HE LOOKED BACK TOO.

I lift my hand to my cheek as I watch my footsteps slowly carry me through the crowded food hall. I reach the last stall by the exit and I can't help but glance up one last time. He pushes through the crowd, almost frantic, his head cutting left, then right, scanning the faces in the crowd. His expression searching. My chest caught. He was looking for me. But I didn't walk toward him. The ache inside me was pulling me in a direction that my feet wouldn't move. I turned away and left. The last of the evening light was on my skin. And then it wasn't.

Florence that semester was all of those things at once — dreamy and slow, electric and lonely, beautiful in a way that sometimes ached. Time moved differently there. I was young and learning, living inside a language that wasn't mine but that I was slowly making mine, one conversation at a time. I should say: Italy has a way of gilding everything. Of making the ordinary feel significant, the fleeting feel eternal. I knew this even then. I just couldn't always tell where Italy ended and the feeling began.

The Mercato Centrale became my ritual. I returned again and again, wandering from stall to stall, trying something different each time, letting the evening find me there. It was lively and abundant, locals and tourists alike moving through it together, the kind of place that hummed with life no matter the hour.

I was walking through one of the narrow corridors of the food hall when I noticed him nearby. I felt his gaze before I fully registered it — he had stopped whatever he was doing and was simply watching me, unhurried, unashamed. I looked down and kept walking in his direction. And then, still looking straight at me: Buonasera. I smiled. Buonasera, I said back, and kept walking.

I found a spot to sit and went up to order. Posso avere un bicchiere d'acqua? He replied in English, brief and matter of fact — they only had bottled water. Something in me fumbled and I slipped into English without meaning to. Oh, that's what I meant. He brought the water and walked away.

And then he came back. This time with a question — how are you so fluent? He asked it in English, and something in me quietly decided: not this time. I answered in Italian, and watched his expression shift — surprise first, then something warmer. A door opening. He welcomed it, and after that the English fell away almost entirely, and something else took its place — not just a language, but a frequency we had found together.

Then he came back again. And then again. Each time with a new question that had apparently just occurred to him and couldn't wait — what brought me to Florence, what was I studying. He wasn't shy about it. He was direct, almost urgent, like each answer only gave him more to wonder about. It made me laugh a little, the way he needed to know. Like I was a language he was trying to learn, and every layer he uncovered just deepened the mystery.

When I'd pause mid-sentence, searching for a word I didn't have, he'd offer it quietly, with a smile. Like he wanted me to find it. Like he was rooting for me.

I saw him a few more times that month, brief crossings that didn't amount to much on the surface — a glance, a hello, a moment of acknowledgment before the evening moved on. But even a glance felt like something. Like a thread between two people who hadn't decided yet what to do with it.

Then I left for Puglia.

I don't know exactly what I carried with me when I went south — only that when I came back to Florence a month later, I found myself at the Mercato Centrale again. My last night in Italy. The place was packed, loud, electric with an energy I didn't immediately understand. A UEFA Euro 2016 match was projected on a giant screen — Italy vs Spain, round of 16, June 27th — the crowd excited for what would become a famous Italian victory.

I made a quiet agreement with myself before I walked in. If he was there — if I found him in that crowd, on this night of all nights — it meant something. That what I had felt, and what I believed he had felt, wasn't nothing.

I walked in. And he was there.

He didn't see me approaching — his gaze was down, elsewhere. I said buonasera and watched his eyes lift slowly, traveling upward until they found my face. And then something happened to his expression in real time — surprise dissolving into wonder, like he couldn't quite believe what he was seeing. Like he had assumed I was long gone, back across the ocean, and here I was instead, still in Florence, still walking back into his mercato. Come stai? he said, and the phrase landed like it meant something far more than it usually does. Because it did.

I found a table somewhere quieter, away from the thickest part of the crowd. Somewhere he could find me. And he did, again and again throughout the evening, the way he had that very first night.

But something had shifted. We weren't stealing glances anymore, or pretending not to look. From across the room we just — watched each other. Openly. Smiling. When the crowd erupted over a goal, the whole room lurching forward, strangers grabbing strangers, we looked up at the screen and then back at each other, and smiled at the aliveness of it all. It seemed like such a small thing. I don't think it was.

At some point during the game I got up and walked over to him with a question of my own. The crowd was roaring so loudly we couldn't hear each other. We leaned in closer.

What's your name?

He said it clearly, the way he said everything. Giulio. I told him mine. Brianna. And then — I'm not sure who suggested it, maybe neither of us did, it just happened — we shook hands. Like we were meeting for the first time. In a way, we finally were. But we were also already running out of time. One handshake that said hello, finally. And one still waiting to say goodbye, already.

We were both smiling. I was giddy. He looked happy too.

Later, I got up from my table again, weaving through the crowd. I passed him. We did what we had been doing all night — watched each other warmly, smiling. And as I walked by he said it clearly, like a simple statement of fact, loud enough that there was no mistaking it:

Principessa.

He knew my name was Brianna. He called me principessa anyway.

I smiled even wider as I kept walking. I didn't stop. But I felt it.

When I finished my meal he came to find me again. He started with a question — how long are you staying in Florence? I remember the way my face answered before my words did. The saddest smile forming, my gaze drifting slightly away from his. And then I told him. I leave in the morning.

His jaw dropped. Truly.

He was like that, I realized — expressive in a way that left nothing hidden. His curiosity came straight to the surface. So did his happiness, his surprise, his determination to come back to my table again and again. And now, his disappointment. He didn't know how to be anything other than exactly what he felt. I've always admired that in a person, even when it makes the leaving harder to witness.

Two expressive, feeling people who couldn't bridge the last small distance. He absorbed it quietly, like something he had been holding had just slipped from his hands.

He told me his own news then, as if offering it in return — he would be leaving for Belgium in September, to study medicine. He had been preparing all summer for an exam he needed to retake, working at the mercato in the meantime, saving money before he would go. In bocca al lupo, I told him, with a smile. He smiled too, just for a moment. Like I had given him something small to hold onto. The way he shared his plans felt like he wanted me to know. Like he was placing his future in my hands for just a moment, the way you do when you want someone to understand that your life is also in motion, also uncertain, also pointed somewhere new.

We said our goodbyes not long after. He extended his hand. A handshake — formal, final. But I leaned in for the two kisses on the cheek, the way you do in Italy, the way it's just done. And he took my hand and held it, his grip firm in a way that had nothing to do with formality. His facial hair brushed my cheek. I noticed. He looked at me the way he had been looking at me all evening — like he was hanging onto every word, except now there were no more words. Just the grip. Just the look. Just the moment stretching itself out as long as it could before it had to end.

Prendi cura di te, I told him. Take care of yourself. I meant it in the way you mean something when you know you won't get to say it again. I don't remember exactly what he said back. I think it was the same. I hope it was the same.

And then it ended.

I carried it quietly. No one knew. It wasn't the kind of grief anyone could witness. There was no event, no ending, no story with edges anyone else could hold onto — just a feeling I couldn't explain without it dissolving in the telling. So I held it alone, and sometimes I wrote it down, turning it over in the pages of journals like something I was trying to solve.

What haunted me wasn't just him. It was a specific moment on repeat — the one where I don't turn away. Where my feet move in the direction the ache was pulling me. Where I walk back into that crowd, and he sees me, and the story continues. I replayed it so many times it almost felt like a memory of something that had actually happened. Almost.

I dreamed about him once, years later. We had found each other again somehow, somewhere — the details dissolved the way dream details do, but the feeling remained: we were together, and we were happy, and I was smiling in a way that felt like relief. But even there, even in that, it was him who told me we couldn't stay. Gently, unhurried, the way you tell someone something you wish weren't true — we have to go. I don't know where. I'm not sure the dream knew either. I woke up with that twinge sitting in my chest, happy and sad at once, the way only dreams about almost-things can make you feel.

And then, slowly, life moved on the way life does. The journals filled with other things. The image of him searching the crowd faded from the front of my mind to somewhere quieter. I went back to Florence the following January for another semester, and I won't pretend I didn't keep an eye out for him — I did, quietly, every time I passed the mercato, until my semester ended in May. He was never there. He was in Belgium by then, I suppose, studying, building a life I would never see.

I let it go. Or I thought I did.

Ten years passed. And then one morning in June — late May bleeding into June, right on the anniversary of when we met — the memory walked back in like it owned the place. The mercato. The calcio match, the crowd, the smiling across the room. The grip of his hand. Prendi cura di te.

I had made a quiet prediction once, sometime in that first year of wondering. I don't know where it came from or why I believed it, but the thought simply arrived, fully formed: maybe in ten years we'll meet again. Somehow. Somewhere in the world. I half believed it. And then I forgot it, the way you forget things you're not ready to examine.

Ten years. It's June. And here I am.

I still don't entirely know why I turned away that night. I've sat with that question long enough to know it may not have a clean answer. Maybe I was afraid of what a yes would have meant — for one night, for one conversation, for whatever small beautiful thing might have followed. Maybe I didn't believe I was allowed to want it. Maybe I was twenty and in Italy and I thought life would keep offering me moments like that one, and I didn't yet know how rare they are.

Or maybe — and this is the thought I keep returning to — it was never really about him. It was about the version of me who almost walked back into that crowd. The one who knew what she wanted and reached for it anyway. I'm still getting to know her.

I think about a girl in first grade who wrote princess on her paper. I think about a man in Florence who looked up as I walked by and called me principessa without knowing anything about her. Maybe he knew something anyway.

Sometimes I wonder: if I could go back ten years to that moment — if I could see what would have happened between us, but the cost was to live out the next ten years in that different fate, forgetting everything my life has become in this one — would I do it? I think about how my life would have changed. How I wouldn't be the same person. How the version of me who exists now, shaped by everything that came after that night in Florence, would simply not be.

And so I don't choose it. But I let myself uncover something else instead — a quiet hope, like a small lamp covered by a blanket. Faint, but still glowing.

Maybe love — or something tender and warm and full of promise, like that memory has always been — doesn't expire. Maybe it simply waits. Finds us when the circumstances are finally ready for it. And he would know me as I am now. Not the twenty-year-old in Florence practicing her Italian, but all of her, everything after. And I would know him — not the romanticized version I've been carrying, whose gaps were filled in by imagination and golden light, but the real him. An infinitely richer expansion of the fragments I got to hold during those few weeks in early summer in Florence.

I wouldn't have to give up my own story for the sake of living a love story.

In my mind and in my heart, they would be the same story.