Hollow in Italy

Vivi moved her flight up to come be with me. The day she landed, Amalfi was postcard-clear; she rolled her suitcase out of the station and threw her arms wide: "Sisters! The Mediterranean! Our gap month!"

Then she got a good look at my face, and the arms came slowly down. "...Talk."

I talked. From the rerouted flight to the door, from not a good time to the light going out on the second floor. When I finished, she was silent a long while, then said the sentence I'd been waiting the whole trip to hear: "If he really has someone else, the man needs his eyes checked." Then she added the sentence I hadn't been waiting for: "But A-Dai, something's off. A man with someone else replies slower and slower. This one cut you off clean, in one stroke. That's not a wandering heart. That's withdrawal — like quitting something cold."

I told her to stop building his defense. She said fine, fine, no defense — let's eat.

Italy takes curing heartbreak seriously. Vivi takes it professionally: she aimed the entire firepower of a Guangzhou appetite at the Amalfi coast, structured each day around three meals, and classified all sightseeing as digestion between them. Lemon groves, cliffs, a sea so blue it wasn't reasonable. She held up an artisanal gelato and pronounced: "Look at this. 正 to the point of tears."

It was all lovely. Truly all of it.

And I moved through those days like there was a pane of frosted glass between me and them. The food was fragrant, the sea was blue, the laughing was real laughing — and it all landed in my stomach as the same substance: hollowness. That particular hollowness of everything is right, and it's not right. I seriously entertained the theory that I was being precious about my feelings — until my body joined the conversation.

Fatigue first. Ten hours of sleep and still tired; three steps of stairs like three flights. Then the flutters of panic, sourceless, mostly in the small hours. One afternoon in Positano I went cold standing in full sun — cold seeping outward from inside the bones. Vivi wrapped her shawl around me and felt my forehead. No fever.

"How long has this been going on?"

"A while," I said. "Probably just tired."

The dreams, meanwhile, were the opposite of hollow. The dreams were more real than the days — which was the frightening part. The hospital corridor came back, longer each time: I could read the Dutch on the wall signs now; I could hear the coughing behind the door. New ones, too: the back of a hand with an IV line in it, veins and spots; a curtain drawn in daytime; the taste of medicine — the dream had taste now — bitter, cut with mint.

Mint.

One night I woke at some black hour and sat up, heart slamming. Vivi slept soundly in the other bed. I picked up my phone and searched — possessed, again — for the thing he'd swallowed at the edge of the flower field. What kind of drug comes as a small white tablet, lives in a tin, tastes of mint.

There were many results. I scrolled them one by one, and my hands got colder with each screen.

At breakfast Vivi studied my eye bags, pushed her coffee across to me, and said, out of nowhere: "Go back."

"Back where?"

"Home," she said. "A-Dai, this is not a state you can vacation your way out of. Things with your mom are frozen, your body's doing this, the dreams are doing that — listen to me once. Go back to Hangzhou. Put your roots in some soil. Then decide where to fly." A beat. "Don't worry about me, la. I will thrive alone in Italy. I already have espresso scheduled with the leather-shop owner in Florence. His name is Matteo."

I laughed — the first laugh in weeks that reached my eyes. "Fast work."

"Eat in Guangzhou," she said with dignity, "love in Tuscany."

Italy had everything right: the sea was right, the food was right, the friend was right.

Only my dreams were wrong — filing nightly status reports on the health of a man who refused to see me.