I’m sitting in a restaurant in Marettimo, an island off the west coast of Sicily. I’m sipping on some granita which a sympathetic-looking waitress offered me (presumably because I’m the only single guest here) as I try to digest another pasta-heavy meal, the lingering flavours of anchovy and lemon clinging to my tongue. It’s humid, and I’m sitting by the window facing out to the sea to cool down. The sun set a few hours ago. If it were day, a clear day, you could look straight ahead on the horizon and see the island of Favignana.
It’s five years to the day since I first visited Favignana. Every year since, I’ve been chasing to find some of the romance I felt there. Some trips, some places, remain etched in your memory as something barely real, almost mystical, such was their impact.
Favignana, with its towering cliffs and its marine blue waters, feels like someone’s abandoned idea of paradise. For all the bustling of the town centre, there are miles of empty land, some for crops, others dotted with the ruins of farmhouses. Most of the island lies still, waiting to be awakened by a downpour of rain. In late September, it is a slow, tranquil place.
In 2020, I matched with a woman on a dating app. I thought she was so beautiful, a bit quirky, and, crucially, passionate. Politically passionate, but also presented herself as someone who cries at the sight of a granddad playing with his grandson.
I had spent much of the previous year processing my first heartbreak, and most of the early months of lockdown surrounded by housemates who were falling in love with their own partners who they had met shortly before the country shut down.
In a spontaneous turn, I accepted her frankly ludicrous idea of flying to Sicily to meet her for our first date.
She had recently broken up with her ex, and, taking advantage of her job’s remote work policy, had decided to work from Sicily for a month. We briefly discussed sharing hotel bedrooms (I vaguely planned an alternative plan if things went south), and I got on the plane.
We met in Palermo. Busy, crazy Palermo. For all the calm of the Aegadian islands, Palermo’s streets are an ever-awake, ever-mad whirlpool of happenings. We met outside the hotel, where she hurriedly parked my bag behind the desk and led me down a side street to what had fast become her favourite restaurant.
It was a movie romance that took place between that night and, a few days later, as we were cycling across Favignana. We played the roles of people whisked up in love. People who held hands through the streets of Trapani, who leaned on each other’s shoulders on a bus across the Sicilian coast, who cuddled, and kissed as a delicate breeze gently blew the curtain hanging over the open window.
I remember that breeze. It was a quiet reminder, as I sat there so in love with this short story I was part of, that it was still just a story, and that reality was probably quite a bit different.
Because thoughts had already begun creeping quietly through my mind. Thoughts about how I wasn’t sounding that much like myself. Thoughts that lingered on those microseconds that we did not communicate properly. Like a peek behind the scenes of the performance.
One day, as we were cycling back to our hotel along the coast, that breeze blew my open shirt back and my hair out behind me, and she, in a purple silk top, was cycling so elegantly in front of me. I looked over at the sea.
The water was a shade of blue that I couldn’t remember seeing before, and the waves crashed against the shore so dramatically, glowing almost. You couldn’t hear anything but those waves, the wind hitting me across my face and the tires of our bikes spinning across the ground, dust flying up behind us as we rode along the path.
I remember looking at her as she cycled, the endless Mediterranean Sea to her right. The whole scene felt so tranquil, so idyllic, it almost didn’t feel real. She cycled ahead with such ease, barely breaking a sweat, that I found myself unsure if she was real either.
Later, once it was dark, we would be sitting down in a restaurant, and I would be looking down at the menu, trying to care about what I was reading. My eyes were outside, observing us from another table, like a snapshot of a moment I didn’t quite belong in.
Anything on that menu would do, everything on that island tasted so distinctively perfect. The pesto, the wine, her lips. I could feel the late September sun sitting so comfortably on my skin.
But I remember her eyes looking past me as she spoke that night, and her hand reaching out to mine, clasping it as if we knew each other, as if we had all these shared stories that had led up to us cycling together across an island during a Sicilian summer like a scene from a film.
I could have spent months in that dream. Those days felt so special. Days and snapshots like that just didn’t happen to me. But even then, it didn’t feel like my hand that she was holding. As the days went on, I began to realise how little we actually spoke, how few subjects we covered outside our daily plans. We were often passively romantic, dream-like, where every touch felt fantastical.
So intoxicated by that dream, I leaned into it. I leaned into it more as we flew back to London together. We said we’d continue to date, and we did. We even had the ‘exclusive’ conversation for the first (and as it turns out, only) time in my life.
But, in the cold grey of London, we never managed to grow into anything beyond the story of two people who met in Sicily for a first date. The more I tried to develop our relationship, the more I was worried about letting that dream go, all while she retreated further and further away.
One day, she returned to Australia. We spoke via text and agreed to end our relationship. We have barely spoken since.
I quietly mourned that experience, in the same way that we mourn the loss of a good dream after waking up. I found myself regularly drifting back to questioning why I could not continue that version of me with the open shirt, sitting on a boat in Favignana, with her sleeping head on my chest. Or at least grasp the same rush of excitement I felt in those first few days.
A year later, I decided to go back to Sicily, to the quiet and remote island of Ustica, north of Palermo. I knew I couldn’t replicate the romance of my first trip, but I hoped that there was a magic in Sicily itself which at least formed part of my long infatuation with that memory.
It took that second visit for me to realise that what I had felt love and wonderment for during that first trip was not only to her, but also to a reminder of home, a version of myself that felt most alive under the Sicilian sun. If intimacy and romance can bring a sense of belonging, so can a familiar sense of home.
My family are culturally all over the place, but my mum’s French identity was perhaps the most dominant culture in our home. From the food we ate to the visits to my grandparents in the south of France, there was a deep sense of Mediterranean identity that existed in the air as I grew up.
The slow lifestyle, the heat, the sizzling smell of garlic in olive oil, so much of Favignana reminded me of the home my family was built in but had almost lost through the generations, keeping it alive through language, cooking, holidays and memories.
For people with mixed identity, finding the part of you that makes the most sense in your understanding of who you are and holding onto it is a familiar feeling. I decided to cling to that feeling I got from Sicily. I went back. Then I went back again. And again. And again.
As I navigated the difficulties of a London life and career, that September 2020 trip gave me the thing that keeps me going today. It was a reminder that I can jump onto a cheap plane once or twice a year, and live in the shoes of that part of me that I like the most.
From the sadness of a romance that wasn’t, I discovered a love that is more stable, more sustainable, and, crucially, something that is true.
I never did learn her side of the story. Sometimes I wonder if she also sensed that we were performing a level of intimacy. Or if that is what she wanted: a quiet space to be hugged by and share a drink with someone. Or it could have been barely anything at all.
For me, it’s gone from a sad, confusing memory, to the opening line in a new chapter of my adult life.
I’m flying home tomorrow, and the breeze will hit differently in London. I’ve gone for a walk along these streets walled by white and blue houses in Marettimo. Every espresso bar I pass is full of a calm, joyful energy from dawn to dusk. Kids are scooting around. The palms are swaying, and the sound of the waves crashing against the rocks is soothing.
It’s a different island, but somehow, it still feels like home.