SUMMARY
Michele finds himself alone one suspended summer, caught between the silence of his flat and the weight of a past he's tried to forget. His days drift by in the same repeated rituals, alongside a quiet longing for some sign to pull him out of his own inertia. But when an unexpected knock breaks the stillness, the past takes shape in the figure of Andrea — the man he once loved and let go.
Blues for Lost Things is a bittersweet tale about missed chances, and above all about the loves we didn't fight hard enough for — the kind that teach us never to take someone for granted again.
DATA
- Genre: LGBTQIA+, Literary Fiction
- Published: 14 February 2021
- Format: ePub, PDF
- Language: Italian
- Word Count: about 2,000
- CW: Emotional Isolation
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Few words about it
There is a particular kind of silence that settles into a home once someone has left it — not the silence of emptiness, but of things deliberately left untouched: a chair never moved, a lightbulb never replaced, a record never played again. Blues to the Lost opens inside that silence, on the last night of a solitary August, when the narrator's carefully maintained stillness is interrupted by an impossible visitor.
Through a quiet, sensory precision — the smell of aftershave, the flicker of a dying lamp, the ache of a song once refused — the story explores how grief can disguise itself as self-sufficiency, and how love, when it frightens us, can curdle into a performed indifference we mistake for freedom. Michele's apartment, frozen in the exact configuration Andrea left it in, becomes a kind of shrine to avoidance: he cannot bear to change anything, and yet he has let the very light go out of the place, unwilling to admit that darkness was ever a choice rather than a fate.
What unfolds between Michele and Andrea that night is less a ghost story than an act of reckoning. Andrea's return is gentle, almost apologetic, the visit of someone who was always more generous with tenderness than Michele allowed himself to be in return. Through him, the story revisits the small, ordinary betrayals that quietly end relationships: the refused dance, the deflected gift, the door closed on a partner's sorrow. These moments, so easy to dismiss as minor, are often where love is actually lost: not in a single dramatic rupture, but in a hundred small refusals to be truly seen, or to truly see someone else.