What He Couldn't Say - Carol Arnold

The words were simple enough, only five of them, all but one only one syllable, but strung together they were so complicated it hurt my brain just to say them in my head. How could I possibly say them aloud?

We had only three days this trip, and since neither of us had been to Italy before we decided to drive the whole country in one fell swoop. I am a romantic by nature, and what could be more so than driving the back roads of Italy tip to toe? It’s long and narrow as countries go, giving us plenty of time to talk. But we didn’t. We spent the drive staring out our respective windows, her’s the back left, mine the back right, both of us absorbed in our own scenery, none of which had anything to do with the landscape outside.

There we were in the most boisterous of countries, and the car was like a tomb. Paulo too seemed to be the silent type, our driver possibly the only such person in the entire country. Everyone else, the shopkeepers and hotel clerks, the waiters and policemen, all of them spoke volumes at the loudest pitch, all the while waving their arms around in great dramatic circles. It occurred to me that maybe that was how I should say the words, at the top of my lungs, waving my arms like a conductor leading the Philharmonic.

We made it all the way down to the tip of the boot, spending the night in a small house near the sea. The owner rented out one room, a tiny square of ancient stucco and tile, a yellow-paned window overlooking the surf-swept beach.

In the end, I never did say the words. I wrote them, accidentally. I had been staring out the window at a teenage girl, her face both happy and brooding in the way only Italian women can manage. She was negotiating a small herd of goats down to the water’s edge. Why she was doing this I don’t know, but the goats seemed to enjoy it, tripping in and out of the shallows like playful children.

A pad of pink notepaper and a pen were lying on the little table I was leaning on. As I squinted out at that flat blue horizon, I began to doodle and when I looked down I saw them. There they were, the words I couldn’t speak, written in fancy cursive with curly-cues endings, the words that made my brain hurt, the words that could destroy my life.

I don’t love you anymore.

The next morning we drove to Rome to catch our plane. She never did see it, the note. I crumpled it up and threw it in the wastebasket. True to form, I left it to find its home in some landfill on a wind-swept terrace overlooking the Mediterranean Sea, a romantic to the end.