EPISODE 1 - THE DAY WHEN TIME STOOD STILL
- Enzo
- Dec 22, 2025
- 5 min read
Updated: Dec 29, 2025
SONG
LYRICS
I came back home from far away,
To where my granny used to stay.
The fields were dry, the air was mild,
The earth remembered me, its child.
The stones were breathing in the heat,
and then I saw him on the street,
and I felt suddenly so incomplete
so empty, so unfullfilled,
He’s the calm inside the fire,
A god of flesh, power and desire.
I break inside, I need to heal
since the day when time stood still.
A cat curled close beside his knee,
His laugh was low, it silenced me.
He petted the cat and asked her,
“Hey bella, who are you down there?”
I wished to be that creature small,
That lived beneath his warmth’s recall.
To breathe where all his shadows meet,
To lose myself close at his feet.
He’s the calm inside the fire,
A god of flesh, power and desire.
I break inside, I need to heal
since the day when time stood still.
I knelt to stroke the cat — a guise,
An alibi for trembling thighs.
I stayed beneath his quiet grace,
And knew I’d found my rightful place.
STORY
EPISODE 1 - THE DAY WHEN TIME STOOD STILL
When, after almost five years, I set foot on Sicilian soil again, the air smelled different from how I remembered it. Riper. Heavier. Like the last warmth of a summer that refuses to give way to autumn.
The wind brushed warm across my skin, carrying specks of dust and the scent of olives, and somewhere in the distance I heard the deep echo of Etna — an ancient, slow breathing that instantly threw me back into my childhood.
I was nineteen, and yet I felt older than I should have.
New York hadn’t changed me — it had only exhausted me.
Too loud, too fast, too full of things one could buy but that held no meaning.
Too little earth under my feet. Too little sky that felt like it belonged to me.
I had come back because my grandparents had died — first my Nonno Giuseppe, then a few months later my Nonna Angela — and someone had to tend the fields.
The olive groves they had cared for over decades stood neglected when I returned. Too many birds had eaten the harvest; too few hands had gathered it. I had picked the few olives that remained and sold them to a local oil producer. The income was small. But together with the money my parents sent from America, it would allow me to live. Barely, but freely.
My parents stayed in New York, determined to chase their American dream.
But mine lay here.
Under this sun. In this soil. In this village that—even despite everything—was home.
The village had just under a thousand inhabitants — too big to know everyone, but too small to remain anonymous.
It was called Sant’Alfio.
The main street was dusty and full of voices; children ran around, women leaned out their windows with the watchful gaze only Sicilian women possess. The men played cards in the evenings on the village square, smoking and discussing loudly.
Everything was familiar.
Everything was unchanged.
Only I was no longer the same.
I had settled into my parents’ house, which now belonged solely to me. It lay in the center, on Via Francesco Crispi — where even in the evenings, voices still lingered beneath the windows.
The work in the fields was manageable — too manageable. Often I didn’t know in the mornings what to do with my hands when the few trees required no tending.
That afternoon, I decided to go to my grandparents’ house for the first time in months. It stood farther up, on the edge of the village, on Via Nucifori — quieter, airier, closer to open views than to noise.
I didn’t know exactly why. Maybe because eventually one can no longer avoid memory.
Maybe because I finally had the strength to open the doors and breathe in the scent of their past.
The stones of the alley burned beneath my sandals. Cicadas hummed, a dog barked, dishes clattered somewhere. The sun hung lower now, glowing golden above the rooftops, when I turned the final corner — and saw him for the first time.
Wow, what a man.
He was in the half-shade in front of my grandparents’ house.
A black cat lay curled at his feet as he stroked her. This man was the first thing in months that took my breath away.
He looked as though he were one of those Greek statues, carved from stone yet alive: broad shoulders, a strong back, arms that spoke of labor. His upper body was bare; muscular. Powerful. A thin veil of dust lay upon his skin. His trousers were loose, beige, in the style of the field workers and fishermen who lived here. His calves were strikingly strong. And around his ankle shimmered a slender golden chain that caught the light like a warning or a promise. Unusual — but it looked like a deliberate statement.
The glint drew my eyes to his bare feet. They stood firmly in the dust — large, earthy, grounded.
The cat nuzzled his ankle as if she belonged there.
I stopped. Didn’t move.
Something in me felt as if I was interrupting a moment that should not be disturbed.
Then I heard his voice.
Deep. Rough. Warm.
Like an instrument played only in summer.
“Hey, bella,” he murmured to the cat. “Who are you really? Maybe I should give you a name… you keep coming back to my feet. Maybe you like me.”
He laughed softly — a laugh I felt rather than heard.
The cat purred.
And for a moment, I wished I were her.
When I finally found the courage to move forward, the stones under my sandals crunched treacherously loud.
Giorgio looked up — and stood. He looked at me. His face was unbelievably beautiful. Masculine. He wore a beard and was bald. He was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.
My heart pounded. I said “Ciao,” and too nervous to keep looking into his eyes, I crouched down in front of him and pretended to be interested in the cat at his feet. But it was only an alibi. A cover for the soft knees he gave me. And there I was, before him, staring at his feet.
In that exact moment — in the dust, in the warm light, kneeling before him — something in me shifted.
The world around me faded, as if someone had closed a door: the calls from the village, the hum of the cicadas, even the distant rumbling of Etna.
All that remained were my breath and his presence.
He stood before me, tall, steady, like a rock in the heat — and yet a force burned inside him that one didn’t need to see to feel.
He was calm within fire, a silence that was not empty but immense.
A man shaped by earth and sun, so effortlessly strong that my own being felt transparent beside him.
And something broke open in me.
A hunger I had never named.
A desire that didn’t come from my body but from something deeper.
A desire to serve him.
To carry him when he was tired.
To be his shadow when the sun grew too hot.
The ground he could stand on.
I, who had so often felt empty, without purpose, without direction — suddenly felt meaning.
Not because he demanded anything, but because his mere presence filled me and hollowed me out at the same time.
Like a leaf in the wind that does not choose, but follows because it must.
He was the force.
I was the movement.
And in this realization there was no pain — only release.
So there I knelt — supposedly because of the cat — but in truth because my body had already understood what my mind was only beginning to grasp:
Time stood still.
I stood still.
And there was only one thing left in me — the burning, quiet wish:
To be with him.
To be before him.
To belong to him.
