"...I inhale the scent of the stranger, which rises from his shirt. I love this smell. 'I love Fernando,' I tell myself and the fire. I am bewildered by this fresh new fact of my life, more from the swiftness of its coming than by its truth. I search for some sense of folie a deux. I find none. Rather than being love-blinded, it is in love that I can see, really see.
Never was there even a flickering sense of my having been beckoned up onto a white horse by a curly-haired swain, by the man-who-would-be-king, my one-and-only-meant-to-be-mine. I never felt the earth crack open. Never. What I felt, what I feel, is quiet. Except for those first hours together in Venice, there has been no confusion, no confounding, none of the measuring and considering one might think to be natural for a woman up to her knees in middle age who thinks to jump the moat. Now all the doors are open, and there is warm yellow light behind them. This does not feel like a new perspective but the first and only perspective that has ever belonged only to me, the first perspective that has been neither compromised or redrawn. Fernando is a first choice. I never had to talk myself into loving him, to balance out his merits and defects on a yellow pad. Nor did I have to, once again, remind myself that I wasn't getting any younger, that I should be grateful for the attentions of yet another 'very nice man'."
by Marlena de Blasi in "A Thousand Days in Venice"
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