​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: Whiskey's Fine by Adam Doleac.

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 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.  
​
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: Perfect Strangers (Acoustic) by Jonas Blue ft. JP Cooper.

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:  
​
​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

​What language do they fuck each other in?  Does she whisper vieni amore in that fleeting moment the French call la petit mort? Throw her head back in ecstasy, awaken a living revenant every morning on his side of the bed? She sometimes wonders these things, these irrational, stupid, immensely unimportant things. Turning them over in her head like a smooth stone held in a palm, contemplative, as if somehow the answer will change something. As if knowing will fill that empty, dark space that exists somewhere under her ribcage, wedged up against her heart.  It won’t and she knows it. People talk about getting over someone as if it were a physics assignment to be completed, a household item to check off a grocery list.

​Cherries. Check. Toilet paper. Check. Forget him. Check. Erase the last year. Check.  What they don’t realize is you’re trying to move on without looking back and seeing the sun glint off her long black hair, her manicured hand fitting in his better than yours ever did or ever will, ever would or could ever hope to. In your rearview mirror is a perfect picture, the objects closer and farther than they might appear, the only thing that’s distorted is that you’re not in it. She loathes that girl and her perfect everything, the way the Roman alphabet rolls off her tongue with such fucking ease, the reverberating double consonants and all those other beautiful sounds that don’t exist in the English language. The sounds that are themselves pure seduction, they can’t help themselves, they pull you in. Beckoning. You are almost compelled to put your mouth on a mouth like hers. Need to know what makes those words sound so good, what it feels like. What a tongue like that could do when it’s wrapped around something other than the letter R. And so she can't blame him for leaving. He was right to want to know the answers to these questions, he was right to keep asking the questions. The perché, the why, is irrelevant. The wanting and the needing to know all those foreign tongues, this is what proponderates over the reason, over reason. 

For a bite-size snack of make-believe romance, read these short stories: 
​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

You were like the captain of the football team, such a stereotypical choice that I wanted to avoid making. I had to avoid making. It’s almost shameful to utter the words “I fell in love with Italy” however, I suppose I should have considered that I used to be a cheerleader and therefore you were my inescapable fate from the start. I’ll come right out and say that it was lust at first sight and not love. It was not love for a long time because of your beauty. Captivating, impossible to ignore or deny. That summer, I was in awe of you. You made me marvel before I knew the word. You were the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. Wide-eyed, I took to your cobblestone streets, negotiating the path of Gods and lesser gods in high-heels and dodging glances from your entourage, dark-eyed and tempting. But it wasn’t them I was looking at, nor the men nor the women. Seductive as they are, I couldn’t take my eyes off you and you alone.

You have that kind of hold on people, and dare I say it, on virgins especially. First-timers. Yet the more I came to you, entranced and enthralled, the more I realized that amongst your beauty there were ruins. I began to see your faults because we all have them. Not even you are perfect, actually, you are the farthest thing from perfection. You hide behind this façade of slow dinners out in the piazza at twilight, the laughter of friends over clinking glasses filled to the brim with Aperol, prosecco, soda water and ice, the cypress-lined drives in the Tuscan countryside, a wake of white dust following a red 1960 Alfa Romeo Giulietta, a silent prayer after wine-fueled nights of passion in a language created for courtship and opera.

Your façade is literally in the façade of buildings that not only house history but are history themselves. You seduce easily, using all these things as part of your armory, but you let only a select few in. I get it. I’ve done it too. It’s a self-preservation thing. So many have thought they loved you until they saw the you without makeup in the morning, with fluorescent lighting after a sleepless night when nothing is going right and everything in the world is wrong. Full of secrets and corruption, of bureaucratic failures and few everyday successes. You like to dwell on the past, your past conquests, your past glories. You live in the past, but this isn’t high school anymore and it’s like everyone grew up around you. You’re vain as well. Sometimes too arrogant to admit your faults but depending on the day, you’re self-deprecating at the same time, quick to react and slow to change.

​The others, they want only the beauty without the beast. But Italy, my dearest, you are both. A paradox of sorts and a riddle that can never be solved. And only a handful of us are content with an unsolved riddle, with getting lost in it and with losing ourselves in it. Some people might say that a love like ours is destructive. I say it’s the only kind to live for. Where I am so entwined and tangled up in you that I can’t discern where you start and I end up. To live with you is to be you and to know that on some days, there are ruins in our beauty and that on others, there is beauty in the ruins. You’ve taught me not only about love but of life. I left behind so much for you, sacrificed everything that I thought of as sacred before you came along. But in you, I finally found what is sacred: slow dinners out in the piazza, twilight, the laughter of friends, the cypress-lined drives, Tuscan countryside, a wake of white dust, a red Alfa Romeo, wine-fueled nights, a language, courtship, opera, and most of all and in it all, passion.

​Luggage-less, I walked up to the sliding doors and blinked as I felt the sudden whoosh of air against my face. When I opened them again, I was standing in front of this familiar stranger. A face and a smile that I knew from a different world, when our surroundings were my comfort zone and the language was my own. I kissed him, which is always a bold move after you’ve been travelling for over 14 hours but seems almost obligatory at airport arrivals, if not for yourself, then to add to the romance of it all for everyone else. He tasted like beer, I remember it distinctly. Poor thing had been waiting for over an hour past my estimated arrival and he ended up passing the time by drinking. I still have the hunch that it was also partly to calm his nerves because if they were like mine, they were probably off the charts. My heart was beating out of my chest, the kind of beating where you become sub-conscious that the people around you can actually hear it. Unless you have been in my position, one-half of a long-distance relationship, it’s hard to describe the sensation of being in the presence of a person whose pixelated face you know like the back of your hand but that is completely foreign in flesh and blood. Our relationship the last few months was entirely reliant on Skype and emails and in this way, you form an exceptionally deep emotional connection but face-to-face, I could feel a disconnect between the physical and emotional. I needed to bridge that disconnect immediately, so I took my shaking hand and gripped his, and together we walked out of the airport and into the Italian night. It seems bizarre, but it felt like coming home. When I finally pulled back the covers to sleep that night, there was a handwritten note from him on the pillow: Benvenuta a casa piccola. Welcome home little one.

This piece was inspired by true events. Wink, wink, nudge, nudge. 

Important Note:
A note on this category "Creative Writing". Writing has always been a love of mine and is one of the main reasons I started to blog in the first place, basically to have a reason to write. At times, I feel like I need to be able to indulge in some creative writing in addition to the informative content I provide about expat life and all things Italy and Italian. So every once in awhile for now on, you may see some short pieces pop up with the header of Creative Writing. Just know they are my little experiments and that they should be considered fiction unless otherwise stated, although as is the case for most writers, inspired in some ways by my own experiences. Thanks for reading. 

For a bite-size snack of make-believe romance, read these short stories: 
​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

​For a bite-size snack of make-believe romance, read these short stories: 
​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

​Do you ever think that you could have lived a thousand different lives, all at the same time?  I left pieces of my heart in every new city that I dragged my MEC backpack through, I re-stitched that Canadian flag on the side so often that I carried a needle and red and white thread in my pocket. By the time I arrived in Italy, my heart had been broken in pieces and I didn’t think even a shard remained. I had lived lifetimes in evenings. My hand out the window of a bright blue VW with early 2000s German rap playing in one ear and the tickle of an accent in the other.  And at 2am I lay awake in a flat filled with French books and posters of films I'd never seen, somewhere near the best spätzle joint in Berlin precisely 7 233km from home, and  I’d think to myself: this could be your life. But it wasn’t. Because my wild, wild heart, the broken one, wanted other lives in other forlorn dots on the map. So I followed her like a reckless lost girl and we went to Paris and kissed tombstones with red Chanel lipstick, we slept off vodka as a train rattled across the black Siberian midnight, we danced until my clothes were drenched in Costa Rica, called taxis and pretended to speak Spanish and bit into mangoes warm from the tree on the streets of Kathmandu, the Himalayas watching our every move. In all of that recklessness, in the foreign faces touched with my eyes, with my lips, we lived. I lived those thousand lives. Then I brought the only piece of my heart to Italy, tired and dull, and a boy thought it was enough and it was. One thousand and one. 

Important Note:
A note on this new category "Creative Writing". Writing has always been a love of mine and is one of the main reasons I started to blog in the first place, basically to have a reason to write. At times, I feel like I need to be able to indulge in some creative writing in addition to the informative content I provide about expat life and all things Italy and Italian. So every once in awhile for now on, you may see some short pieces pop up with the header of Creative Writing. Just know they are my little experiments and that they should be considered fiction unless otherwise stated, although as is the case for most writers, inspired in some ways by my own experiences. Thanks for reading. 

For a bite-size snack of make-believe romance, read these short stories:
​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
​

While this is a traditional blog, meaning I typically write more than I feature photographs, Sicily is just one of those places where no amount of writing I could do could possibly create the perfect picture in even the most daring of imaginations. That's why this post about our weekend on Sicily's East Coast is being presented as a "photo diary". I'm going to let you peruse the moments that we lived and I hope that they will conjure in you, the same breathless feeling of what it means to step foot for the first time in Catania's notorious mercato del pesce (should be given the official title THE fish market) or to scoop up your first mouthful of granita alla mandorla (almond granita) when the sun is high in a cloudless sky and you just slept the sleep that you can only sleep on an island, after a day of breathing in the salt-filled air. Catania has the wonder of Disneyland for adults. I could have stood fixated for an entire afternoon just watching the fishmongers chop off heads and fins, me in a white cotton shirt, dodging from left to right to avoid the spray of the sea off of scales (and the occassional, unavoidable spurt of innards!). It seems like the set of a movie, like it shouldn't exist in real life. The fishmongers are the young and the old, they laugh from the gut and call you over to eat a freshly shucked oyster. The younger ones wear white, sleeveless, ribbed tanks, exactly as you'd imagined and as you would hope for- showing off sculpted muscles and tattoos like a perfect cliché. They are shy and still lack the easy confidence of their grandfathers who set their sights on every passing tourist. You can't help but grin, inviting more attention.

​Another Sicilian makes a joke about cherries and you can't decide whether to laugh or be offended, is there an innuendo hidden underneath? No. Sicily is not a land of innuendos, it is the polar opposite. Nothing is suggested or implied, it is right there underneath your nose. Ruby cherries, warm from picking. We stop at a kiosk to quench our thirst with a beer. It costs all of 1 euro, money well spent to chat up the owner and get directions to our favorite kind of restaurant, the ones where "si mangia bene e si paga poco" (you eat well and pay little)! I used to rely heavily on guidebooks, now I really heavily on locals.  With a bit of a beer-buzz, we prepare ourselves to seek out this seafood restaurant, armed only with the name of the owner: Aldo. We find it about fifteen minutes later, it's on the second level without air conditioning and it's jam-packed. It's perfection. There's nothing I adore more than being near the sea and having a truly satisfying spaghetti allo scoglio. By now it's late afternoon and the sun, the 1 euro beer, and the house white wine are getting to my head. We wander aimlessly through a market and for another euro, I pick up a pair of rhine-stoned earrings with my initials. I'm almost certain they'll fall apart while I'm wearing them but it was kitsch I just couldn't refuse. 

Catania is life lived. I've often said the same thing about India, a place that overwhelms your sensory nervous system until you can't quite distinguish between taste and smell and sight. It's dangerous even, a sudden intoxication. We are so affected that, upon returning to freshen-up at the hotel, we collapse on the bed and wake up sweating and scrambling as dusk turns into a pitch-black night and we venture out to find dinner. If I thought the city had been lively in the daytime, the night was something to behold. The entire city must have been out in the piazza, we were literally enveloped at one point by herds of teenagers looking like they were about to audition for a Snoop Dog music video- eyeliner darker than midnight and jean shorts that could have been painted on using underwear as a stencil, that was the uniform of young Sicily it seemed. This is what I meant when I said that innuendo doesn't exist here. I want so badly to indulge in the Catanian nightlife. Every corner we turn is playing host to the most rambunctious dinner parties, the yellow-toned lights are bouncing off the walls, illuminating graffiti and creating some kind of bizarre oxymoron out of this historical city. It's beautiful and ugly, pristine in its degradation. The next day we would head to Taormina, driving along the coast through the old fishing towns and ports in our rental car that was falling apart at the seams. I drift off to sleep dreaming of sweet cherries and the salty grit of oysters, the window open as we listen to Catania's lullaby- a mishmash of tire screeches, overheated motors, banging headboards and the occasional swear. It's the most beautiful song I've ever heard.