He wore north-facing shoes

I watched him walk away down that sagging street with the brilliant sun. His person pulled upon the sky, tied by string to the dying sun, dragging its rays behind his back and casting a shadow above my shoulders. He reached the corner at the instant of dusk, on that Milanese street with the tired buildings, the smell of baking pavement, the sweat between my toes- plastic sandals, his wiry frame and russet skin but a distant mark, swimming on the surface of my eye- smaller and smaller still. I uttered a promise, a knot of which both strength and desperation were evenly tied, but it fell from my lips like a bird without wings, colliding with the pavement at my feet. Its polite death sounded as he turned on his heel, disappeared around the corner and out of my life.

It wasn’t until the summer of '98, that I found myself, once again on that sagging street with the brilliant sun. I remembered how I stood there, my friend beside me- my head underwater. She nattered in my ear as if time hadn’t stopped and the sun was still shining and the grass was still green. Her voiced drummed, punched at my cheek, pressed upon the soggy fabric of my brain. I remember taking a shallow breath, trying to stop the water from gushing down my throat. I’d write about you some day, I thought. Some day your light will dance across the pages on my desk, your light will shine amongst the hearts of readers-maybe throughout the world.

I looked down at the train ticket in my hand. In soft grey, I calculated only one hour left before its expiry. The journey here had been long, but not long enough to bother me. I was happy to be back in the country of romance, food and well-dressed women.

What can be said of an event that was never documented? A moment in time seen by only three witnesses; my friend, the man and myself. I, left feeling the burn of the pavement on my thighs, wondering how the world had suddenly become so fragmented and slow, and how long it would be until I could once again breathe.

I’d returned to find my answers- to fill in the blank spaces in my diary where the muscle in my chest had taken over, where every beat was like the sun’s rays on that heavy July day, pushing on my shoulders and weighing down my legs. The moment when my mind lost control and every second became a separated event, broken by a hazy blackness, as if someone were to capture frame after frame, his north-facing shoes, slapping the pavement to the rhythm of my heart.