He never made it to Florence.

Not in the way you both once whispered about in the early mornings, when your heads shared the same pillow and the sky outside was the color of pressed lavender. He never stood at the foot of Brunelleschi’s dome with you, never drank wine beneath the slanting Tuscan sun, never mispronounced Italian in restaurants that smelled of rosemary and old wood.

But the dream—that lived longer than his breath did.

You kept the itinerary in a drawer by your bedside. Folded. Annotated. Stained in one corner from the blood-orange juice you were drinking when he first scribbled “Venice: gondola or death” in his slanted, poet’s scrawl. Beneath that, in finer ink: Paris. Just you, me, and the ghosts of Hemingway’s bad behavior.

It had all begun on a Tuesday in March, in his flat that always smelled faintly of bergamot and dust. He was sitting on the floor surrounded by crumpled brochures and secondhand books with titles like “Train Journeys Through the Continent” and “The Essential Backpacker’s Guide to Vienna”. His legs were crossed, his sweater too loose on his frame, collarbone visible like a cracked horizon line. There was a kind of fever to him that day—but not the kind that needed a doctor. The kind that needed hope.

“We’ll start in Amsterdam,” he had said, eyes alight, tapping a map with a pencil. “Because nothing says romance like bicycles and existentialism.”

You laughed—genuinely, the kind that escaped without your permission. He looked up, triumphant.

“Then Brussels. Bruges. We’ll get fat on chocolate. Then on to Paris—because of course we’ll fight in Paris, that’s what lovers do.”

He was already writing the story before it existed. Spinning narrative out of nothing but maps and breath and time he didn’t have. His illness had not yet folded him inward. His fingers still looked like they belonged to a pianist, not a patient. His cheeks still carried color, though you’d started to notice how tired he became by noon.

“Will you take pictures of me looking mysterious at the Luxembourg Gardens?” he asked. “And weep discreetly at the Musée d’Orsay?” ‎ ‎ ‎