Bellinzona — Bellano: 73 km

I cross the border from Switzerland into Italy, I pass the emerald water of Lake Lugano, take a ferry From Menaggio to Varenna, cycle 8 more kilometres and there she is, the girl I’ve been waiting so see.

She’s expecting me at the foot of the ancient stairs chiselled into the rocks of the mountain her parents own a house at, wrapped in a towel over her swimsuit. She looks like summer. She looks like summer in Italy. Like summer in Italy at lake Como. The water still in her hair makes it an even darker brown, her green-blue eyes stand out even more. We hug, we kiss. It’s a cliché, but it feels like we’ve done that yesterday, and at the same time it feels like we haven’t seen each other in six months.

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Us meeting was planned, of course. It was somewhat luck that we would be in Italy around the same time, but we’ve planned to see each other. Merit has been my main destination these past two weeks. My first stop, first anker, and – other than the reasons for this trip I’ve described in earlier stories – a reason to keep the wheels turning. Now I’m here. A not so along awaited reuniting of what was supposed to be a week, but turned into ten days, of absolute fun.

Merit and I have been dating for about a year now back home in The Netherlands. We never really gave our relationship a name. My search of freedom and fear of losing independency seeps into my behaviour when it comes to love and dating. Her reaction, naturally, was to keep a certain emotional distance. Don’t get me wrong, we’ve been dating seriously, but just never taken ‘the extra step’. It accumulates to us fighting 3 nights in a row, about the most stupid and mundane things. It’s strange because we didn’t have a single fight in the year we’ve been seeing each other back home. Maybe we fight because we realise this is our last time together, in this form at least, whatever that form may be. We’re on a clock, and that makes everything unconsciously a little more tense. Even though we fight about nothing, we also express ourselves about serious feelings. In the end it frees us up and creates some clarity, at least for me it does.

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Merit is wondrously beautiful, but Lake Como is also not bad. Fig trees heavy with ripe fruit grow in every place imaginable (we will make jam out of them later in the week), wild flowers bloom through the cracks in the walls made of rocks found nearby, rosemary, mint, oregano and thyme are seemingly weeds here, the small villages feel sleepy in the unforgiving Italian summer sun, and everything happens on the backdrop of the quietly rippling lake. Her parents welcome me as if I’ve been part of the family forever. Their pace is big, with a garden made up from ridges and levels, and we spend our time in an almost bungalow-like little house next to the main house. When we’re home, we spend our days on the terrace, having coffee, cigarettes, breakfast and beers, looking out over the Alps with the water in between, a view that provides a panoramic theatre of clouds, sunrays and sailboats.

Our ten days we fill with drinking, eating, climbing, swimming, laughing, cooking, visiting the nearby towns, spending a night in Milan, going on a sightseeing train to Switzerland (that I pass out on due to hight sickness), exploring, and drinking and eating again. The day-to-day I will spare you, but I hope you get the gist that these couple of days feel like magic, in what is already a magical trip.