(Excerpt )

‍ At the corner near the fountain, the careless poly person from the long-table dinner appeared in full festival scale, louder here, hair tied in a scarf patterned with moons, touching someone’s elbow while kissing someone else’s cheek and telling a third person, “No, no, Mara is not my ex, Mara is my former disaster, which is a warmer category.” A moment later the same voice floated back through the crowd: “Ask Jules, Jules has been one of my people in four different countries.” Easy, unembarrassed, not asking permission from the air.

Emilia caught the line, stored it with no immediate use for it, and then lost the speaker again to color and bodies.

Petra passed in the opposite direction carrying a paper tray of grilled sardines and a plastic fork, talking over her shoulder to an older man about weather windows and diesel filters in German-accented English. “No, because if you think the fuel is clean here, you are a child,” she said, and kept moving.

By the time Emilia looped back toward the square, she had spoken to half a dozen people and been spoken to by twice that many. Not deeply. Not memorably in any one instance. But fully. A joke at a bread stall about loaves shaped like municipal decisions. A conversation with a woman from Crete about tattoos done at sea. A brief serious exchange with someone who was organizing tomorrow’s boat parade and pretending it was not organization because the word frightened festival people. Emilia moved through it the way she moved through rooms on land when the rooms were worth the energy—making contact, asking the question that opened instead of the one that pinned, laughing when there was anything to laugh at and not waiting for someone else to mark the rhythm first.