What is it about the rain that makes us so nostalgic? I’ve wondered this before and tried to make sense of it, just as I am in this moment. I’m walking slowly in the city, balancing my oversized umbrella on my shoulder and a steaming coffee in one hand. It’s drizzling, the borderline between real rain and nothing at all, where you’re constantly questioning whether you actually need an umbrella. The skies are slate gray and that’s when I realize that maybe I feel this way because they are the color of your eyes. Or maybe because of the way you’d look at me when you wanted me and I could see a storm brewing in them, I swear they got darker with desire, your hand on the back of my neck sending lightning down my spine.

Now it’s raining harder.

The pitter patter of the drops like a heartbeat and I suddenly remember how fast mine was as you kissed me in a downpour and the sky opened up around us. It takes me back to simpler moments that I took for granted- running with you, tucked into your trench coat and under one umbrella, trying to find refuge in the warm glow of a Parisian restaurant. You hadn’t made reservations, you never did and I used to hate that about you. Now it just makes me smile as I think about how much better it always turned out anyways, like that time we stood under the portici in Bologna for hours, talking about our future. We didn’t know it at the time that we wouldn’t be in each other’s. Do you remember that awful rainy day in New York? It was our first day in the city and we awoke to a full blown autumn storm, the kind that seemed to shake skyscrapers. We spent the whole day in bed in the Egyptian cotton sheets, ordering room service and singing karaoke to MTV. The way you butchered the lyrics with your imperfect English just made me fall for you more. The rain. It was there that night in your car, an Alfa Romeo wasn’t it? We parked it on a dark road in your hometown on a Saturday night and did what teenagers do on dark roads on a Saturday night. The rain hammering the roof. You wrote TVB into the steam in the windows and when I asked you what it meant, you smiled. That’s the thing about rain, it’s been a part of beautiful moments that I usually try to forget because they belong to our past lives.

Then there was the last time I saw you, tears streaming down my face like rain down that hotel window in New York, down the car door window on a Saturday night. I wipe away a runaway tear, or is it just the rain?

It seems like the worst is over now, I put a hand out from under my umbrella to make sure, close it, slide it under my arm, and keep walking.

It was that moment that every lover dreads, the end of summer. The coloured umbrellas and lettini were being rinsed of the salt, sun, and sea that had plummeted them over the last three months. I watched as they were folded one by one and carefully piled away to await another summer a year from now. I sat with him, shoulders touching, watching the very last shard of the Italian sun dance across the inky blue waves set out in front of us. We sat in silence, knowing there was nothing more to be said. I was going home to start my degree and he would be staying in the sleepy town where he grew up. It had been the summer of stories, the kind that belong to books and he was the kind of boy that belonged on pages, the kind I always loved to read about and the one I would write into all the chapters of my life. More than that though, he belonged to Italy. When we were desperate, I tried so hard to imagine him in a double-breasted peacoat and tan loafers, wearing actual socks. Walking in Williamsburg on a Saturday under the amber leaves of fall or sitting with a paper coffee cup on the steps of my parents' brownstone watching the city pass by. But I simply couldn't conjure the image in my head. He has the sea running through his veins and the sun in his hair. He even tastes like the Mediterranean - foreign and forbidden, salty and yet somehow sweet. I thought about that Atticus poem, 'love her but leave her wild'. This time, the wild isn't me but him. In his heart of hearts, he knows I have to leave him even though he's been supplicating me, telling me he'll move across the Atlantic and into my one bedroom, sixth floor walkup. Naples is the furthest he's ever travelled from his hometown on the coast.

I'll come to the New York, he says, adding a superfluous article without thinking about it.
And what will you do? I ask.
Be with you, he answers.

Pleads. Be with me. It's such a simple solution but somehow, it's the simplicity of it all that hurts the most, the fact that we can't concede ourselves the beauty of simplicity because it would require one of us to live where we don't belong and isn't that the worst fate of all? To live a life that was never meant for you? He knows this too and that's why we have to say goodbye. I used to think I was a romantic, but now I realize I'm just a realist who likes a good story. I'm watching him now, drinking in every second like I'll never be able to satisfy this thirst again and maybe I won't. Maybe I'll be back here in fifty years from now, sitting under the sun with wrinkles and grey hair, a pocketbook full of photographs and a life lived and out of the corner of my eye, I'll be looking for a boy I once knew. I need to memorize him, I tell myself. His dark eyes and the way they speak Italian to me with a look. The curve of his back and the way the muscles in his jaw are tense, as if he's holding back words. It's dark now and my plane is in the morning. The couples start making their way towards the square where the smell of today's catch is beckoning. I know what waits for us- a long goodbye. The worst kind and not the ending I want for this, for us. So I turn my head, kiss him slowly and with the taste of salt and sun and everything I ever wanted on my lips, I stand up and walk away, a certain homesickness already settling itself in my stomach as the distance between us grows.

If you enjoyed this short story, you will love my book.
Wander(lust) is available on Amazon worldwide and online at major book retailers such as Waterstones, Indigo Chapters, and many others.
​
Click here to see it on the US site.

See more Creative Writing here.

Dear fellow Italy lovers. This is our last linkup. I don't want to write a long goodbye, they are just not for me, but I hope it's enough to say that all good things come to an end and this has been an absolute joy over the past two years, we are utterly grateful to have connected with all of you. We hope you will keep sharing the love, let's use the hashtag #DolceVitaBloggers on Instagram. Grazie a tutti.

​I couldn’t believe the summer was ending. Just a few weeks ago, I remember holding my passport and a dog-eared dictionary in my hand as I waited impatiently for my backpack. It was easy to spot, covered in patches that I’d hand-sewed from every city I’d ever visited. Usually I would sit on a hostel floor, armed with the needle and thread and as if it were some kind of ritual, I would sew on the newest one the last night in a country. The Canadian flag patch was by far the dirtiest but also in the best spot on the backpack –  front and center, the right-hand corner was peeling off and the maple leaf was just barely distinguishable due to one too many snags on a bus, plane, train, or rickshaw. It may have also fallen off a donkey at some point or a Mongolian wild horse, I can’t quite remember. There was a tiny, free spot right under that patriotic patch for the one country that I was missing, the country that I had just landed in.
 
I was in Italy for the first time. I told myself that I was saving the best for last and it turned out to be true. This was the end of my around-the-world trip, one that I had booked with a broken-heart and an overdrafted bank account with the sole idea of leaving both behind on the runway as the first plane took off. Three days prior to the purchase of a plane ticket, my high school boyfriend told me was no longer happy. He stopped at “happy”, as that would prevent me from imagining how that was actually supposed to end. I half-expected him to give me the dreaded “it’s not you, it’s me” speech, but we both knew it wasn’t true. It was me. I had become complacent, not just with us, but with life. Everything I had was exactly what I had worked so hard to have and I found myself in my late-twenties wanting none of it. I would stay up at night, wide-eyed and fearful of something that I couldn’t put a finger on, a monster in waiting that somewhat resembled my future and it was terrifying.
 
And that’s how I found myself one sunny August morning, downing a caffè corretto to calm my nerves and help my rusty university Italian. I was staying with a friend in a town I couldn’t pronounce the name of, a friend that coincidentally had been in my university Italian classes until he met a fabulous Italian queen with the best eyebrows I’d ever seen and the two of them strutted onto a plane with a one-way ticket back to the queen’s hometown in Tuscany. It was the scandal of the century at first, but now they are, fittingly so, town royalty, and I was to be the guest of honour this summer. They literally laid out the red carpet for me and suddenly this foreign country felt like home. I spent the first week in a shameless Chianti-fuelled daze by the turquoise pool overlooking an expansive olive grove.
 
I ventured into town the second Monday, dripping with sweat and chlorine from the pool, my hair in a messy bun falling off one side of my head and the straps of my yellow sundress falling off both shoulders. They say fate has a sense of humour and that afternoon confirmed it. I was such a state: bare-faced, shiny and boasting the biggest sunglasses known to man and of course it was in that moment that I ran into him. Him with a capital H. I had been warned beforehand, a detailed physical description of the one man I had to be sure to avoid at all costs was given to me my first night in Italy. The description was drilled in my head and his photograph (conveniently fished off social media) was burned in my memory: tall, olive skin, dark eyes and even darker hair, and a jawline that looked like it could injure someone. He looked like a group of single foreign women had convened to provide one of those police sketches and that their prompt was “sexy Italian man”. Yet after almost a year of travelling solo as a female, I had met my share of attractive men the world over. From blue-eyed Danish models to hip-swaying Latin Americans, I was immune to seduction by the time I arrived in Italy.  I remember laughing out loud, thinking how absurd it all was because how dangerous could one small-town Italian man be? Famous last words. 

To be continued...
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.
​
This is part of the #DolceVitaBloggers Linkup - #16 May 2019. Add any Italy-related post to the linkup party below and join the fun. We are looking forward to another year of this wonderful community. Our goal is to connect over our shared love of Italy. Thank you all who have participated before, and those who join in the future!
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If you have any questions, please feel free to leave a comment below!
​
Past #DolceVitaBlogger Link-Ups:
#DolceVitaBloggers Linkup - #14 March 2019
#DolceVitaBloggers Linkup – #13 February 2019
​#DolceVitaBloggers Linkup – #12 January 2019
#DolceVitaBloggers Linkup – #11 October 2018 – Hilarious Travel Mishaps
​#DolceVitaBloggers Linkup – #10 September 2018 – Favourite Italian Recipe
​#DolceVitaBloggers Linkup - #9 August 2018 - Culture Shock
​#DolceVitaBloggers Linkup - #8 July 2018 - La Dolce Vita
​#DolceVitaBloggers Linkup - #7 June 2018 - Hidden Gems in Italy
​#DolceVitaBloggers Linkup - #6 May 2018 - Five Italian Words
​#DolceVitaBloggers Linkup - #5 April 2018 - The Perfect Day in Italy
​#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
​

Most recent posts:
​Creative Writing: Magnolia
​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

​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

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: Happier by Ed Sheeran. 

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