𝐂𝐎𝐑𝐀𝐋𝐈𝐍𝐄, damiano david

━━𝟔𝟓. 𝐀 𝐂𝐚𝐬𝐭𝐥𝐞

━━━━ 3 𝑦𝑒𝑎𝑟𝑠 𝑙𝑎𝑡𝑒𝑟 ━━━━

        I stared out at the gentle waves of the sea, illuminated by the moonlight. My feet roamed the cool water and I closed my eyes to listen to the surf. It smelled like salt water and summer, home.

Through the kitchen window of the small house, the voices of two Italian presenters drifted out from the radio. For a year now, I had been living in the small house in Rome, right by the sea, but I still hadn't got used to the feeling that my old, and now again new, home had triggered in me.

It had been a long way up to here and it had taken me a long time to be ready to return to this life that was so foreign and at the same time so familiar to me.

I had gone back to my old psychologist, started to put the past behind me by selling my father's house and flat and detaching myself from the memories of it.

I had spent so many nights lying awake in my bed crying until my throat hurt from sobbing, until eventually I had no more tears. I didn't have a single tear left for my father and what he had done to me, and I knew then that I was over it.

A year after the break-up with Damiano, Sophia had moved out to live in Rome with Ethan, I had finished my studies in London and had even gone out with Cayden a few times, but I wasn't really interested in a relationship.

After my studies I devoted half a year to music, I wrote a whole album about my trauma and all the terrible things that had happened to me, until I had turned every little bit of pain into poetry. And I was cured, at least for the most part.

A few months later, a music university in Rome offered me a job as a professor and without thinking much about it, I took the job.

I mainly taught correspondence courses, so I worked from home a lot, but every now and then I was also at the university itself to teach students, and the job was perfect for me.

I bought the little house by the sea and since then I spent almost every one of my evenings sitting on the short jetty and staring at the endless horizon stretching out in front of me.

And I was happy.

I had only seen Damiano once since our break-up, and only very briefly, when I picked Sophia up from the airport in Rome after she had been on tour with the band.

It had hurt, but I had expected nothing less.

Some people expected the one who ended the relationship to just move on, they expected me to be able to let him go without any problems, but they didn't know that Damiano was a part of me.

He clung tenaciously to the remains of my heart, but with each shard that returned to its place and healed my heart, he disappeared a little bit more, until eventually only a small part of my heart belonged to him. But it would always belong to him, because I would never be able to let go of Damiano completely.

And when I lay in bed at night and saw pictures on my phone screen of him with another girl, that part of my heart stung.

We had been separated for three years, but the problem was that I would still choose him over everyone else if I could.

Nevertheless, I knew that it had been the right decision at the time to separate from him.

The long-distance relationship would have broken me and I had to heal, had to take my time for myself and put every single shard of my heart back in its place, under my own steam. It hadn't been easy to leave him, but life always went on.

As much as I had loved him, I didn't need a man to heal me, I only needed myself.

The wind brushed through my hair and I opened my eyes again.