we had met in a little seaside town just north of Marseille in the cool summer of 1975. It had been 2 years now and I could barely remember what life felt like before it all. she was a young writer from Sicily, 20 something with eyes that burned with desire and dreams for a life that simmered somewhere in the dark. for some time it was beautiful, long days spent by the water with the cliffs on each side of the beach, hot walks back to the car, her cheeks warm and red in the s

it was as it had to be, the spring of 1993 in the Alps just north of Lake Garda. hot nights and sleepless days, bathing by the Lake as the sun passed gently over the mountains, cool mornings in the Chalet, her bare feet on the floorboards by the fire. carrying her from the bathtub to the bedroom, the way her skin felt pressed against mine, the way her arms wrapped around my neck and she kissed my shoulder. the handsome young knight with his books and his words, the princess w

somewhere in the south of spain was an island forged in the heat of the summer. you could follow the roads north from the city to a small town which sat high above the rocky coastline with dry streets and a towering church. it was called Sóller, the golden city where the afternoons were warm and you felt dizzy in the heat under the white umbrellas that lined the square. you could drink apéritifs in cafes as the night fell and the tram passed through every few minutes carrying

a few hundred miles south of the Austrian border sat a small ski town nestled in the heart of the Italian Alps. the mornings were quiet and cool and you felt clean walking the streets before the sun rose and brought light to the valley. in the spring you could hike from Lago Di Braies to a small Rifugio further up the mountain where you felt warm by the fire and the wind would rise in the evenings with a deep howl from the valley below. on spring days the gravel felt fine und

in the deep south of Italy a small fishing village sat perched on the very edge of the Adriatic Sea. it was the summer of 1994 and a sense of yearning swept across the beach below, in the evenings the horizon would slip into the sea and you felt that in moments like these maybe this really was the edge of the earth. the cliffs seemed to fall away into the blue water below, bodies scattered across the rocks, the water broken every few seconds with people diving from the cliffs

it was as if we had met in past lives, probably in more than one. although we had arrived in the first few days of spring in Paris, the city seemed to whisper to me that we had been here before. it was her first time here and the streets were beginning to shed their coats of thick ice from the winter. she seemed to bring with her enough life to return the colour to the cherry blossoms that ran along the river south towards Montmartre. it didn't take us long to tender our way

the winter had finally set in across Paris and the city was beginning to freeze under blankets of snow. some nights we would watch shadows dance on the walls as the snow fell like feathers and the fire smoked in silence. she would rest against my chest for warmth, falling asleep as the sky bled with midnight and my heart bled with pain. although the time for me to write about the love that I found in the summer was beginning to end, I still felt like there was so much more to

it was the summer of 1973 and the heatwave had fallen across our little island off the coast of Sicily. there were some cliffs just a small drive from Scopello where the bluff was sharp and the water blue. it had been 2 years and I finally felt alive again in the heat of the Italian summer. we spent the days in the shade of beach umbrellas and bookshops where all I ever looked for was copies of Hemingway and anything that resembled you. in the evenings we would drink Sangria

it was just past midnight on the road between Villefranche and Cannes, she rested against me in the back of a black taxi with the windows down and the lights of the Riviera flashing past. her head in my lap, my arm around her waist, her mind on the road. her lips tasted of coconut and lime and flecks of salt from the French sea, her eyes a glassy blue and her cheeks warm. she leant across me with intention, pulling her hair behind her ear, resting her head in my lap with her