Creative Writing: Call Me Baby

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:
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​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