The Moments I Play in the Dark

I - All the love we had and lost

ONE

'All the love we had and lost'

The sun is just about to set over the horizons of fair Verona.

Carmela is sitting at some random café located in the biggest Piazza around the town, watching, observing the hustle of the market square in the late afternoon. She had arrived here late last night, and the exhaustion of travelling had crept up on her, so she's opted to take one day just to adjust before she goes exploring around the city. Anyway, she reasons, time is on her side.

So far, she's only been to Piazza dei Signori to look at the statue of Dante (whose Divine Comedy she vaguely remembers only as a required reading in her literature class back in College), and then she'd taken the less than two minute trek from there to Piazza delle Erbe and had been enticed by the smell of coffee and pastries.

She has spent the last hour there, then, sitting idly and wasting away the hours until it's nighttime again. Tomorrow she plans to go out and explore, it's a city of wonder after all, but today she decides to take a step back and just relax.

The skies turn pink and orange as the last of the flames of the sun burst out, descending now as the night begins to fall and the hour shifts again. A sigh escapes her lips as she watches, forever mesmerized by the beauty of nature, and when it meets the beauty of the history of men, romance seems to just brew everywhere. And she has found plenty of romanticism everywhere as she makes her way through Italy, wandering through the streets of its ancient cities, sampling the good food and wine they have to offer, and stopping at bridges to glance at the rivers that seem to stretch for miles, the scenic views just boundless, limitless. It has been a long month of travelling, made even longer – it seems to her, anyway – by the fact that she's doing this alone. Still, it's something to check off her bucket list.

"Ela?" she hears someone call out her name. It's curious because only a select few would call her that – close friends and family, people who have known her a long, long time. She's always been Carmela to her acquaintances and colleagues. And the voice sounds familiar to her, like she's heard it before, but the subtle changes distorted the image she has in mind.

God, she hopes her hunch isn't right.

She cranes her neck slightly, hair flying behind her, and tries to find the person who just called her name. Finding the pair of warm brown eyes she least expects to meet here, her mind and heart stutters for a beat or two. She feels her own eyes widen and she stops, unsure of what to do, before she decides to try to be a little more amiable and a little less shocked.

"Fern?" she hears herself say, though her voice sounds a little distant even to her own ears; garbled, like her words are muffled under the pillow, or like she's speaking underwater. Of all the places, and of all the people, she meets him here in Verona.

He walks over to her then, a tentative smile on his face. He stops at her table and she stands, takes him in an awkward one-armed embrace. He holds her to him, and she gives up, holds him with arms looped around his neck.

It hasn't even been five minutes, Ela, she scolds herself.

"What are you doing here?" she asks him as she pulls away. She stands in front of him a little awkwardly, looking up at him without looking at him.