fordelaurent
Rome is a city drenched in color-sunlit ruins, warm stone, endless stories carved into every street. Yet some lives move quietly through it, untouched by its brightness, existing instead in muted tones and unspoken emotions.
She came to Rome searching for distance-from her past, from love, from the parts of herself that once felt too deeply. In the early mornings, when the city is still half asleep, she finds comfort in solitude: the echo of footsteps on cobblestone streets, the smell of coffee drifting through narrow alleys, the safety of a life carefully controlled. She believes that keeping her heart guarded is the only way to survive.
He has always belonged to Rome, but he walks it with a weight he never learned how to put down. Nights find him wandering along the Tiber, thoughts tangled with memories he avoids and feelings he never voices. He loves intensely, dangerously-but he has taught himself that silence is safer than truth, and distance is easier than commitment.
When their paths cross beneath Rome's fading streetlights, their connection doesn't arrive like a storm. It unfolds slowly, almost imperceptibly, in shared glances across cafΓ© tables, quiet conversations that end too soon, and moments where being close feels both comforting and terrifying. They don't fall in love loudly. They fall in love in fragments-in pauses, in shadows, in the spaces where words fail.
As days turn into nights and seasons shift over the Eternal City, their bond deepens in shades of gray-hope mixed with fear, desire tangled with restraint. But love written in silence is never simple. Both carry histories that refuse to stay buried, and Rome, a city built on memory, has a way of forcing the past to resurface.