It was supposed to be the trip of a lifetime. I had saved up for two years, booked the cheapest flight from New York to Palermo, and told everyone I was going to “find myself” among the ancient ruins and endless plates of pasta. What I actually found was a girl named Sofia who worked at a tiny espresso bar near the cathedral. She had that perfect Sicilian smile — the kind that makes you forget you’re sweating through your shirt at 11 a.m. — and she laughed at my terrible attempts to order a cappuccino in broken Italian.
We talked for forty-five minutes about nothing. She told me about her nonna’s secret recipe for arancini, I told her about the time I got lost in a Walmart for three hours. She invited me to meet her after her shift for a walk along the waterfront. I said yes faster than a kid grabbing free samples.
The next three days were a blur of perfect nonsense. We rode scooters up winding roads to Taormina, where the Greek theater overlooked the sea like it had been waiting two thousand years just for us. We ate gelato that tasted like it was made by actual angels. We sat on the beach at sunset while she explained the difference between real cannoli and the tourist junk they sell in the airport. I nodded like I understood, but I was mostly just staring at the way the light hit her hair and thinking this was the kind of story I’d tell my grandkids someday.
On the fourth day she said she had to help her cousin with something and would text me later about dinner. I waited. I walked the same streets we’d walked, bought a ridiculous tourist hat just because she’d laughed at one earlier, and practiced saying “ciao bella” in the mirror of my tiny hotel room until it sounded almost natural. The text never came.
I checked my phone every thirty seconds for forty-eight hours straight. I refreshed like it was 2007 and I was waiting for a MySpace comment. I even walked past the espresso bar three times a day, pretending I was just “in the neighborhood.” The old man behind the counter eventually gave me a pitying look and a free espresso. On the sixth day I took the train to Catania just to clear my head, convinced myself she was probably just busy with family stuff like she’d mentioned. I bought her a little ceramic lemon as a gift because she’d said they were her favorite.
By day eight I was inventing elaborate theories. Maybe she was secretly a spy. Maybe her phone fell into the Mediterranean. Maybe the ghost of some ancient Sicilian king had kidnapped her because he was jealous of how happy we looked in the theater. I even asked a random old lady feeding pigeons in the square if she knew Sofia. She just shrugged and threw another handful of breadcrumbs.
On the tenth day I flew home. The ceramic lemon is still sitting on my shelf next to a half-empty bottle of limoncello I never opened. Every time I look at it I think about how the whole thing just… vanished. Poof. Like it had never happened.
And that’s why I still check my phone every thirty seconds whenever someone says they’ll text me later. Because somewhere out there, Sofia is probably still helping her cousin with that thing. Or maybe she just got a better offer.
Who knows?
The end.
Image © Scott Wylie | Text © Storyteller
Comments