Adults greet people they recognize. Children greet existence itself. Around me, most people didn’t respond. Only an elderly couple, a young man, and I waved back.
The boy seemed delighted by every returned gesture, as if each wave confirmed a hypothesis he still held about the world.
Namely: that other people are available.
That idea struck me because availability is one of the first things adulthood quietly takes away.
Children assume interaction. Adults require justification for it.

The light turned green. The car drove away. The boy disappeared.

And for a few seconds I found myself staring at the empty stretch of road he had left behind, wondering when exactly we become so reluctant to acknowledge one another.
I continued walking. The city was already warm.
Not the golden, forgiving warmth people write poems about, but the practical heat of an approaching Roman summer. Stone absorbing sunlight, engines idling at intersections. Scooters threaded through narrow gaps. Coffee cups clinked against saucers. Heat rose from the pavement in slow waves. The faint smell of breakfast, dust and exhaust drifting together in the air.
People moved around me with destinations.
A mother adjusting the hood of a stroller, shielding her baby from the sharp angle of the sun; a man balancing grocery bags against his leg while waiting for a bus; tourists unfolding guides, tilting their heads up to take in the ancient facades.
Everyone seemed to belong to a narrative already in progress.
I was simply moving through it.
Running errands. Crossing streets. Thinking about nothing in particular. Or perhaps thinking in the loose, unfocused way that only becomes possible when the mind is not assigned a task.
A kind of openness. As though attention, when left alone, stops hunting and starts receiving.
At an intersection, a woman passed in front of me.
I barely saw her.
I couldn’t tell you what she was wearing or reconstruct her face now if I tried.
But she was carrying my grandmother’s perfume.
Not something similar — not a familiar scent, not a variation of its notes. That exact perfume.
And suddenly, while Rome continued performing its ordinary choreography, another place entered the scene.

My grandparents’ apartment. And I was sitting in the living room.

My grandmother, sitting in her usual chair. Hands, crossed by delicate rivers of blue veins, resting lightly on her lap. Her skin so thin it seemed almost closer to paper than flesh, marked by the patient work of an entire lifetime. She was speaking, as she often did, in stories that moved through decades. Names of relatives I had never met appeared and disappeared in her sentences like figures passing behind curtains.

My grandfather was cutting dark chocolate into perfect little squares for tea.
I could hear the knife against the wooden board before I could even see the room.

The memories that survive are rarely visual for me.
People speak about memory as though it were a gallery of photographs stored somewhere in the mind.
Mine feels different. What returns are textures. Temperatures.
The sound of a door closing in another room.
The weight of afternoon light settling on furniture.
The smell of places where people have spent years becoming themselves.

So a smell enters, and a decade opens.

My grandmother was ninety then.
She rarely left the house.
Yet every morning she prepared herself carefully.
Hair arranged. Clothes chosen. Perfume at the wrists and neck.
All of it was part of the ongoing sentence of being herself.
And there is something profoundly elegant about that.
A generation that understood presentation not as performance but as respect.
Not for other people. For life itself.

As a child I loved spending afternoons with my grandparents, though I could never explain why. Nothing happened there. Or so I thought.
Now I realise everything happened there.
Patience happened there.
Attention happened there.
Conversation happened there.
The slow accumulation of wisdom happened there.
I learned that not every meaningful thing announces itself while it is occurring.

I remember my grandmother possessed a kind of serenity that seemed almost supernatural to me. When I worried, she reduced mountains to pebbles. Not because she dismissed suffering. Because she had survived enough of it to understand its proportions.
She belonged to a generation that knew how to wait. How to endure. How to continue. A belief that life remains intact even when parts of it are not.
Perhaps I kept returning because I wanted to learn that language. And perhaps I am still trying.

The woman disappeared into the crowd.
The scent faded. Rome returned to being only Rome.

By the time I arrived home, the boy and the woman were probably somewhere else —already dissolved into the city.
Neither of them knew they had entered my day—yet both of them altered it.
None of them will ever know they are here, in these words.
Which makes me wonder how many times we do the same for others without ever realizing it.
How many memories are we currently living inside?
How many stories contain us for a single paragraph?
How many people have attached us to a smell, a gesture, a glance, a sentence we don’t even remember saying?
We spend so much of life worrying about our significance.
Meanwhile, perhaps significance is happening continuously, beyond our awareness.
A child waves from a car.
A stranger walks by.
And without permission, without intention, without ever knowing it happened, they become part of another person’s internal world.
Brief collisions, tiny moments when one life brushes against another and leaves behind something almost invisible, but not quite gone. As if to remind us that we have never been as separate as we imagine.
Every song, every scent, every street corner becomes a private universe. And still, somehow, those universes overlap.

And perhaps that is one of the strangest things about being alive:
we are constantly leaving traces in places we will never visit.

I still don’t know if you called me first, or if some hidden part of me had been walking toward you for years without saying it out loud.

I think the strangest part is that you arrived in my life before I arrived in yours.

Because when they asked me, that morning, if I wanted to come see you — immediately, no planning, no warning, no time to even understand what was happening — something inside me answered before I did.

Yes.

As if I had already been on my way to you for years. Somewhere deep down, it felt less like an invitation and more like something finally catching up with me.

That’s how I woke up in Rome and ended up in Manhattan.

Even now, the sentence feels borrowed from somebody else’s life.

The night before, I had worked until late. My body ached with the kind of exhaustion that doesn’t disappear with sleep, only changes shape. I woke up heavy and disoriented, still carrying fragments of dreams on my skin. I stayed in bed longer than I should have. Then I moved through the apartment slowly — tea, toasted bread, orange juice, silence, thoughts tangled like headphones at the bottom of a bag.

Outside, Rome was already alive.

Inside me, something wasn’t.

Can’t really tell what it was. Not sadness.

Just slightly off-beat, as if my soul and my body had stopped walking at the same pace.

And maybe you noticed.

Maybe some places appear in your life precisely when your inner world has become too small to contain you anymore.

I was still in pajamas when life asked me if I wanted to come see you.

That same day.

I remember standing there with a glass in my hands, hair undone, sleep still warming my shoulders, and for a few suspended seconds the entire room felt unreal — like life had accidentally opened a hidden door in the middle of an ordinary morning.

And the strange thing is: I wasn’t shocked.

If I had paused to think rationally, maybe I would have been. Crossing the ocean with only very few hours to prepare should have felt absurd. But instead there was this overwhelming sense of inevitability.

Like a scene that had already been written long before I arrived inside it.

I always imagined meeting you differently.

I thought I would come with somebody.

A best friend.

A lover.

My family.

I thought you would be a shared experience, the kind people photograph excessively because they’re afraid of forgetting how happy they felt.

But now I understand something I couldn’t have understood before:

we were supposed to meet alone.

Because there are conversations too intimate to survive witnesses.

In the taxi to the airport, Rome slid past my window. The ochre buildings. The scooters. The laundry hanging from balconies like small domestic flags. I looked at everything tenderly, but without attachment.

Rome has been holding me gently during this chapter of my life. I love her chaos, her ancient melancholy, the way beauty leaks casually from her walls. But as we drove toward the airport, I realized something: I could love a place deeply and still not belong to it entirely.

Rome suddenly felt like a beautiful hotel room. Somewhere I love staying in, but not somewhere I am meant to remain forever.

At the airport, I moved through everything with almost frightening calm. I searched for my gate as if I were waiting for the subway to my favorite grocery store, not boarding a plane toward the other side of the world. People around me looked exhausted, impatient, distracted by delays and luggage and coffee cups.

Meanwhile my life was quietly rearranging itself.

And nobody knew.

Not even me.

Even seated on the aircraft, I felt no chaos inside me.

Part of me wanted to tell everyone:

I’m going to New York!

But another part wanted the moment untouched. Sacred because it was unshared.

So I texted my parents. A couple of friends who had asked me to go out that night. Then airplane mode turned the world off, and suddenly there was only me — suspended above the Atlantic with my thoughts and the clouds — faithful companions of mine for as long as I can remember.

I think people underestimate what flying does to the human heart.

There is something profoundly unnatural about it.

We are creatures designed for gravity, and yet there we are — crossing oceans in the middle of the night, carrying entire lives inside metal bodies above the clouds. Everything becomes temporary up there. Countries disappear. Time zones blur. Your past loses precision.

Maybe that’s why people become honest with themselves on airplanes.

There’s nowhere else to go except inward.

And somewhere over the ocean, while everybody around me slept beneath dim cabin lights, I looked out at the clouds glowing silver under the moon and realized:

I still believe in miracles.

While I was lost in my thoughts the cabin slowly began waking up.

Window shades lifting one by one.

Seatbelts clicking.

Faces still swollen with sleep turning toward the glass.

And there you were.

Not distant anymore.

Not imagined.

Real.

Your lights scattered beneath the plane like somebody had spilled constellations onto the earth.

I remember pressing my forehead lightly against the window trying to understand how something could feel both completely new and deeply familiar at the exact same time.

I arrived at your doorstep at 10pm.

You weren’t sleeping.

You never do.

Everybody knows that.

My body reacted before my mind did.

Something in me unclenched the moment I saw you.

You didn’t welcome me softly.

You arrived all at once.

Light.

Steam.

Glass.

Noise.

Movement.

From the car window you shimmered like a living thing. Something closer to a nervous system, every avenue carrying its own pulse through the night. Your lights trembled against the windows. People laughed outside delis. Steam rose from the asphalt as if the earth itself were exhaling. Yellow taxis drifted through intersections like currents moving through blood vessels. Even your noise felt comforting. You weren’t trying to impress me. You were simply being yourself.

Driving through your avenues toward Broadway felt less like arriving somewhere new and more like remembering a place I had forgotten existed.

And that terrified me a little.

Because I recognized you instantly.

And somehow, against all logic, I had the unsettling feeling that you recognized me too.

You know what struck me most?

You never asked me to slow down.

Most places demand a version of yourself.

A performance.

A posture.

A rhythm.

But you let me arrive exactly as I was:

tired,

confused,

overworked,

emotionally cracked open,

still carrying sleep in my eyes.

And somehow that was enough for you.

When I finally entered my room, the jet lag wrapped itself around me immediately, but sleep refused to come.

Instead, I sat by the window for hours.

After a while, the exhaustion stopped feeling physical. I kept getting up from bed and returning to the glass as though you were speaking and I was afraid to miss a sentence.

You were immense outside my window.

It felt as if you were introducing yourself personally. As if all your lights had rearranged themselves only for me. And for the first time in a very long time, I felt an unfamiliar sensation settle inside my chest: home.

Every illuminated window carried entire invisible lives inside it. Arguments. Affairs. Loneliness. Ambition. Someone laughing. Someone grieving. Someone falling in love at 3am. Someone deciding to leave. Someone arriving.

Millions of private worlds stacked on top of one another.

And there I was too, now.

One more lit window inside your endless body.

I don’t know when exactly I started crying.

There wasn’t a trigger.

It felt like my inner world had gone quiet for the first time in months.

I cried because I had never felt more alone.

And because I had never felt less lonely.

I cried because your skyline looked like something capable of loving people back.

Because the silence in that hotel room felt holy.

Because sometimes beauty arrives with such force that the body mistakes it for grief.

At some point during the night, I had a phone call with one of the people I carry closest to my soul. And afterward, when silence returned to the room, I sat there again in silence, looking at you, realizing that in that exact moment I desired absolutely nothing beyond what already existed.

No alternative reality.

No different version of myself.

Just that room.

That night.

Your lights beyond the glass.

That feeling.

You and I.

So I waited for dawn.

Because I wanted to see who you became in daylight.

The sky turned watercolor blue. Pale gold spilled slowly between the buildings. Your windows caught the first light one by one until the entire city seemed dipped in honey. Even the morning air carried a strange kind of tenderness.

And for the first time in a long time, waking up did not feel like returning to reality.

Reality was finally catching up with me.

It was still early when I left the hotel wearing a tracksuit, determined to see as much of you as I could before the day had fully begun.

And outside, you stole my breath immediately.

The skyscrapers rose above me and somehow made me feel small in a comforting way. The sky still carried traces of dawn — lavender fading into blue — while the streets stretched awake beneath my feet.

So I walked toward Central Park. Or maybe the park pulled me toward itself.

I started running for a while, then slowed into a walk because there was simply too much to absorb. The trees moved softly in the morning wind while the city stood around them like a promise. People passed me with coffee cups and headphones. Dogs tugged impatiently at their leashes. Sunlight filtered through the branches in fractured pieces.

And there, somewhere between the silence of the lake and the sound of the city breathing beyond the trees, I thought about my grandfather.

He used to tell me:

When you go to America, think of me. Go there for both of us.

He never got the chance to see you himself.

And suddenly, standing in the middle of your morning light, I realized he had arrived anyway.

Through my eyes.

Through my astonishment.

Through the way my heart kept failing to contain what it felt.

So for a moment, it wasn’t just me walking through you.

We were two people.

And maybe that is what love really is — carrying people with us into places they never had the chance to reach.

I think a part of me had always known you would change something inside me.

Not because you’re glamorous or because movies taught us to romanticize you.

But because some cities don’t simply exist in the world.

They exist inside people long before they arrive.

And maybe I should have always known that you and I would recognize each other instantly.

You didn’t heal me.

You didn’t magically solve anything.

But you reminded me that I am still capable of wonder.

And that matters more than people realize.

So thank you for finding me when I didn’t even know I needed to be found.

Thank you for the sleepless night.

For the silence between sirens.

For returning a certain kind of light to my eyes.

For making me feel small without making me feel insignificant.

For reminding me that life can still surprise me in the most beautiful ways imaginable.

I left a version of myself somewhere between your sleepless avenues, hotel windows at 3am, early mornings in Central Park and the quiet loneliness of crossing your streets for the first time.

Maybe that version is still there, walking slowly beneath your lights.

And maybe one day I’ll meet her again.

See you soon, New York.

I have the feeling this was never meant to be our only conversation.

I was standing a few steps away in front of the florist, pretending to compare ranunculus prices while actually staring at tulips arranged like applause. Buckets overflowed with peonies the color of blushes you regret, sunflowers with their brazen yellow faces, roses too dramatic to be trusted, baby’s breath trying its best to look innocent. Spring had exploded into metal pails and brown paper wraps. Beautiful, yes. Also tragic. Every stem there had been interrupted mid-life, uprooted for decoration.

The flowers were louder than the boys at first.

Two of them. Maybe eleven, or twelve — that age when your voice betrays you, limbs arrive before coordination does, and confidence enters the body long before wisdom thinks to knock.

They sat shoulder to shoulder on the pavement, knees open, elbows loose, discussing something with the gravity of men dividing land after a war, and the vocabulary of pirates. They were swapping soccer stickers, handling each shiny rectangle like rare currency. Their fingers moved quickly, instinctively, with the seriousness only children and surgeons possess. Their voices overlapped constantly — correcting, negotiating, insisting — as if agreement was something to be engineered rather than reached.

One wore a white hoodie with black track pants. The other a black hoodie with white track pants.

Before I knew their names, I knew their arrangement. So I called them Yin and Yang.

Only then did the rest of them come into focus. Yin was fuller at the cheeks, broader already, built as though life intended solidity for him. Yet there was something watchful in him too, a softness not yet embarrassed out of existence. Yang was narrow and quick, all angles and impatience, as if still deciding where to settle inside himself. One had hair cut close to the scalp, the other wore his longer, falling into his eyes every time he laughed. They had dressed, unknowingly, as philosophy.

Balance, but make it suburban.

Both wore black-and-yellow Nike sneakers with the solemn pride boys reserve for the first objects that make them feel almost grown — believing that the right shoes can say everything they don’t yet know how to say themselves.

Every now and then, Yang glanced at me.

Not boldly. Just enough to register me as part of the scenery. A woman at the florist, watching them and tapping notes into her phone. I must have looked suspicious. Then he’d look away quickly, folding and refolding a scrap of paper — probably from the sticker packet — until it became softer, smaller. Yin was doing the same. Folding paper, unfolding it, pressing the crease flat with a thumbnail.

And because my mind dislikes empty space, I followed them forward.

Yin becomes dependable before he becomes happy. Some people are mistaken for strong simply because they can carry what breaks others. Life notices this and keeps handing him weight.

By twenty-eight he knows the price of groceries without checking, how to quiet a feverish child, to apologize even when tired. He falls asleep on sofas with the television still on, keeps receipts folded in his wallet. He says we’ll manage more often than he means it.

He has a daughter who insists on glitter shoes in winter and a son who sleeps only if carried. His wife leaves mugs in every room and calls his name from the other side of the house. Their place smells faintly of detergent and tomato sauce. There are school drawings on the fridge, unpaid bills in a drawer, tenderness buried under logistics. And sometimes, when everything is finally asleep, he wonders what kind of man he would have been if nothing had ever needed fixing.

There is love in his life, but the practical kind: packed lunches, topped-up gas, remembering dentist appointments, warming towels on radiators.

One night a friend asks for a lift. Just ten minutes, just to pick something up. In the boot are counterfeit parts, stolen tools, papers with the wrong names on them. When the police stop them, the friend runs. Yin doesn’t. Innocent in motive, implicated in fact.

Years later, people will summarize the collapse of his life with one lazy sentence: bad luck.

And yet even there, in whatever room they place him, he is the man others come to when something needs fixing, lifting, enduring. That part doesn’t leave him.

Yang, with those quick eyes and nervous hands, will spend years being told he has potential — that elegant curse. He’ll start three degrees, five jobs, two businesses, one podcast. He’ll know how to charm an interview room and hate himself on the train home. He’ll search for himself in cities, in substances, in productivity hacks, in airports, in other people’s mirrors. Nothing ever quite feels like it belongs to him.

He always smells faintly of expensive intentions — cedar, citrus, something purchased in duty-free. Sometimes, he notices how long it takes him to unpack a suitcase, and wonders if that slowness means something he has never learned to name.

Women fall for him in chapters, never the whole book. First for the velocity of him — the plans, the wit, the sense that life might become larger nearby. Later they discover that momentum is not the same thing as direction.

At twenty-five there is a photographer with impossible cheekbones and no patience. She loves how lightly he carries everything until she realizes that includes her. At thirty-six there is a divorced mother whose little boy begins copying the way he ties his shoes. For the first time, someone is learning him through his smallest habits. It unnerves him. It also keeps him there longer than usual.
There are others: women who lend him weekends, keys, fragments of themselves.

Then one Tuesday, nearly forty, in a laundromat with one broken dryer, he meets a woman reading a thick novel and eating salted almonds from her coat pocket. She does not ask what he does. She asks what he finishes.

He laughs before answering. This time, there is nothing he is trying to become.
They begin there.

Maybe Yin and Yang will lose touch at nineteen and find each other again at a petrol station outside Bologna. Bigger, balder, kinder. Each carrying traces of the other. They’ll laugh at nothing for twenty minutes.

Maybe I’m wrong about all of it.

Maybe Yin will become a florist, gently arranging peonies he once would have mocked.

Maybe Yang will become a father so devoted it terrifies him.

Maybe both futures are already there, dormant as seeds.

The boys finished their trade. One sticker exchanged for two lesser ones and a promise. A primitive stock market. Then they stood up in that gloriously awkward way boys do, dusted themselves off, and walked down the street still arguing, still certain the world would wait for them.

I stayed with the flowers a moment longer.

Thinking how strange it is that we all begin with roughly the same equipment: two hands, two eyes, one pulse, five toes on each foot.

And yet even in matching black-and-yellow sneakers, no two people are broken in by the same road.

Cables crossed the stones of the square like dark rivers. Light stands rose where, a few hours earlier, tourists had taken photos and children had chased pigeons through the last gold of afternoon. Someone adjusted a lamp the size of a moon. Someone else shouted quiet, please! into the open air, as if a city could be persuaded to lower its voice.

I stood near the truck with a paper cup of tea warming my hands and cooling by the second.

The wind moved first through the equipment.

It tugged at diffusion silk, rattled metal frames, lifted the corner of a callsheet, ran its fingers through the hair of an actress pretending not to be cold. Then it crossed the barricades and entered the street, where life—unlit and unpaid—kept happening on schedule.

A woman in heels walked home carrying pink and yellow flowers, the sound of her steps tapping the stones like a metronome.
Two men beneath a statue were still discussing last Sunday’s football match with the gravity of diplomats.
A delivery rider checked directions with the impatience of the underpaid.
A couple kissed with the concentration of people who had almost lost each other.
An old man stopped to watch us manufacture emotion, shrugged, then walked away with his hands clasped behind his back.

Above the café awning, fabric snapped and recovered. A newspaper abandoned on the next chair opened itself to a page no one had chosen. A receipt hurried along the pavement as if late for something important. A scarf escaped its owner entirely and lived, for three glorious seconds, a more interesting life.

There are days when the mind behaves like a tidy room: every idea folded, every feeling labeled, every memory placed where it belongs.

And then there are days when the wind arrives.

Like that night.

It opens windows you forgot were there. It lifts papers from their piles. It carries one thought into another until nothing stands alone anymore.

Some winds do not move branches.

They enter through the smallest opening—the cracked kitchen window, the train door that never closes properly, the five-second pause between one task and the next—and suddenly the mind is no longer arranged the way you left it.

While sipping my tea, I could not help thinking of the tea I had made for myself that morning, with the absurd seriousness of a seasoned critic comparing vintages. And just like that, I was no longer in the square.

I was back in my kitchen.

The spoon against the mug sounded like the metal rings of a tram in another city, another season of my life, when everything felt new enough to be intimidating and possible enough to be worth trying.

So I ended up in two kitchens at once. Well, three, actually.

The first one: the white elegant counter, the dish towel hanging in perfect symmetry, the basil plant on the windowsill waiting to become either tomato salad or pesto, depending on my mood.

And the one I had in Venice: where the hot water took forever to arrive, the coffee machine sat mostly decorative, and independence felt glamorous right up until the hour homesickness entered the room.

And then another one, farther away in distance than in memory, part of my life for only a couple of weeks and dearer than I admit: where the chocolate and biscuits lived on the highest shelf and I had to climb the counter to reach them; where the whistle of the kettle already sounded like comfort; where matcha green tea could place an arm around the inside of your ribs.

The wind does that.

It refuses chronology.

You reach for your phone to check the time and instead wonder what happened to the person who once knew exactly how you liked your tea, at what hour of the day, in which cup. You open your laptop to join a meeting and remember being twenty-two, newly graduated, impatient to begin, certain life would be larger, brighter, perhaps much more fun than this. You tie your hair back and think of your mother doing it for you when you were little, fingers gentle, as if love were something that could be braided into place.

Nothing arrives politely.

Everything arrives together.

The rent.
The eyes of someone you care about, destined to remain somewhere inside you.
The email marked urgent.
A lover’s touch.
The sound of the sea.
The friend who says she’s fine in lowercase.
The body keeping score.
Your mother’s hands and her velvet voice.
Your brother’s laughter, arriving before he does.
Your father’s languid eyes and his ungovernable curiosity, bright as a child’s.
How strange it is that some people become landmarks.
What to cook tonight.
Whether you have mistaken endurance for wisdom.
Whether there is still time.
The fact that time is both slow and ruthless.
The absurd need to buy micellar water in the middle of all this.

We pretend thoughts come in lines.
They don’t.

They come like birds startled from a roof.
One lifts, and suddenly all of them do.

A memory of being sixteen and invincible.
A fantasy of disappearing for a month.
The suspicion that success might be a costume tailored by other people.
The smell of rain on stone.
A text you should answer.
A text you never will.
The tender astonishment of becoming someone your younger self could never have predicted.

And still, the kettle whistles. The tram arrives. The workday continues.

This may be adulthood’s least discussed talent: the ability to hold profound emotional weather while completing ordinary tasks.

To feel heartbreak while travelling on the metro among strangers.
To carry hope into the supermarket.
To grieve in excellent tailoring.

The wind knows this about us.

That desire can sit beside gratitude without cancelling it.
That envy sometimes lives next door to admiration.
That relief may arrive wearing guilt’s coat.
That joy can enter the room while sorrow is still seated.

We are taught to tidy ourselves before being seen.

Have one clear goal.
One identity.
One coherent narrative.
One answer to How are you?

As if a person were a form to complete instead of a sky to read.

A little restless.
Bright in parts.
Chance of nostalgia.
Pressure dropping by evening.
Warm fronts of courage moving in.
Unresolved.

Some winds are kind enough to expose the mess.

They knock over the stacks, scatter the files, carry an old childhood memory straight into tomorrow’s plans, send old versions of you sliding across the floor where you can finally look at them.

The ambitious one.
The romantic one.
The coward.
The brave woman.
The one who stayed too long.
The one who left too soon.
The one who still believes, embarrassingly, magnificently, in miracles.

They all belong to the same house.

So if tonight your mind feels crowded, if practical concerns are tangled with ancient feelings, if you are thinking about taxes and death and kissing and groceries and whether it is too late to begin again—

perhaps nothing has gone wrong.

Perhaps a window opened.

Perhaps the wind entered.

And perhaps coherence was never the point.

After too many nights spent working in the dark, carrying fatigue like a stubborn weight draped over my shoulders, I woke up slowly—without urgency. For the first time in days, I allowed myself the simple ritual of breakfast.

I toasted some bread, spread apricot jam over it, watching it melt slightly into the warm surface. The sunlight flooded the living room, bold and almost blinding, yet irresistibly inviting. It reminded me of how insects surrender themselves to light at night, drawn in without resistance. The floor had turned golden under it. I was sitting at my usual spot, but I couldn’t stop looking at the other side of the table, where the light was hitting directly. The edge of it gleamed as if it had been waiting just for me. I don’t usually move once I’ve chosen my place, especially not in the morning. I am a creature of habits, protective of them even. But that light—it was impossible to ignore.

So, I stood up.

Barefoot, still wrapped in the softness of my pajamas, I crossed the room. The cold floor kissed my feet as I moved toward it. I sat down in the new spot, letting the sun rest on my back. I glanced at where I had been sitting moments before—just a few crumbs left behind, quiet evidence of a past version of myself from only seconds ago.

The warmth spread across my shoulders like an embrace no person could ever quite replicate. I felt my shoulders drop. My chest opened. The tension I had been carrying all week began to dissolve, sliding off me as if it belonged to the golden floor instead. For a moment, I had the strange sensation that even my thoughts were doing the same. The intrusive ones, the restless ones—they hovered, then softened, then slipped away. Not defeated, just out of place.

I finished my breakfast slowly, stretching every bite, reluctant to interrupt that state. I stayed there even after the plate was empty, doing nothing in particular, just sitting, letting the warmth settle into me. And I realized I wasn’t ready to leave. Not the chair, not the room, not the light. It had become something I didn’t want to interrupt. So instead of getting up in the usual way, moving on to the next thing, I found myself negotiating with it.

If I had to move, I would move with it.

I followed the sunlight as it shifted, subtly, across the room—sliding along the floor, climbing the wall, escaping me just enough to make me aware of it. And without really deciding, I got up and walked toward the balcony, carrying that need with me.

There isn’t much space there. I awkwardly placed a chair—uncomfortable and unstable—but it didn’t matter. I sat down and rested my feet on the railing. My legs stretched out in front of me, bare, still holding the faintest trace of a tan I had tried to earn in Los Angeles back in January.

For those who don’t know me—I’m not tall. Not even close. And yet, looking at my legs there, resting in the light, I couldn’t help but think about how far they’ve taken me. Places I didn’t plan, distances I didn’t measure, moments I didn’t expect.

I lowered my gaze to my knees. A small, almost invisible scar caught my attention. I traced it with my fingers, and just like that, I was there again.

Five years old. Rocks. A fall.

I remembered everything with precision—the sharp contact, the blood running down my shin, warm and vivid. I remembered not crying. I remembered Stella, my dog, running toward me. And I remembered getting up. Just getting up and going back to play, as if nothing had happened.

There was a breeze in that memory. Late September. The ground slightly damp. The afternoon leaning toward its end. My mother’s voice calling me from far away, unaware of the fall. And the smell—moss, earth, something green and alive clinging to the rocks.

I stayed there for a while, suspended inside that fragment of childhood, moving through it slowly, as if it still knew exactly how to hold me.

Then, suddenly—a scream.

A child’s voice, sharp and immediate, rising from the courtyard below. I snapped back into the present, instinctively alert. Something had happened, I thought. An accident.

I leaned over the balcony, probably more than I should have, driven—as always—by that insatiable curiosity.

And there he was.

A little boy on a bike. No training wheels.

From the sixth floor, I adjusted my position, searching for the perfect angle—one that would allow me to witness everything without giving up my place in the sun. I settled in, like I was about to watch a scene unfold on a stage.

The father stood nearby, trying to disguise his concern behind encouragement.

“Don’t look back!” he called out.

“Dad, where are you? You promised you wouldn’t leave me!” the boy replied, his voice wavering between trust and fear.

“I’m right here. Keep going. Pedal. Look ahead—watch the turn.”

The boy wobbled. Then fell.

The father walked toward him—not rushed or panicked. Calm. He helped him up, quickly checked the bike, made sure everything was still in place.

The boy, surprisingly amused, almost thrilled, said: “Again! But this time, hold the seat.”

He climbed back on, but only after making sure his father’s hand was firmly there, steadying him. He started pedaling.

Slowly at first, then faster—just enough to find balance, that invisible line between falling and flying. And then, at some point—unannounced—the father let go.

The boy kept going. The bike seemed to glide across the courtyard, almost weightless. He took the curve this time without falling, moving farther than before. And then he turned, just for a second—

—and realized.

His father wasn’t behind him.

And instead of fear, he laughed.

A full, unfiltered, radiant laugh. The kind that doesn’t belong to doubt or disappointment, but to discovery. A laugh that didn’t dwell on the broken promise, but celebrated something far greater: I can do this.

He didn’t stop. Round and round, gaining confidence. Sometimes uncertain, sometimes wobbling—but no longer dependent.

At one point, he stopped, jumped off the bike, and ran toward his father, leaving it lying there in the sun—blue and red, glowing under the same light that was now blushing my cheeks.

He threw himself into his arms. “Dad! You didn’t keep your promise!”

The father smiled—not defensive, not apologetic. Just knowing. “I didn’t,” he said. “But look at you. You didn’t need me to.”

And there it was. Simple. Precise. Undeniable.

That’s how you learn.

That’s how we all learn.

And suddenly I remembered—it had been the same for me. My father had done exactly that. And his father before him. And countless others, stretching back through time, repeating the same quiet betrayal that isn’t really a betrayal at all—but a gift, disguised as absence.

Later, I went out for a short walk.

And as I passed people—men, mostly—I found myself searching. Looking for the child they once were. The one who had learned to ride a bike. The one who had trusted, fallen, tried again. The one who had felt, for a fleeting second, both abandoned and free.

I searched for that moment in their eyes—the moment when fear turned into laughter.

I kept walking, letting the sun fill the spaces inside me. Watching, remembering, thinking about how trust is given, taken, broken, rebuilt. And how freedom—real freedom—sometimes arrives softly, in a laugh, a glance, the letting go of hands we once clung to.

And maybe that’s the part we spend the rest of our lives trying to understand.

Not the falling. Not even the getting up.

But that exact instant in between— when support disappears, and you don’t.

I’m sitting two tables away.

Not part of it, not entirely outside of it either—just close enough to notice what slips. The moment after the smile lands. The pause before someone answers a question they weren’t expecting. The way a hand lingers on a glass not because of thirst, but because it needs something to hold.

It feels like watching rushes no one will ever edit.

And I know that feeling well. We’ve all become very good at choosing what survives us. We don’t lie. We just don’t tell the whole story.

We share the version that makes sense. The one that lands cleanly. The one that already knows what it is. But most of what we live doesn’t arrive like that. It hesitates. It contradicts itself. It changes tone halfway through.

It exists in drafts.

In almost-texts.

Those messages we type or record, delete, rewrite—where we’re not performing yet, not fully protecting ourselves either. Just suspended somewhere dangerously close to the truth. For a long time, we’ve treated them like private rehearsals. Courage, but contained.

Lately, I’ve started sending them.

Not all of them. Not impulsively. But enough to notice something: truth rarely arrives complete. It shows up unfinished, slightly off-balance, without the dignity of hindsight.

An almost-text is what honesty looks like before it becomes elegant.

Sending it feels like stepping into a version of yourself that hasn’t been approved yet. It interrupts the instinct to wait until everything makes sense—until you can package it, justify it, make it digestible. It says: this is where I am, not where I’ll pretend to be.

And when I put the phone down, I realize the same pattern follows us into the rest of the day. Thoughts that stall. Choices that float.

Days that don’t resolve. You come home, drop your keys somewhere you won’t remember, lie down without turning on the lights. The room is familiar but slightly off, like it’s waiting for you to decide what kind of day it was. You stare at the ceiling. Letting thoughts pass without holding onto them.

Nothing in particular happened. And yet something moved. A conversation that didn’t quite land. A feeling that stayed just out of reach. A version of you that almost surfaced, then didn’t.

There’s no narrative to extract. No clean line from beginning to end. Just a subtle internal shift with no external proof. Those days don’t go anywhere. Not online, not in conversation. They don’t have the structure we reward—no arc, no lesson, no takeaway. But they’re not empty. They’re just happening in a language we don’t know how to share.

In this restaurant, everyone is carrying something that will never be seen. A man walks past me, whispering the same sentence under his breath, adjusting its rhythm as if rehearsing a confrontation that hasn’t happened yet. A girl checks her reflection in a dark window—not to admire it, but to confirm it still holds. Two friends sit across from each other, one speaking, the other nodding with a delay just long enough to reveal they’re somewhere else entirely. A couple shares a table in a silence so dense it feels like a third presence.

No one captures these moments. Not because they lack meaning—but because they resist being framed. They don’t perform on cue.

And when I notice them—really notice them—I feel something strange. Not curiosity. Not even empathy, exactly. A brief, almost disorienting awareness that whatever is unfolding inside them has a shape I recognize. Not the specifics—the structure of it. The hesitation. The almost. The part that never becomes visible. It’s not connection in the conventional sense. It feels like catching an unintended truth, just before it slips.

We tend to blame platforms for this distance between what we live and what we show—as if curation were a modern invention, a side effect of feeds and filters.

But the instinct runs deeper than that. We’ve always edited ourselves in real time. Softened reactions. Delayed answers. Replaced truth with something safer. Long before anything was posted, it was already adjusted.

What’s changed is not the behavior, but its permanence.

Now the curated version stays.
Now the omissions accumulate.
Now what isn’t shown starts to feel like it never existed.

And beneath it, something quieter but more structural: we’ve learned that being fully seen, without context or resolution, comes at a cost.

So we wait. We wait until confusion becomes clarity.
Until feeling becomes language.
Until vulnerability develops edges.

We don’t share things as they are.
We share them once they’ve learned how to survive being seen.

But in that waiting, something disappears.

Sometimes I feel closer to strangers than to the people around me. Not in a sentimental way. Not because I know anything about them. But because I catch them off-script.

There’s a kind of accidental intimacy in witnessing someone who isn’t aware they’re being read. A moment where no version of them has been selected yet. No angle chosen. No meaning assigned.

It doesn’t last. It can’t. We recover quickly. We adjust. We return to ourselves—or at least to the version of ourselves we know how to hold.

But for a second, something slips through. And when I recognize it, I don’t feel like an observer. I feel implicated. Not because I understand it—but because I have my own versions of it. Entire sequences of thought. Reactions that don’t fully form. Emotions that only exist in drafts.

Writing is the only place where I let them stay. Not because it’s more honest—but because it tolerates incompleteness. It doesn’t ask me to resolve before I speak. It allows contradiction to sit there. It’s the only place where I don’t have to wait until I make sense.

Somewhere far from here, someone is having a moment that will never be seen. Not because it isn’t beautiful—but because it doesn’t know how to be. And maybe we’ve misunderstood the problem. Maybe it’s not that we fail to share enough. Maybe it’s that we’ve started to believe that what isn’t shared doesn’t fully count. Reduced to something that can be understood too quickly. Named too easily. Closed before they’ve had the chance to expand. Maybe that’s why so much of life stays unshared. Not out of fear. Not out of shame. But because it refuses to be finished.

The light is still low, but the room has changed. What was once a low hum of overlapping voices has thinned into scattered fragments. Cutlery rests where it was left. A chair scrapes somewhere behind me, too loud for how little it matters. The air carries that end-of-night mix— red wine, warm bread, a faint trace of citrus from someone’s dessert.

A waiter moves between tables with that practiced neutrality—present, but never really there—collecting what’s been finished, leaving untouched what no one claimed.

At the counter, a man in his early forties stands slightly hunched over his phone. Shoes scuffed at the toes, jacket folded over his arm like he doesn’t plan to stay. There’s a kind of contained urgency in the way he types—fast, precise. Then he stops. Reads it back. His jaw tightens, just enough to register. Not regret, not exactly.

I wonder who he is writing to. Someone he hasn’t spoken to in months? Someone he’s barely dared to name in his own head? Someone he trusts. Someone he fears. Someone he loves. Whatever it is, it isn’t ready for the world. Too raw to exist outside these four walls.

He deletes it. Lets the screen go dark. For a second, he just stands there, hand still, as if the gesture itself carries more life than any sentence could. You can almost feel the pulse of it—the intensity, the tiny flare of courage, the almost-there truth that won’t be shared.

Then the waiter calls his order. He looks up immediately, answers without hesitation, voice calm, almost indifferent. His jacket now looks like a shield, and he slides a bill onto the counter. A small nod, a brief exchange of eyes with the waiter—no smile, no farewell, nothing to betray what just happened. And then he steps outside, the door swinging shut behind him. The sound is sharp, a punctuation to a sentence no one else heard.

I glance around, and the room’s ghosts return. The man who whispered to himself, now gone—but the lines in his forehead still speak to me. The girl at the dark window, her reflection still flickering in the glass, as if confirming she exists. The two friends, voices dissipated but the rhythm of their delay still echoing somewhere in the corner. The couple, a small candle sits between them, its wax nearly spent, soft drips frozen mid-fall, like a countdown no one asked for. His hand rests on the table, rigid as if bracing for something that won’t come.

There’s no version of those moments that survives outside of this small restaurants.

And yet, in those fleeting hesitations, in those unsaid words and small gestures, I could feel the room breathing, alive in its truth. And I was part of it.

This morning I woke up later than usual, the hum of the city already threading through my window. I sat on the edge of the bed and, almost automatically, walked to the mirror. There I found myself, brushing the sleep from my eyes, and then, for a moment, they lingered on my neck—slender, pale, it rose gently from my shoulders, framed by the soft fold of my pajama, the fabric falling away enough to reveal the curve. I tilted my head slightly, and the morning light caught it just so, and it felt like the entire world had shrunk to this one line of flesh and bone.

And then, almost like a series of flickering images, I started seeing every neck I have ever noticed, every neck I have ever felt. The strangers on the street, leaning forward to read a sign; the barista with his tie loose at the nape; the woman on the train whose hair fell to cover the curve of her throat. And the lovers whose necks I have brushed, kissed, tickled—soft lines that have trembled under my fingers, under my lips.

Necks are carriers of the invisible: the weight of thought, the pulse of the heart, the hush of memory.

Some are open in trust, offering themselves without caution, others are guarded, pressed into collars, hidden beneath scarves or hair, tight as if afraid to breathe too deeply, too fully, too honestly.

I think of love. Of the way a neck curls into a shoulder during an embrace, a surrender that says more than words ever could. How goosebumps rise along the curve like tiny constellations on a pale horizon, awakened by a kiss.

How it presses into another chest, learning rhythm, learning to yield without breaking. Passion makes it tremble, trust lets it soften—and within these movements, something deeper speaks, something words can only circle around.

Some necks hold the tension of a lifetime of care, responsibilities resting like invisible weights along tendons and vertebrae. Others are soft as morning light, carrying just enough of a tremor to remind the skin of warmth, of touch. Some stay unnoticed, but no less alive.

Each one tells a story—of sorrow and laughter, of desire and trust, of fear and surrender, of a courage that can only exist in something so fragile. A neck that trembles under the touch of a hand, a mouth, is a neck that trusts. And that trust is luminous.

And then there is mine, the one I saw this morning: unassuming, yet holding all that I am, all I think, all I feel. It is the pedestal of my head, the bearer of my thoughts, the vessel of my unseen self, the home of my invisible heart. Vulnerability lives there, and it is breathtaking.

I linger in front of the mirror, breathing into the line of skin and bone, feeling the insistence of being alive. And in that strip of body, I see everything I carry and everything I am willing to risk: trust, tenderness, desire, the courage to be known without defense.

Necks are compasses. Mine reminds me that even the most delicate line can bear the weight of a life, and still tilt toward the sun.

It felt moving — seeing those small pockets of warmth in the middle of all that cold. I started paying attention because there were quite a few of them. Each one built so carefully, different sizes, different materials. I imagined these little families of birds flying across the mountains searching for the right twig, the right leaf, piece by piece, just to keep their home warm.

Up here we’re really in the middle of nowhere. The rain seems to have settled in for good. When I first saw the hotel, I wasn’t exactly thrilled. My room looks like it could belong to a nun — simple, austere — and there’s a single bed tucked against the wall. But the ceiling is made of old wood beams, dark and warm, and the window opens toward the mountains. The view stretches out over the valley, pale and misty. Somehow it feels like the right kind of luxury in a place like this.

After unpacking my suitcase, I went out for a walk. The air smelled like burning wood from the chimneys, and a thin fog was lingering between the houses, softening the edges of everything. It was freezing, of course. Not far from the village I stumbled upon a waterfall. The water plunged through the rocks with a kind of wild determination, loud enough to fill the entire valley. I stood there for a while watching it — the restless movement, the sheer force of it, the cold spray lifting into the air. And at some point, without really noticing when it happened, I realized I liked being here. All of it. The rain, the silence, the fog. Even my little nun’s room.

The village itself seems to have stepped aside from the rest of the world and forgotten to return. Stone houses lean into the narrow streets, their walls damp from the rain, their windows small. Walking through them feels like moving through someone else’s memory. Not many people around. A door opening somewhere, then closing again. The faint clatter of dishes behind a wall. A dog barking once, without conviction.

Around six, the bell from the church tower began to ring. I hadn’t noticed the tower before — it rises from the cluster of roofs like something modest but stubborn. The sound of the bell spread slowly through the village, filling the wet air with that hollow, metallic echo that only small places seem to know how to hold. For a moment it felt as if the entire valley paused to listen.

One by one, lights began appearing behind the windows.

That was when I slowed down. Many of the houses have those old lace curtains. I found myself instinctively glancing toward them as I passed. Not out of curiosity in the usual sense, not really. More like a quiet attempt to get closer to a life that isn’t mine.

Through one window I caught the golden flicker of a television. In another, the slow movement of someone crossing the room with a bowl in their hands. In one kitchen, a woman stood at the stove stirring something in a pot, her silhouette blurred by steam and fabric.

It struck me how contained these lives are, how carefully folded into the rhythm of the village. Dinner at the same hour, the same bell every evening, the same rain tapping on the same stones. And yet none of it felt small.

I imagined the stories behind those walls: long winters, children who grew up and left for the cities, old recipes repeated so many times they no longer require measuring. Someone mending a sweater near the radiator. Someone listening to the radio while peeling potatoes. A man sitting by the window with a glass of wine, watching the fog gather in the street. There’s something comforting in the idea that entire worlds can live like this, hidden in plain sight.

At some point the fog thickened and the village lights began to blur into small halos. The streets emptied even more, until my footsteps felt almost too loud for the place. I walked back toward the hotel slowly, breathing in the smell of wet stone and smoke. When I reached my room, the wooden ceiling creaked slightly as the wind moved outside. I sat by the window for a while, looking out at the faint lights of the village scattered below.

It occurred to me that maybe those birds I saw earlier understand something we forget too easily. That warmth doesn’t need grandeur. Sometimes it’s just a matter of gathering the right twigs, one by one, until something begins to feel like home.

Transparent,
yet holding entire galaxies.

You hide—
and in that hiding,
you unveil your allure.

There is an unconscious wisdom
in the way you exist.

You are
the shape of a human soul.

One day, maybe things will be different, and I’ll start getting used to the pain, getting used to life.

One day, maybe I’ll learn to accept that suffering exists, that sometimes you don’t even know why, but your heart breaks over and over again. And the one picking up the pieces is always you. Alone, in silence, on a cold winter night.

You cut your hands on those shards of heart, tears running bitter down your face when those brief moments come back to you, those moments when you thought you understood what happiness was, when you had forgotten the taste of tears, and the word “end” felt too far away to matter.

You try to put those pieces of your heart back together, carefully, one by one. But some of them just won’t go back where they belong.

You think you’ve stitched them in place, and yet there they go again, falling back into the dark. They’re scared.

But they don’t know that you—romantic soul—are even more afraid.

Still, you try.

You find strength within yourself, because you don’t want to give up on love, on life, on being who you are.

So you comfort those pieces, you promise to be more careful, and a sad smile settles on your lips.

The years go by, and your heart starts to look more and more like that blanket your grandma crocheted for you, the woolen one she gave you when you had just turned nine, full of vivid colors that clashed with each other. And that’s exactly what makes it beautiful. Its uniqueness. You know that no other child will ever have a blanket quite like yours. Similar, maybe. But never the same.

And you’ll learn that your heart is just like that.

Look in the mirror and be proud of the colors in your heart, because that reflection couldn’t exist without the colors you carry inside.

It was a peculiar half-day—waking up in Rome while outside the window everything was still dark, the city wrapped in the silence of night and of a Saturday that, for most people, is a day off. Few souls awake. No lit windows, just mine.

Then the walk to the metro, accompanied only by the sound of my steps and my suitcase gliding lightly over the pavement.

The metro was empty. I was the only passenger. What a marvel. I had never seen it like that. It felt like stepping inside a secret.

The carriages, stripped of bodies, were overflowing with presence. In the silence, all the voices seemed louder—the ones never truly heard. The tired commuters thrown off balance by sudden stops, the anxiety of first days and final exams, the craving of someone going home to his family, the excitement of tourists just passing through. Lovers leaning into each other, musicians with their guitars like second spines, the homeless, children tugging at sleeves asking when it’s time to get off.

They were all there. While in the early morning darkness, underground, I traveled alone in their company.

The blue seats of the empty metro offered a striking vision of symmetry—disorienting, yet elegant, almost ceremonial in their order.

By the time I reached the station, dawn had begun to loosen the dark. The hall was vast and deserted. The departure board towered over me, and I stood beneath it—small, backpack on my shoulders, suitcase at my side—waiting for my train to announce itself. And again that feeling returned: solitude without loneliness. As if life were happening everywhere at once, even while I stood still at its center.

So many trains. So many trajectories. Lives brushing past one another with exquisite precision, never colliding. A flawless system. And then, every now and then, two paths cross—not by accident—and everything quietly shifts.

I wondered who, long before me, had stood somewhere like this, staring at something solid and ordinary and suddenly sensing its depth. Someone in ancient Greece watching ships leave the harbor. A child in the French countryside centuries ago, looking at a road and feeling time move through it. Whoever they were, I felt close to them—those rare souls attuned to what can’t be seen but can be felt.

The train pulled away, and the city began to thin. The outskirts emerged—poorer areas, decaying buildings, cluttered and weathered balconies, lives showing their seams. Shutters lifted one by one. Morning entered kitchens and bedrooms. Scenes unfolded like a slow film: a cigarette smoked in pajamas over coffee, a mother hanging laundry while a child wrapped herself around her legs, a lazy cat making its way to the litter box.

This morning felt like going to the cinema—except the camera was my eyes, the soundtrack my Spotify, and the lighting was chosen by God.

And then I flew—high above everything and everyone. Lifted away from all coordinates. No sense of belonging, just the way I like it. Sunlight warming my cheeks, clouds like cushions beneath me. The wing steady, cutting through space. That moment where you are nowhere and therefore free.

The descent brought recognition. The jagged coastline of the city that raised me appeared below, familiar as a memory stored in the body. I returned to it instinctively, the way animals do. From the window I spotted my parents’ car, impossibly small. They saw the plane. My father flashed the headlights.

Me in the sky. Them on the ground. No words required. I am lucky. I am deeply grateful—for what life has given me, and for what it keeps placing gently in my hands.

I think of you often. You already know that. Perhaps the clouds I met today will tell you better than I can. I can’t help it: I write, and what I feel needs to be said. Forgive me if I linger, if I sound too intense at times. I don’t know how to dilute what matters. I only know that I hope to see you again soon.

There is still so much I wish I could share. I wish I could stand closer to you, be more present, offer steadier support. I hope I’m doing enough from here.

Just know my soul and my thoughts are there with you, ready to celebrate your successes and to face your challenges—whatever they may be—together.

Good morning to you, blue belt like the metro seats.

Iscriviti ora