On Leaving Things Unfinished
There are seventeen notebooks on the shelf above the kitchen table — possibly eighteen, one may have moved to the library — and not one of them is finished. This has never troubled me. A notebook, in my experience, is not finished so much as abandoned at the right moment, which is a different thing.
The library holds several years of abandoned essays: thoughts that began well and ended somewhere unexpected, then were simply left there; observations that seemed important at eight in the morning and considerably less so by noon. I keep them all.
“I have a good system,” I tell Valentina when she looks at the state of things. She has stopped responding to this. We both know the system is not quite real, that the notebooks will stay unfinished, and that this is simply how it is.
August ends the same way. At some point in the last week — the exact date varies — the summer people are simply gone. No farewell, no ceremony. One morning the streets are a little quieter, then quieter still, and then it is only Marisòla again, which is how it prefers to be. The season does not close. It leaves things where they are and moves on, and the town lets it, the way you let go of something you have decided no longer needs fixing.
There is, however, one thing in Marisòla that is never left unfinished. One force that does not permit it.
Nonna Rosalia is nobody’s grandmother in particular and everybody’s in practice; the town has arranged itself around her without ever discussing the matter. She is kind-eyed, quick-tempered, and entirely unchallengeable in the kitchen, where the idea of disagreeing with her has never occurred to anyone. Some time ago she decided that I am too thin. This is not a medical opinion. It is a conviction, and she communicates it without words — through the size of the portions, the size being a matter she alone decides.
I was invited to lunch on a Thursday in August, the kind of invitation here that is not entirely optional. Rosalia made pasta, then fresh fish, then meat, then vegetables that seemed to have been cooking since the previous Tuesday. Bread arrived continuously and without explanation. At some point a dessert appeared that I had neither expected nor any means to refuse.
She watched me eat with the satisfaction of someone correcting a long-standing problem. When I suggested, carefully, that I had perhaps had enough, she took my plate, filled it again, and said — firmly, and without leaving room for reply — “You are too thin. Eat.” It was not a scolding. It was simply Rosalia’s understanding of what a lunch is for, and of how one looks after the people one has quietly decided to look after.
The walk home took a long time. The afternoon heat, which I would normally resent, felt entirely appropriate — a punishment I had earned and accepted without argument. I reached the terrace, sat in the chair nearest the door, and did not move again for three hours. When I woke the light had changed, and Dante was watching me with the patient expression of one who has been waiting a while and would like it noted.
There are moments when the body makes its own arrangements. Mine had decided on movement — a little air, a slow turn through the cooling streets, the thing the Italians call fare la digestione, which after a lunch at Rosalia’s is not optional. Nothing at Rosalia’s is.
Walking back as the last light settled on the water, I found myself thinking about what this summer has been. A season’s worth of mornings. Several notebooks opened and not closed. Things begun with conviction and then left, without regret, at the point where they seemed to stop needing me.
The beach is still there. The notebooks are still on their shelf above the table, not one of them any closer to finished than it was in June. August is almost over. I am not sure everything has been said. But then, it never is.
Osalio Verbino
Marisòla, summer 2026
Osalio Verbino — Appunti da Marisòla Track 03: Espresso Before Regret
Music: AI-generated with Suno Pro 2026