“What? Where?”
“Who cares? Just let it happen.”
Let what happen?I wanted to ask.
He looked over his shoulder with mischievous excitement and expectation. As if he didn’t know what the hell we’d be doing either. He was improvising by the minute. Letting life happen to him. That attitude was different from anything I’d ever known, and it was pushing me to see the world in a freer, less rigid way.
Maybe that was one of the reasons why I found him so special. So different. He was the opposite of everything I was. Everything I knew. And I wanted to try to be a little more like that.
So I squeezed his hand and let him drag me along and share hisspontaneity with me. I decided I would let things happen, even if I didn’t know what the hell that meant.
I felt alive.
For the first time in my life, I felt connected to something.
To someone.
22
Broken. I don’t like that word when it’s applied to a person. It’s so cutting, because not everything broken can be repaired. I prefer incomplete, I prefer to say something’s missing. And if whatever that is can’t be found, maybe you can replace it with something else that’s even better.
I like thinking we’re like a puzzle in a box, a bunch of pieces waiting for someone to help fit everything together. That person can move us, try us out in one place, turn us upside down, until they help us connect with the other pieces and create a new, complete image. And some people are even capable of making new pieces to replace the ones that are missing.
Before I met Lucas, all I could see were the scattered parts of myself, as if I were being reflected in a cracked mirror. With him I learned that words may say one thing, our mind may say another, but it’s what our body feels that really matters. The body can’t lie. It reflects what we desire. Impulses shake it. Sensations make it move.
I learned with him that you have to let your emotions take hold of you. Feel them. Even if they hurt, even if they scare us. Because when all of them come together, that’s what we are. They give us shape,draw us with our lights and shadows, show us from different angles in all our dimensions.
He taught me that there are journeys without a destination.
That the destination is itself a journey.
With no map, no compass, no stars to guide us.
Because the route doesn’t matter.
It doesn’t matter whether you’re going nowhere.
In the end, where you end up is always where you belong.
Your destiny. Your destination.
23
Lucas took me to a pub on Corso Italia, the main street in Sorrento. It was a small, picturesque place called Banana Split. We took a table outside.
“What do you feel like having?” he asked.
“What are my options?” I replied.
Lucas pointed to the wall where there was a huge board with the drink menu. I couldn’t believe how many they offered. I read attentively until I reached the section called SEXY DRINKS. I felt as shy as a little girl as I read: Golden Dream, Sex on the Beach, Against the Wall with a Kiss, Orgasm, White Lady, Sixty-Nine. I burst out laughing and couldn’t stop. I’d been nervous for days and I was finally exploding. And it was liberating, letting all that tension go.
When I regained my composure, more or less, because I was still giggling—a little like the aftershocks of an earthquake—I said I was sorry.
“Don’t apologize for my sake,” Lucas responded. “I think it’s great.”
“What, seeing me acting hysterical?”
“Oh, whatever. You’ve got to loosen up. I’m serious.”
