Letters From A Wanderer

“I used to hate it when my boyfriends would call me baby. Don't call me that, I'd say. Don't call me baby. Now I'm writing this four thousand miles from home, across the Atlantic Ocean where the boys don't speak my mothertongue and they say things like bella, tesoro, and amore. And I loved it at first, the swirls of each familiar letter that placed side-by-side morphed into something so foreign and delectable, I couldn't help but fall.”

You can find Bethany on Instagram as @thestraniera.

“We met in high school in small town America, you playing the perfect role of foreign exchange student and I, just one of the many girls that fell for you and your dark hair that would fall over your eyes in calculus, you and your leather jacket and All-Stars and the way you’d ask questions by inflicting the end of your sentences rather than invert the subject, you and your easy drop-dead gorgeous smile.”

“I had never eaten a mulberry before that steamy afternoon at the market in Catania. I had to look up the English translation afterwards, I didn’t even know what a mulberry was. A fictional thing perhaps, a figment of nursery rhymes and stories told by grey-haired grandfathers on front porches. In my imagination, mulberries belong in a Nicholas Sparks novel. There would be a brimming bowel of mulberries on a table somewhere in South Carolina, waiting to be nibbled on a fated night with fated lovers.”

You can find Kelly on Instagram as @italianatheart_.

“It was sometime in summer, let’s call it a midsummer’s night and Rome was suffocating with the kind of heat that emanates from the city, from every single cobblestone and ruin, after a long, hot day of pure sunshine. It’s that season when everyone and everything in the city is a little more provocative- the hemlines rise, shoulders and collarbones are exposed to the night air, hair is let down and then gathered back up, and imaginations run rampant.”

You can find Flavia on Instagram as @whichwaytorome.

“I want a Sunday kind of love. When Saturday night’s perfectly applied makeup is smeared on one of those throwaway wipes and my hair is a mess and we guiltlessly spend all morning in sweatpants in bed. I’ll wear your college T-shirt with the faded "H" and the tiny hole on the right shoulder, you’ll wear a smile. And you’ll be scruffy even though you shaved the night before; they linger on your skin, the smoke from the bar and one too many whiskey sours and my Gucci perfume.”

“The pitter patter of the drops like a heartbeat and I suddenly remember how fast mine was as you kissed me in a downpour and the sky opened up around us. It takes me back to simpler moments that I took for granted- running with you, tucked into your trench coat and under one umbrella, trying to find refuge in the warm glow of a Parisian restaurant. You hadn’t made reservations, you never did and I used to hate that about you.”

“I couldn’t believe the summer was ending. Just a few weeks ago, I remember holding my passport and a dog-eared dictionary in my hand as I waited impatiently for my backpack. It was easy to spot, covered in patches that I’d hand-sewed from every city I’d ever visited. Usually I would sit on a hostel floor, armed with the needle and thread and as if it were some kind of ritual, I would sew on the newest one the last night in a country.”

“That summer, I was in awe of you. You made me marvel before I knew the word. You were the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. Wide-eyed, I took to your cobblestone streets, negotiating the path of Gods and lesser gods in high-heels and dodging glances from your entourage, dark-eyed and tempting. But it wasn’t them I was looking at, nor the men nor the women. Seductive as they are, I couldn’t take my eyes off you and you alone.”

“It was that moment that every lover dreads, the end of summer. The coloured umbrellas and lettini were being rinsed of the salt, sun, and sea that had plummeted them over the last three months. I watched as they were folded one by one and carefully piled away to await another summer a year from now. I sat with him, shoulders touching, watching the very last shard of the Italian sun dance across the inky blue waves set out in front of us. We sat in silence, knowing there was nothing more to be said. I was going home to start my degree and he would be staying in the sleepy town where he grew up. It had been the summer of stories, the kind that belong to books and he was the kind of boy that belonged on pages, the kind I always loved to read about and the one I would write into all the chapters of my life. More than that though, he belonged to Italy.”