The Words You Would Never Say - #StorieDiVino Contest

La casa in pochi minuti si svuotò dagli amici, poco importava, importava che tra loro c'era anche lui.

A few minutes passed before the doorbell rang. It was him, he had forgotten his phone. In that moment I felt a sensation that, photographically, could be compared to the face of those die-hard fans when their favorite team scores, or, even worse, to the look of someone who finds themselves holding the winning lottery ticket. Yes, exactly somewhere between wonder and the panic of disbelief. In short, with my usual clumsiness I left him there, on the doorstep, taking a few minutes to come back to my senses and invite him in.

Had the phone been an excuse? Did he want to find himself alone with me? Or was this one of my many short films playing in my head?

Chance, fate, or whatever it was, brought us alone together in that half-furnished house I had recently moved into; I had just had enough time to put up a few small souvenirs, almost all of them connected to him. That sweatshirt on my bed, the one he had draped over my cold shoulders there on the gangway of the ship taking us to Corfù (our first vacation together), that mug bought together at Gardaland, a photo collage of all the places we had visited together – in short, the clues were not lacking.

In that moment embarrassment was the master of the house and I was already agitated, afraid that he might, precisely on that occasion, put together the pieces of that million-piece puzzle, just when I was anything but ready (when would I ever be?).

Not knowing what to do, I noticed a bottle of wine given to me by a dear couple of friends and, without much hesitation, I grabbed two glasses from the moving boxes, washed them, and handed them to him. We sat down on the sofa. He seemed so focused on uncorking that bottle of Lacryma Christi rosso, or perhaps, just like me, he was too embarrassed and was trying to shift his attention elsewhere. As the bowls of the glasses filled with that full-bodied red, he told me about the various legends surrounding that wine, among them the one evocatively retold by the great French poet Alfred de Musset, which tells of the angel Lucifer, who after being cast out of Paradise had stolen a piece of it to create the Gulf of Naples on earth. Jesus, having noticed the theft, wept bitterly, and from his tears the vine of Vesuvio was born. I was captivated by his story, or perhaps simply lost in those hazel eyes of his – strangely, I found myself at a loss for words.

It was hard to resist a second round of that red, so fresh and soft on the palate, even though for a non-drinker like me it was quite a gamble.

I began to feel so relaxed and happy, I felt all those fences of embarrassment – until then firmly fixed in my life – come tumbling down, as if that river of Vesuvian red had knocked them all over and uprooted them entirely. He, a little awkwardly, moved closer to me, brushed my long dark hair, and there I could not hold back from whispering to him that I had loved him my whole life. The glances between us allowed our souls to latch onto one another, just as our bodies did that evening.

There are things you would not say even under torture, there are thoughts and secrets you would not reveal even to a priest in confession, and perhaps you would not even repeat them to yourself more than once for fear that some thought might become a word. That evening it was not like that for us, because this rule, for a person in love or a non-drinker in the company of a good glass of wine, obviously does not apply.