19. A Letter Without Destiny
It was summer in its platitude. Turning facedown the colours of our shared afternoon, he hid the pebble. “It is our secret.” It could have been any one of them, grey, blurred by the waves of time pacing up and down. What was anonymous before is now ours, just like kids, awaiting after the sunset to deny the end. The cliff and its green moss ellipse embraced the marine distention, adjacent to the city centre. It was too late for the dusk to offer a warm atmosphere, on whose tepid drapes the heavy day’s thoughts rested. The summer could not brag yellow and rose mantles, the temperature was too arid. There were no adolescent leaves, nothing to be shed on the way to realism, only a few palm trees, never changing, opening the landscape to distract our solitude – which often carries away loud words, and the raindrops remain as after a stormy night in the moods. On the other side, brown clay buildings fumed homogeneity and small romantic houses shaped by the time, facets destroyed by the earthly crises. None of these shelters would have appeased the thirst for knowledge of the inhabitants. Disregarding the history, a life on an island is a constant desire for what is over the sea, dreams overcoming the simmering evenings. Its people are tied in an ancestral sense of belonging, floating in a womb whose motherhood is their myth, undeniable and carnal. The origins. We did not belong to it, if not as a breeze, preluding the Autumn. I could feel it combing my hair, while nervously sitting at his side, stuffing in words to catch his seductive presence playing on my confidence. Reserved, his words, rare and punctual, concealed a life of transgressions, his secrets. The hand repetitively tangling up his ash blonde hair as an expression of his shyness, a gesture in which he seemed to get lost, pausing the thoughts. We had already been together for three days; despite it, I couldn't say much about his life, the August calm sea didn't cease to amaze our senses. That was his season, the summer. He came from Britain, Dover, left behind to give his life to an uncommon twist. Besides that, he was orderly going out and about, but remained in his room most of the time when not in a café; few acquaintances to whom I had already been introduced on the day of my arrival. “Do you like him?” his housemate asked me, her eyebrows frowning, vexed. A sense of vertigo since then took over my sobriety; I was frightened and thence attached.
* * *
One year earlier, a colleague of mine gave me his letter; it was in the room on the bed, left before his departure in the morning. The letter lying on my bed sounds like a sweet ending to a troubled night of misunderstandings, where fleeting attractions made our behaviours childish enough to lose the perceptions of their consequences. Maybe I should have been more direct, expressing without any reserve my interest in a stranger passing through my monotonous life, sitting on the a priori of my feelings, opening up to him as to a friend. Instead, all my friends around me were trying to elude my already obvious interest, while he was playing dumb although aware of it. Nothing came out from that long night, if not a diagnosis of shyness and pride to hinder further conversations. It became complicated. “Did Danny invite you to the pub with us tonight?” – “Yes, but there is a rock concert just two blocks from here, I’d prefer to jump over there. Would you like to come?” – “Well, thank you. I think I’d rather stay in the hostel”. An embarrassed smile from both sides to give a close to a quite avoidable exchange. There was some space, once he left, to think of my rejection; maybe he meant to invite me somewhere else to have the occasion to get to know each other. But the rejection, for me, was in his sentence and not mine. Anxiety never lets us breathe in the moment. I took my jacket and joined my friends at the pub, still angry because of this latest upsetting episode of my flirting immaturity. Therefore, no more thinking, a beer and some chill music to forget again. Hopefully again. The pub was on the last floor of an industrial building accessible from the outer staircase, which spiralled like my current wanderings. I could eavesdrop on the music from the bottom floor. Smoother than a rock concert to pacify with the recent past, it had to be passed. Each step was a little bit more of a distance from the shame. And the next – “Why, didn’t he come?” – the same question, now in my mind, I have asked Corin at the reception. Finally, I got to the door to open the couloir onto another scene. Nobody knew about what happened before, well, besides my friends. Therefore, nothing to be afraid of. A few minutes after my entrance, time taken to acclimatise, I heard a “Hey!” and as a bolt out of the blue, it was him. I nodded at him with spontaneous indifference; there would not have been time to prepare an appropriate reaction. I was surprised, and more confused than earlier. Tenderness arose shortly after, but confronting the unexpected, there was no sign of it. He was sitting on the window case, me taking the opposite way to the counter, to join a friend of mine, Manuel. Turning to the other side, the gasp of my breath: “It was my secret.” There were some familiar faces around me, but spending time chattering with them would have been a waste with the feelings I was going through. Any word would have been a misspelled theme, and a stuttering incapable of transmitting my state of being. Struggling with the disagreement between my will and my capacity, I was instead standing in the middle of the dancefloor, cutting him out of my sight. “Do you want to take some air?” Manuel asked me, perhaps moved by my unusual stillness. Through the exit door, straight away out, to cool down the unexplainable weather. “Do you know what I like about music?” Manuel was an incredibly talented bass player. “It does not require words to live, and you might be thinking that I contradict myself due to the extenuating length of my conversations, but I think it is my personal challenge to find an equivalent in our orderly life. I can assure you, it is a lost cause, but yet it is worth a try”. I do not remember giving any answers to his remarks, neither him waiting for them in his reggae symphony whose starting and ending moments were never clear. And then laughing, laughing, laughing, counterpointing the introspections. He had a strange way of inhabiting space — but in that moment of absence, I couldn’t even recall what that strangeness was. It must have been an entire Marley concert out on the stairs, because I was finally ready to enter to talk to him, although Manuel did his best to distract me from doing so, showing a suspicious interest in some terminological discrepancies between Indian and Indonesian Buddhism, related to what I was reading those days. Anyway, our reciprocal ignorance saved both of us from such a cavillous debate. “Hey Manuel, I'm going inside, what about you?” – “Go ahead, I will come after you”. I opened the door enough to take a glimpse in, immediately closed it, again sat at Manuel's side. “You know what,” I told him. “The music doesn’t matter; groupies never give up.” I didn’t add any explanation. What to say: a train does not wait for you for hours, even if you are the only one with a ticket. Whoever is guiding it will lose hope or think of a destiny joke. He was dancing with another girl. “So, Manuel, what were you about to say? Have you heard of a rock concert a few blocks away from here?” He touched my shoulder and said, “Another time, maybe. Do you want to leave?” We went down through the exit door stairs into the hostel, into a potentially mutual silence, too high for anything more. “Hey, I'll meet you tomorrow morning at breakfast as usual.” – “Of course.” Of course, the day after, the entire hostel were to know about it.
* * *
For about six months I lived in a hostel in Istanbul; it was a way to ignore my boredom and do away with my doubts. However, I cannot remember any ambitions of mine, as the days passed by with each similar to the next. What rather stays in my mind is the joy I felt the first time I went there. I was invited to a traditional wedding on a boat, a crib of exaggerations. Reading coffee cups’ fonds on the table garnished at each entrance. There were no precise hours to welcome guests. Dreamlike colours signed on the hands of the women participating in the Kına, the rite we make before the official ceremony, the bride’s aunt told me. It was a dance whose syncopated rhythms intertwined the heartbeats and the henna red of fertility. Four hours on the Bosphorus: there was food, but no alcohol because the family was conservative. There were some bottles hidden in the wardrobe if you wished to drink, and then it came, the music, whose arrhythmia isn’t alleviated by the river’s waves. Still in my memories are signs of Atatürk’s time in impossible crowded streets and markets. Veils covering women's traits, and colourful lipsticks accentuated their smiles. Eyes following you, often, too much sometimes. The sense of spirituality was one of the reasons why, the following year, I decided to go back to the capital, to pursue a kind of ignorant anthropology and relative tourism. In the sky, the seagulls. This time in which we haven’t yet met. On the terrace I used to sing, out of sight, veiled by the evening lights. Sounds in the air to liberate my anguish, because when the soul escapes others' lives make noises. And mine was crawling away from their weight. Before we met, a note of depression unable to express itself.
* * *
Bundling up the few objects in my luggage to head back to my hometown, his words ran down my mood, a τοίνυν and back forward. A sudden nostalgia steeped in hopes – “You were the one I wanted to talk to” – it was his forgotten letter written for me. Saved as a part of my personal archive of never achieved desires, it became, time after time, a messenger of uncanny emotions. I haven’t let it slip away from my hand while reliving our story in my memory. Because it was the simplest trace of my latest years, an anchor, once back in my room. Too small to contain the experiences that passed through my meagre body, and too tight to give shape to the flows of words donated by the people with whom I had walked to missed rock concerts, empty reggae pubs; or been on a staircase to nowhere only for a smoke; or sat on a repaired grass hill by a mosque in the plain city centre, where tourism could not yet stamp on the frail existence of migrants, daring their life far away from their rooms. Compared to the cold tint of my hometown asperity, I’d prefer banality. Therefore, I had written to him before anybody else who knows me, because I did not want them to end my journey. I was defeated by the sheik of incomprehension, and me, the one supposed to be the centre of unceasing changes, I was disoriented. “There is still somebody I’d like to get to know once I’m back in my country,” I told dear Marjane during our farewell afternoon. “It’s because of his letter, isn’t it? I feel you,” she observed, as she always did. “It isn’t a small gesture; if there is something architecture hasn’t taught me yet, it’s the meaning of this immense art exposition we call life. I encourage you, probably I’d do the same in your place. It cannot be a futile thing” There are moments in life when elements fall into place to compose sentimental stories: drips of immaturity. Ageing is not growing, and the emotional support given to you by a friend to keep on believing, it is as precious as a few lines on paper left on an occasional bed. And so, I wrote him, “I am about to be back”. “Yes, I'd like to see you.” His answer arrived on time.
* * *
It was me at the station, waiting for the train to arrive, drifting into my wandering mind, while the landscapes unwound in front of me. A slow trip, each station a memorable petal in a bouquet of expectations. The cabins were emptied of those voices lost in ancient villages. My journal in my hands as an attempt to prepare and clarify my arrival, but the torpor took over my strength. We are called to determine our own values, even more so when travelling. In the midst of unusual moral, cultural, and political uncertainty, the need to model our identities is as stringent as ever. Trading our preferences, observing the birth of a new family, the chosen one this time. But my considerations were as nimble as the train pace was moderate. The gardens of my native land did not claim the space they were compelling me toward. Lemons, oranges, chaotically dispersed on the soil had nothing of a lost infancy to recall, or probably I was unconsciously ignoring them to keep attached to a memory brought from the most recent part of me into the present. My ring of conjunctions within a fragmented life. I’m not back yet, I am not here. Village after village their veneers impressed my eyes, not giving the time to figure out the entire picture. Evocative and picturesque paintings belonging to unfamiliar people. Still lives glimpsed. Until the last one, the end station where I promised, I’d have wanted to live, to suspend my lonely life, to perpetrate as far as the imagination could go our togetherness, for one day, and the day after too, and the other day too, and also that day after. I wished to see his letter, your letter, as only the beginning of an entire story to invent. No more friends to interrupt the connections to my emotions, or to show me the way out of inhibitions. Nothing special happened during these hours of travelling, I was used to my nervous attitude, but nothing within my souvenirs could suggest to me who to be when your intentions come to life. It was evening and my worries went away into their natural element. You were terribly kind in your decadent elegance. Delicate manners inviting me to recover from afar. My clumsy entrance into your life hid nothing, but probably due to the experience we already had the first time we had met, you decided not to play with it anymore, at least not for the overture onto another stage. Sentimental enough not to dismay my already tired dreams. Your silence did not give me any other chances. But the night, the seashore was awaiting us. At least pathetically I hoped for moments out of the others' range, free from the handshaking of yesterday afternoon, when the scent of an adieu was already in the air, and my rigid flesh responded to your avoidance. Hanged on your introversion, there was a fret of sadness that my memories could not frame. The same one getting stuck in your finger when turning in your hair, abridged unsaid. When the others' moods are difficult to bear, forget the pungent words you had just addressed to me. “I cannot be the one you wish for.” Any stupidities worked out. "Let's play a game; I will not tell you the questions. Give me the answers.” You replied to me yes three times, unfortunate not to be aware of the question: “Is this my place, at your side?” When our noses were upturned staring at the Cassiopeia constellation, knowing more than what we could, as if almost truly replying to my questions, you told me a story. “She left me behind; why should I open again to something new? I have split my life between my needs and her obligations. Back and forth to visit her to prove my love. And you see, I often come on the seashore walking back to this past, which has hooked me to her cynical rejection.” We haven’t seen our tears. We strangers abandoning our loss of appetite for life, inscrutable for the cinder of the ended passions. It was a unique recess in a desert coast, too depleted for anything to grow. We have been in our womb, belonging to a birth coinciding with its death. Our alchemy’s origin hoisted the new day. You were already up, its shadows still on your lineaments, tenebrous and discrete, wearing out your sorrows. Closed up in yourself, you did not say more than that; what I have found instead was another letter in my bag. We never blare out our secrets; neither did you. “I will remember us being free.” – “So, do I.” – "Do not rush to leave straight away, why don’t you stay?" I've hidden the colours of somebody else I met after you, so here our story ends. Our letters had no destinations, and yours no destiny. “I was the one you could not talk to.” A cigarette between your lips, you told me, “Let’s play a game, choose a pebble.” You drew on it our story with invisible temperas before to turn it face down. “It is our secret, a kiss of two mysteries, as deep as it can be the unforeseen.”
This piece was shortlisted for The Varnish Prize for Fiction 2025.
Simona Stefania Chiusolo is an Italian writer who graduated from the Sapienza University in Performing Arts. Her life journey is per sé a quest for knowledge, inspiration, and freedom, whose research unfolds between academic studies and autodidactic practices to explore creativity as originality. She attended the faculty of philosophy at Macerata University and plays with mathematics while performing, painting, travelling, and playing cello. Her writing got mixed with journalism, thanks to a five-year-long collaboration with the review Live Performing&Arts, in which she speculated on gender troubles, discrimination, and racism in the art field. Her article ‘Pearl Primus: Black dance matters’ was a finalist at Dancerewrite, while in 2026, she published her first poetry book, Nocturnes.