Between Marble and Memory

My name is Ife.
I live in Firenze, a city of marble, rules, and watchful eyes. I am a student. I am a foreigner. I am a woman learning what it means to exist in a place that remembers me only when it must.
These pages are not history. They are memory- mine. They hold the things I could not say aloud, the questions I learned to ask too late, and the moments that quietly changed me. I write of love as I understood it then, and of loss I did not recognise until it had already shaped me.
This is not a story of arrival, but of becoming. Of what it means to grow when the world insists you remain small. Of the spaces between who I was, who I was expected to be, and who I am still learning to become.
I write because marble forgets.
I write so I will not.

(In celebration of Black History month)