If you had been the one, we would be living near San Francisco and surrounded by academics. Your colleagues are Stanford professors and when we entertain them at our place, they give me forced smiles and comment incessantly on what a talented artist I am as they scan the walls of our living room with Tom Ford tortoiseshell glasses propped on their noses. You never liked going out to eat, so I’ve never been to Foreign Cinema or to Sotto Mare in North Beach. Instead, we do weekends out immersed in the Redwoods because it’s where you’re happiest, with a backpack and hiking shoes on your feet. Being with you makes me feel outdoorsy, even though I’m really quite the opposite. You don’t like makeup. I remember that time we saw Eva Green on the big screen and James Bond looks at her as she’s getting ready and you looked at me and said – see how beautiful she is without anything on her face? I wanted to tell you that the most makeup goes into making her look like she’s wearing none, a fact that all women know and no man does but instead I just throw out a lifetime of Sephora and keep a clear lip gloss and some mascara for special occasions. My wardrobe is simpler too, just every day basics because that’s what you wear. Jeans and a T-shirt is somehow acceptable if you’re a brilliant member of faculty. I’ve only ever seen you in a dress shirt at graduations and you always looked ready to disappear. You hate attention, I love it. And so I think, if you had been the one, mine would be a life with a little more order and a lot less passion. It is perhaps a life better suited to one of us than the other and I am the other. One day, I find myself strolling Pier 39 amongst the tourists and the sea lions and maybe, just by chance, I hear the soft strokes of a language half a world away. It’s Italian. I’ve never studied it in my life but for the quickest second- like a flame erupting and burning to black all at once- it ignites a yearning in me, a twisting, needing, wanting sensation. Like when you know your soul mate just walked by on the street, hands nearly grazing and for a brief moment, you are where you were meant to be. In that moment, I see a different version of myself in a vintage tee, a brand new phone in hand, walking confidently in high heels on cobblestone, somewhere in Rome.

This piece was inspired by the songs The 1 and Cardigan by Taylor Swift. And if you loved this, you'll love my book Wander(lust) and all the stories in my Creative Writing here.

It was summertime, isn't it always when you last see someone? The birds singing and the limpid blue skies of my hometown overhead. I was already living abroad at the time and walking back up the oak-lined streets of the university campus, the entire life I'd left behind felt like an entire lifetime ago. We were meeting at our old spot. The place with the cinnamon buns that sits along the river valley where you can never find parking. I don't remember if you were already sitting inside when I walked in, I was probably late- a habit that I had been quick to pick up after just a year in Italy. We would have hugged and it was probably awkward, the both of us with someone new when once upon a time we were with each other. You looked different. The signs of the time that had passed written all over your face. A little less hair, a few more eye crinkles. The crinkles were to be expected though. You used to smile so hard, your light green eyes would disappear. I remember when I was the reason and sitting across from you, I wonder who the reason is now. We order something and continue our conversation, this city is the only place we have in common. You've been in California, I've been on the other side of the world. It used to be easy to talk to you but now, we're walking the thin line that separates two people who were once lovers. You know, that line that you mentally cannot cross, the barriers of intimacy that you no longer are allowed to jump over even though you know you could if you wanted to - the place where all the memories remain. Like you and me driving around in a winter snowstorm, the heat all the way up and the windows wide-open so we could catch snowflakes on our tongues. Lying in your bedroom with no parents home and Snow Patrol on the speakers. High school, all of it. Drunk on whisky at some house party, that time I sat out on the doorstep as the sun came up and my dad came to pick me up. It's terrifying really, how much life changes. My dad is gone now and in a less permanent way, so are you. 

This piece was inspired by a series that was started by blogger Brenna Holeman who writes The Last Time I Saw You on her site, The Battered Suitcase. I absolutely adore all of them so if you liked this one, head over and read hers. And if you loved this, you'll love my book Wander(lust).

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.
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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.
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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!
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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
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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:

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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
​