He writes his phone number on the corner of a till receipt, when just the two of us are left, when he’s totting up his day’s takings, exactly as he does every day, and I watch him do it, exactly as I do every day, feeling completely destroyed.

I’m surprised, though, to see people on his café terrace, because there’s never anyone here when I have my spritzers, people who look happy, eating their breakfast. I sit down, slightly put out because my usual place

I must finish taking her face off the walls of Trieste, she has no right to be here, she mustn’t come to this city, first of all because it’s my city and also because she’s dead, she doesn’t exist anymore.

on the house for the occasion – and I cried.

The more days go by, the more wine he puts in my spritzers, the more days go by, the more food he gives me in passing, as if he knows I’m just eating taralli and, on special evenings – rarely – gnocchi with spinach. In the early days he brought me a few olives, and then one evening he put a saucer down in front of me with a little slice of bread

I’m making this city my own, making this patch of land my own, making this life my own. Without you I’m still me, without you it’s still springtime, without you it’s still life beating like blood in a constricted artery. Is that really what I’ve done, run away just to spend hours at a time sitting on a little pale-blue bench?

It was completely irrational, upping sticks, leaving the child and my work, buying a plane ticket on a whim and accepting a lift to this place that means nothing to anyone. What if that was why? What if that was why I came to lose myself here, because it means nothing to anyone?

My body’s often weighed down with longing for her body, for our two skins mingling together, for our fingers as deep as they will go inside each other, for our little hands intertwined.

and my mouth too dry to get any words out when I want to tell her to stop, that all this is torturing me, that she’s no right to keep me at arm’s length and tell me she doesn’t love me anymore while also telling me this stuff, describing this terrifying scene, I want to scream that she’s a witch, that she’s cruel, that she’s got to leave me alone