Diary Entry
Paris, May 4th, 1966
I don’t even remember who introduced us—maybe no one did. He was already watching me when I arrived. Not in the crude way that men watch. In the way animals sense earthquakes. Still. Alert. He looked at me as if I were a question he already knew the answer to.
He asked me if I liked Palermo. I told him I’d never been. He said, “Good. Then let me take you somewhere you’ll never recover from.”
Dark, sparkling pools, his eyes looking at me.
He grinned and said, “I’m Luca.”
“Shivan,” I replied, extending my hand to his.
The grin deepened into a smile, dangerously beautiful. The pools glistened some more.
There is a moment—oh God, it’s unforgettable to every woman—the exquisite pain of mourning something that hasn’t yet begun. It pierces through the second you recognize him as a chapter you won’t be able to close clean.
I packed nothing. Left a note on my door that simply said, Adventuring, and followed him.
We arrived in Palermo under a waxing crescent. Even the moon was raising its glass to meet us. The air was soft with sea salt and motor oil and something floral I couldn’t place until morning. Orange blossoms. They grow everywhere there, like tiny gossiping nonnas—always hanging around, listening.
For a breathless moment, I belonged to nothing but the taste of his name in my mouth and the forkfuls of pasta con le sarde he was feeding me. The days blurred like film run too hot through a projector. He had a walk-up flat above a ceramic shop where the walls were always warm from the southern sun and smelled faintly of glaze and sea-damp mortar. Luca lived in a state of curated disarray—crumbling stone angels, books with their spines cracked, fully loved. Half-restored fragments of marble torsos leaned against his bookcases like past lovers in repose. Every object in his home had soul. Especially the relics brought back to life by his own hand.
He played records from an old turntable patched with solder, careful with his selections, like they were keys to unlocking a secret side of himself. Sam Cooke’s "A Change Is Gonna Come” was the first he played for me—said it reminded him that even beauty can’t hold the tide. Then Otis. “Cigarettes and Coffee”, humming low while he smoked at the window and I gazed out into the fading gold of the Sicilian sun.
At night we wandered the city with no plan, walking until the streets folded into each other. He showed me where he used to hide as a boy, the church where he lights candles for those already gone, the abandoned palazzo with the blue doors where a violinist played a haunting melody “for his lover that, eh, disappeared,” Luca said, in his lyrical English.
I didn’t ask questions. None of it needed explaining. That was the beauty of it. No future. Just the continuous now, buzzing and almost unbearably full with pleasure. There was a heat in him I hadn’t seen before in men—not hunger or ambition. A kind of readiness and certainty.
There was no beginning to it; just the moment unfolding with us inside it. The windows in his apartment were open, and the air was thick with the sensuous perfume of jasmine blooming across the street. A dog barked once and went quiet as the faint hum of a gypsy violin marauded out from the store downstairs. He didn’t undress me. He peeled me. One shoulder. Then the other. Studying the ripeness of the fruit before him.
My eyes had given me away. He kissed the side of my neck without seeking permission, and then drew back and looked at me for a long moment, studying my eyes. “Ti ho conosciuta prima,” fell from his mouth as he leaned into my breasts and inhaled deeply. His fingers were already beneath my skirt, finding me. And he knew what to do. Some men need a map to the world. Luca is a river that knows how to run.
There were no words. I felt him trace something on my back with his fingertip—was it a symbol? A prayer? He bit the back of my knee, low enough to buckle something in me. I sank to the tile and he followed, pressing his palm to my throat, keeping me close. He pinned me to the tile floor as if aligning me with some forgotten axis of devotion, a geometry only he remembered. My body opened in the shape of his invocation, and it was certainly that—some wordless appeal to a version of me still coiled in the dark. We moved through one another in a slow, bone-deep way. It was ancestral. Pre-verbal. The body remembering something it never knew it forgot. We used the wall. The floor. The space between tongue and teeth where I kept his name. He came with his hand fisted in my hair and my lips around his thumb.
We made love until the next afternoon, in silence, with the shutters half-closed and the breeze moving across us like a second mouth. The heat of his skin carried the scent of neroli and something mineral, like he’d just come in from swimming in the sea. Beneath the motion of his fingers on my body was the mind of a man trying to memorize something he'd dreamed of before. He touched me the way a storm reclaims its origin. The way fire consumes oil. There was no introduction. No hesitation. Only recognition.
Afterwards, we lay in the noise of it all. Skin against skin, both of us too ruined to move. Drunk in the long hush that follows a fated truth. My chest moved, but I wasn’t breathing. I was being breathed. I stayed in this feeling for a while, and then I kissed him slowly and deeply, for what seemed like a long, long time. Until the tears from my eyes rolled down his face, and I had spilled my soul into his body as a parting gift.
He opened his eyes. Just said, “We’ll dream of this. Even when you have forgotten my face.”
I could never forget his face.
The morning I left, he gave me a coin from his grandfather’s collection. “For your pocket,” he said. “For help, eh, making good decisions,” flashing an ironic grin. I wrapped the coin and a sprig of orange blossom from his trees in a napkin from our last breakfast, and returned to Paris.
Everything feels flattened out and dull. The silkened dream has dried into paper. Each day the philosophers’ drone on and the Seine rolls by, indifferent. My café feels like a stage.
I’ve told no one and it’s excruciating trying to keep up appearances. But I want to keep it intact and unexamined. Unnamed.
Léonie once said of a man she occasionally entertained, “I don’t want to know him well enough to hate him.” That is the only consolation I have right now. I want to write to him, but I won’t. I don’t know if I’ll ever see him again. But oh God—if there is a God—I know, I will never feel this way with anyone else.
Editor’s Postscript
Shivan’s leather-bound diaries were found with the letters inside the carpet bag. Stitched into the lining of the bag was a linen napkin embroidered “L.G.” in copper thread, containing a sprig of dried orange blossom and a 19th-century Sicilian coin from the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. The ink of the final sentence of Shivan’s diary entry had bled slightly, suggesting it was, perhaps, written in tears.
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My most favorite to read. Look forward to each.