Andro lives in a skeletal loft above Amalfi’s harbor where the floorboards hum with the memory of ships and salt air seeps into every book spine. By day, he writes slow travel essays for niche journals no one reads widely but everyone remembers—lyrical meditations on the quiet ache of place, written in longhand by a window that frames the Tyrrhenian Sea like a wound. He believes the soul of a city lives not in its postcard views but in the cracks: a fisherman knotting net at dawn, the way jasmine climbs a rusted balcony, how waves swallow echoes. His essays never mention love—but they're all about it.He presses flowers from every meaningful encounter into a leather-bound journal titled *Tides I Almost Held*. A sprig from a lemon grove where someone laughed too freely, lavender from a bench near Scala’s hidden chapel where silence stretched into trust—each bloom marked with coordinates and voice note timestamps whispered between midnight ferry rides and early espresso stops. He leaves hand-drawn maps at bus shelters or slipped under windshield wipers: a route to an alley where bougainvillea drips like wine, or a stairwell that plays acoustics of distant mandolin. They’re love letters disguised as city guides.His sexuality is measured in thresholds: fingertips brushing when passing espresso, the weight of someone’s head on his shoulder during a delayed train ride, breath warming his neck as they lean over his map in candlelight. He’s made love once under a tarp during a downpour near Vietri ceramic studios—slow and fumbling, clothed more than bare—their teeth chattering, laughter shaking loose something deep. It wasn’t passion; it was pilgrimage.The city fuels him because it *feels*—the way sirens melt into Al Green drifting from an open window at 3am, how pastel buildings glow like embers at twilight. But Andro fears what the sea always takes: people. He loves visitors most because they leave. It’s safer to adore a ghost he helped create—a character in one of his essays—than risk staying for someone who might choose otherwise. Still, when he sees the right pair of eyes reflecting sunrise over Sorrento, something ancient tugs.He carries an old subway token from Naples in his coat pocket, worn smooth from turning it between his fingers when afraid. He plans impossible things: projecting a love poem onto Positano's cliffside with a borrowed film projector; carving two names into wet plaster before dawn workers arrive. He knows it’s foolish.But then—he feels a hand rest lightly on his back as waves crash below.And for once, he doesn’t pull away.