I’ve fallen out of love with Italy.

It’s a devastating realization, to be standing in the middle of a beautiful Italian city and…feel nothing at all. An emptiness. A resentment for the cultural idea of love and passion—to witness the gentle way a couple will hold and kiss the other and to have your heart squeeze not in adoration but envy. Fuck that. It’s not real. This whole thing is a lie.

The knowledge of a language and a people—to have no interest in exploring that again at all. My brain is thick and gunked up in pain, there is no use for the words I learned from my betrayer. An absence in trying.

La Prima Cosa Bella came on the radio while eating at a restaurant and there I felt something. Anguish. For the connotation and the memory.

How she tried to find the song in my phone by typing in a lyric about suonare la chitarra and I went—OH! You mean this one? And we played it together and just looked at each other in amazement. How did we both know we meant the same song?

And she giggles and tells me—“You’re the first beautiful thing!” That night surely was for me as well.

And I can’t stop the single tear that escapes me in this recollection. I hate this song. And I hate this place. And I hate that the romance is now gone.