or read the included pieces as individual posts:
​
​Creative Writing: The Butterfly Effect
​Creative Writing: The Letter R (Explicit)
​Creative Writing: Dear Italy (A Love Letter)
Creative Writing: Airport Arrivals
​Creative Writing: Tanqueray and You
​Creative Writing: A Thousand Lives
​Creative Writing: A Sunday Kind of Love
​Creative Writing: Perfect Strangers in Switzerland
​Creative Writing: Rooftops and Rome
​Creative Writing: The Morning After in New York
​Creative Writing: Mulberries in Sicily

I’m laying on my back looking up at the sky, letting the first spring rain run mascara and tears down the sides of my face so that they slide over and under and seem to pool in my ears. Tiny black rain drops. A quick melodramatic moment, I try to tell myself. The sensation makes me want to laugh out loud even though I’m crying, like when the sun is shining on a rainy day. It happens you know, in the tropics. It can be raining and sunny at the same time, go figure. That’s what I feel like now, like weather that can’t make up its mind.  It’s impossible to know how much I’m crying, the briny tears mixing with the rain provides solace to my sense of pride. I've concluded that’s why people cry in the shower, because the falling water makes it impossible to quantify just how many tears you’ve spilled for another human being and the invisible sound waves bouncing off the bathroom tiles drown it all out- the sorrow and the sound of sorrow. I’m starting to wonder the same about rainstorms, perhaps they have the same magical power. It's like the falling trees in the forest; if no one hears you, maybe that means you’re not crying your heart out at all. Maybe that means you’re actually happy in that universe where tears are uncountable and unperceived and unheard.

They say that a butterfly can flap its wings and cause a tornado halfway across the world which is just a romanticized way to say that the smallest, most insignificant factors can change the course of our lives, can turn calm into storm. That small, insignificant moment for me was when I held a stranger’s eyes that one second too long over miniature rainbow-colored umbrellas on a beach somewhere on the Indian Ocean. One second we were strangers and the next, the sun was rising, a literal tequila sunrise if you will- syrupy grenadine reds and oranges and streaks of pink- and I had sand in every crease of that cotton dress you loved so much. One second was enough to put me here stomach-up on the grass in Jardin des Tuileries, when I should have been admiring the Monets nearby in the kind of outfit that can only be worn in the City of Light. One second is what made me drink almost an entire bottle of Beaujolais at lunch, sitting outside before the rain at our favorite table at that unpronounceable place on Rue des Rosiers with the wobbly wicker chairs all facing the street. The best seat in town to watch life unfold, you would say to me, between drags of your hand-rolled cigarette. I hated your smoking but I loved your old soul, how you would scribble French poetry on pieces of paper that you kept in your pockets and would eventually end up running after when they slipped out, flying away with the wind, which they inevitably always did. I used to laugh as you grasped violently at the air at the little elusive paper squares that said things like corps de femme, blanches collines, and cuisses blanches. Somehow I convinced myself that smoking, poetry and old souls were inseparable. I should have known that one vice leads to many. 

I should have know that even the people we think belong to us are just strangers that we let into our lives and write into our narrative, thinking that we know the character enough to plan the next chapters. But we can never know. A character is fictional, they exist as we want them to, as we create them in our minds, and at a certain point in the book, you turn the page and they deceive you. From one punctuation point to the next, they reveal their flaws. Like when you arrive at his five-floor walkup in the Marais on a Monday afternoon, unexpected. I keep going back to the one second it took to turn the key and find him there inside my linen bed sheets and inside someone who wasn’t me.  And I stood wordless like the fool that I was as I thought about that one damned second too long, the superfluous second, all the months before, on a beach on the Indian Ocean when I held his gaze and he mouthed bonsoir. That was the butterfly and this, this is the natural disaster.  
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I love music just as much as I love writing, so in case you're like me, I'll provide you with a song that would be a good "soundtrack" for this story:

If writing intrigues you, read ten very short stories which are now available as a cute collection in my first eBook: This Sweet Life. You can download it for FREE in my store! Or read the included pieces as individual posts:  
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​Creative Writing: The Letter R (Explicit)
​Creative Writing: Dear Italy (A Love Letter)
Creative Writing: Airport Arrivals
​Creative Writing: Tanqueray and You
​Creative Writing: A Thousand Lives
​Creative Writing: A Sunday Kind of Love
​Creative Writing: Perfect Strangers in Switzerland
​Creative Writing: Rooftops and Rome
​Creative Writing: The Morning After in New York
​Creative Writing: Mulberries in Sicily