I wanted this walk never to end. The silent and deserted cobblestones glistened in the damp air, as though an ancient carrier had spilled the viscous contents of his amphore before disappearing underground.

He came. He left. Nothing else had changed. I had not changed. The world hadnt changed. Yet nothing would be the same. All that remains is dreammaking and strange remembrance.

How wonderful, to walk half drunk with a lemonsola on a muggy night liek this around gleaming slat cobbletones of Rome with someone's arm around me.

Had never had contact with neapoticans. But the strains of the doleful song stirred such powerful nostalgia for lost love and for things lost over the course of one's life and for lives ... whose memory I wanted to share word for word with ...

If there is pain, nurse it, and if there is a flame, dont snuff it out, dont be brutal with it. Withdrawal can be a terrible thing when it keeps us awake at night, and watching others forget us sooner that we'd want to be forgetten is no better. We rip out so much of ourselves to be cured of things faster than we should that we go bankrupt by the age of thirty and have less to offer each time we start with someone new. But to feel nothing so as not to feel anything - what a waste! Our hearts and our bodies are given to us only once. Most of us cant help but live as though we've got two lives, one is the mockup, the other the finished version, and then there are all those versions in between. But there's only one, and before you know it, your heart is worn out, and, as for your body, there comes a point when no one looks at it, much less wants to be near it. Right now there's sorrow. I dont envy the pain. But I envy you the pain.

Time makes us sentimental. Perhaps, in the end, it is because of time that we suffer.

Finally encountered the life that was right for me but had failed to have it. They can never undo it, never unwrite it, never unlive it, or relive it, it's just stuck there like a vision of fireflies on a summer field toward evening that keeps saying, you could have had this instead. But going back is false. Moving ahead is false. Looking the other way is false. Trying to redress all that is false turns out to be just as false.

He was more me than I had ever been myself, because when he became me and I became him in bed so many years ago, he was and would forever remain, long after every forked road in life had done its work, my brother, my friend, my father, my son, my husband, my lover, myself. In the weeks we'd been thrown together that summer, our lives had scarcely touched, but we had crossed to the other bank, where time stops and heaven reaches down to earth, and gives us that ration of what is from birth divinely ours. We had found the stars, you and I. And this is given once only.

I stopped for a second. if you remember everything, i wanted to say, and if you are really like me, then before you leave tomorrow or when you're just ready to shut the door of the taxi and have already said goodbye to everyone else and there's not a thing to say in this life, just this once, turn to me, even in jest, or as an afterthought, which would have meant everything to me when we were together, and, as you did back then, look me in the face, hold my gaze, and call me by your name.

Only when it was too late did they realize the price they must pay for escaping their destiny. Every Happy Ever Happy was tainted. Fate, at first so amenable, so reasonable, so open to negociations, ends up exacting a cruel revenge for happiness.

The tales were brutal and sharp and heartbreaking. I loved them. There is no end to human suffering. Only endurance.