beautiful
intelligent
thoughtful
lightness and depth
high emotional intelligence
open
understanding
energetic
positive outlook
positive energy
a quick mind
critical thinking
entrepreneurial
patient
compassionate
caring
bright
responsible
trustworthy and reliable
appreciation of beauty and the natural world
mountain lover
whole
7 June 2025, eve
Monument hill, looking east — towards the beginning.
I do imagine that he is gone forever, the ragazzo with the shining eyes.
He was so alive. His first love. Sei la donna perfetta per me. His dream. The dream that he clung to right until the very end. The dream. Thank you, ragazzo. It became my dream too — you made it my dream too. Because of you, I believed. The dream is dead. I understood long before you that it could never be, that it was impossible, utterly impossible; and yet, a part of me weeps for the death of the dream, for the death of you. Farewell, my love, addio — farewell. You lived so briefly, an incandescent brilliance whose flare changed me forever. My love, farewell and grazie infinite.
You are infinite. I love you.
You were so alive. So alive. Your aliveness filled and captured me, even in a video call. So alive. And so intent on capturing and keeping me. The intensity of your gaze, eyes shining; the intensity of your energy, your mind. You.
The ragazzo with the shining eyes who wanted to try living with me, who had to do it, and gave it everything he had.
The ragazzo with the shining eyes, tall and straight and beautiful, who walked towards me with his jerky gait in the piazza in front of the train station in Bergamo. But usually, it was on the video calls that I saw you. And the first night and the first weekend. And driving from the Bergamo train station towards V along that five-kilometre stretch. So excited to see me and be with me again, and so aroused.
The ragazzo with the shining eyes who during our forced ten-day separation while you waited for your (last!) stipendio told me on a late-night video call, out of the blue, that I would make an amazing mother.
The ragazzo with the shining eyes who cried with all of his being ‘Cento per cento!’
C’è l’abbiamo fatta, amore mio. Addio. Grazie.
A ragazzo with a dream of a life.
‘Volevo tornare alla mia moglie.’
‘Ti amo tornare a casa a qualcuna che ti ama è bellissimo’
Ero io.
Eri straordinario. Unico.
You changed me, and my life, forever.
My first true love. And I, yours.
You’re unbelievable. You’re not of this world. You couldn’t stay.
Farewell, my love. I’m sorry you had to die. You were amazing.
It was love at first sight, for him.
‘Spero! che diventa “ti amo”.’ It did, my love, it did.
His arm hooked forcefully around my head as I drove down the tornanti from V, to pull my head towards his so he could kiss me and kiss me and kiss me in joy.
I’m reading two books about getting lost: Lands of Lost Borders and A Field Guide to Getting Lost.
24 dicembre 2024
RULES
MINIMUM: laurea breve; IDEAL: master’s or PhD
NO brivido della passione
First meeting in a neutral location
He was twenty-three. Slender, athletic, russet skin, pale where it hadn’t met the sun. Dark, serious eyes that quickly turned warm with humor. We ended up back at my place. The date, of course, was merely the form, the accepted preliminary.
We stood facing each other, I naked except for my white boy shorts. The eighteen years between us were dissolving beneath his gaze.
“Turn around,” he said, gesturing in a circle with his finger.
Like a mannequin on display, I slowly turned around. When I faced him again, his dark eyes were shining.
“Wow!”
I don’t remember forgetting what it was like to be in love. That memory, that feeling, that knowing were worn away, slowly, insidiously. Eroded by constant dripping of anti-love and criticism. By lack of love. By removal of love that once was. It was slow; each layer, each level, each downward change so incremental as to barely command attention, but all together they joined, fused by weight, like the weight of earth turns minerals into oil, liquefies rock.
Come I will teach you to dance as naturally as falling asleep and waking and stretching long, long.
– Marge Piercy, “The Cat’s Song”
Languorous and feline the centerfielder stalks the ball, judging its trajectory, like a cheetah weaving through the dry savannah grasses, topaz eyes fixed on its prey. The world silent inside his head, his concentration inviolate, his supple body flowing through the floodlit night, he tracks his quarry, pivoting and gliding to intersect the arc of its flight. He is hunter incarnate, sultan of his domain.
But this time, it seems, the cheetah will be cheated. He has misjudged, moved too slowly; arrogant cat.
Until . . .
With a swiftness that violates time, an instant that bursts inside me and snatches my breath, he is here, and then he is there. Leaping, off balance—but a cat is never off balance—he stretches up a paw of claws sheathed, and the ball, spinning white, drops in.
Man, young men are seductive. An arm placed across my shoulders, a face turned toward mine. “Jane . . .” There was that smile, the one they give you when they want something, these boys, a smile full of sparkle and charm like sunlight in your heart.
. . . again and again one catches beauty unawares
– W. H. Murray, Mountaineering in Scotland
The sunlight streams low across left field, stroking the baserunner’s arm and throat gold. His body tilts aslant, taut and fluid, as his right leg reaches beyond the third base bag, turning towards home. Beneath his feet puffs of dust gleam copper in the late-afternoon light.
Beauty that arrests.
Somewhere past Duncans Mills, he pulled to the side of the road, stopped the engine, and asked me to hand him a small white folded paper pouch from the glovebox. Delicately, he opened the pouch, bladed the contents into a thin line, poked one end of a rolled-up scrap of paper onto the line of white powder and the other end into a nostril, and drew the makeshift straw along the line, inhaling sharply. At the end of the line he straightened up, a look of anguished bliss passing over his face, then turned to me and smiled. Dimly I smiled back, not sure what to think or what to do. He folded up the pouch and handed it to me, I put it carefully back in the glovebox, he restarted the engine, and we pulled back out. As we resumed our journey coastward along the wild west county road, like an anthropologist observing the customs of an indigenous population, I was interested to note that he could still drive well under the influence of cocaine.
Riding at high speed in a powerful sports car along the narrow, winding coast road, a sheer cliff on one side dropping down to the waves crashing on the rocks below, while the driver was jacked on cocaine—I wondered if it was too large a price to pay to be in the dugout whenever I wanted.
I rode in the Spyder a few more times.