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