“I just can’t. I don’t mean to be cryptic.” I put my elbows on my knees and pressed my fingers to my temples. “I can’t believe this is happening here.”

“Well, sometimes, they say that when your addiction finds you in treatment, it’s your higher power forcing you toward something you don’t want to face.” I tried not to remark on the mention of a higher power, which I’d regretted doing the first time. “Let me ask, do these people that you ‘fall for’”—she made air quotes—“all have something in common?”

“What do you mean by ‘in common’?” I asked.

“You know, like it’s guys with dark hair, or guys with glasses, or something like that?”

•

When I got off the train in Florence from Paris via Turin, I realized I knew almost nothing in Italian. Not even hello. I knew “ti amo,” as Kate had started signing off her emails with it when she returned from her semester abroad, the emails she sent asking if we could still be friends, a request she stopped making after a bar fight and a slap across my face. But that was the only expression I knew.

Why Italy? Kate, for one. I spent most of the semester Kate was abroad in my room, listening to Kind of Blue and feeling sorry for myself, wondering how many Italians she had slept with so far. Eventually I broke into her email and found out: all of them. I became enamored with the place, thinking that by experiencing it for myself and taking over a space that seemed to belong to her, I could conquer the pain and eliminate her from my memory. But by the time I graduated and boarded the plane, the pain of Kate had subsided, replaced by another relationship, another heartbreak. Still, I felt an urge to inhabit a new place, to detach myself from anything that felt familiar: the U.S., Jordan, Palestine. Those places all had notes in the margin that proved distracting. In order to think, I needed blank sheets.