When we met, it was an unbearably hot day.

I was living in Italy on a research grant, where I immediately settled into a routine. I got up, had breakfast, and set off for the town archive, navigating the narrow streets at a brisk pace. Once I arrived, I presented my passport and access card at the door, stored my bag in a wooden locker, and handed my document request slip to the archivist before heading into the reading room with my laptop clutched against my chest. I spent the day transcribing historical documents, and when the archive closed, I packed it up, went back to my apartment, and worked at my desk until it was time for bed.

People would email to ask how I was enjoying Italy.

“You must be having so much fun,” they’d say. “Italians really know how to live.”

My apartment overlooked a popular square, and as I sat at my desk reviewing my notes and double-checking my translations, I’d hear children laughing as they played soccer outside my window and eventually the growing volume of chatter as locals gathered after work. When the sun was low enough to flood the piazzetta with orange-red light, a violinist would show up, staking his position near a fountain to play for tips.

Once it was dark, the crowd got younger and drunker. I’d hear animated arguments, playful flirtation, and shrieking laughter, and in the background, the violinist went through his nightly rotation of Bach. Gradually, it would get quiet again and once the violinist counted his tips and packed up for the night, he’d stop outside my building to tease me for wasting all those beautiful summer nights chained to my desk.

“You’realways there,” he’d say (in Italian). “Are you being kept prisoner?”

My apartment was one floor up, lit from within. He’d stand outside in the light of a street lamp and gesture for me to come down.

“It isn’t healthy to work so much,” he’d say. “You also need to live.”

The fuck does that even mean? I’d think.

I’d remind myself over and over that my work ethic was noble and important, a true test of will and endurance, and that this whole “living life to the fullest” thing was just romanticized self-help pablum. This was a lie I had to tell myself because the alternative was to acknowledge the humiliating truth.

I was mute. Whenever someone spoke to me, I wanted to speak but couldn’t.

I’d never experienced anything like it before. I knew other languages, I’d lived in other countries, I’d experienced every conceivable conversational malfunction.

But not this. This was paralysis.

I tried to overcome it. When I was alone in my apartment, I practiced common phrases, hoping they’d become muscle memory, but one week went by, then two, then three, and the paralysis was still there. So I stuck to a routine and stayed inside to avoid all interaction, if only to avoid the reminder.

But one day, when it was unbearably hot, the archive closed early. And as I walked home in the midday sun, I passed the violinist, who was sitting on the steps of an old church. When he saw me, he leapt up and jogged to walk beside me, joking about how he couldn’t believe I managed to escape my captors.

Up close, I could see that he was in his late twenties like I was. He was tan with chestnut-colored hair and hazel eyes, and he was dressed like someone who was raised in the sun, with loose cotton pants and a generously unbuttoned muslin shirt, his sleeves pushed up to his elbows and his wrists layered with leather bracelets.

He introduced himself as Gianni and asked where I was headed.

I licked my lips, briefly forgetting I was mute, but when I tried to speak, my heart thumped, my cheek twitched, and my eyes stung with tears as the paralysis set in. The reminder was mortifying — I gestured that I couldn’t talk and picked up my pace to hurry back to my apartment before he noticed I was upset.

“But you can understand?” he said, catching my arm to stop me. “You can understand the language?”

I nodded, looking anywhere but at him directly.

“Then you’re just blocked,” he smiled, tilting his head to try to catch my eye. “That’s easy. You have to force yourself to speak.”

I was instantly livid — that fucker had no idea how hard I’d been trying and it wasn’t easy, it was fucking traumatic. So I took off again, walking briskly toward my apartment, and to my extreme irritation, he kept up with me, insisting he could help.

It was his day off, he said. He had time. We could practice conversation until I became unblocked. All I needed to do was push myself. That was my problem. I was hiding. I needed to push through it and he could help.

I wasn’t interested and I was outraged that he was hitting on me, and if he touched me again, I was going to go absolutely batshit fucking nuclear.

“But I can help you.” He gestured his frustration with both hands as he kept pace beside me. “What, do you think your problem is so special nobody else could possibly understand? I understand. How did you learn the language? From books?”

I did.

I’d picked up Italian by brute force when I realized I needed reading proficiency to pursue my research topic. I didn’t have time to take classes, so I learned it on my own.

And as he continued to insist he could help, I started to second-guess my impression.

Maybe he wasn’t hitting on me. Maybe he wasn’t full of shit.

“Try,” he said. “We’ll have a conversation. What’s the worst that can happen? You stay the same? Come on.”

I should pause here to mention that English wasn’t my first language. It was supposed to be but it didn’t turn out that way.

I was born in a small European country. My parents, both American, liked the idea of me growing up bilingual, and even though they didn’t know the language themselves, they decided to put me in a local school instead of an English-language program for ex-pats.

The story I was told is that the older I got, the less verbal I became. I’d get home from school and go quiet, but whenever I was around other kids, I was animated, outgoing, and chatty. At a certain point, my parents realized it was because I was fluent in the language they couldn’t understand. They thought it would be enough that they spoke English, but it wasn’t. My English was crap.

So we moved to the States where it would be English-only from there on out.

I was six-ish, so I don’t remember much from that move. I’m told it was a culture shock and that I became very shy, which sounds about right. What I do remember is that we had an apricot tree in our backyard and I was really excited about that, and one day, while I was playing in the front yard, one of the older girls from down the block started talking to me about cherry trees.

She explained that in our neighborhood there were good houses and bad houses and because cherries were the best fruit, only the good houses had cherry trees.

I didn’t know there were good houses and bad houses — they all looked the same to me — so I asked what it meant if you had an apricot tree instead.

Well, it turned out apricots were for dumb foreigners who didn’t belong there and couldn’t even speak American, so I ran into my backyard, climbed that tree as high as I could go, and started hurling unripe fruit over the fence into the neighbor’s yard. Because if apricots were for dumb foreigners who couldn’t speak right, then the obvious solution was to get rid of the apricots.

This became a thing for me. If kids made fun of my accent, I ran home and threw apricots.

Another thing I remember is the time I was at the center of a big sticker controversy at my new school.

Since I had an accent, I was pulled from class a few times a week to work on my pronunciation with a speech therapist, and at the end of each session, she gave me a sheet of stickers as a reward.

The other students didn’t like that. To them, I was getting special treatment. Not only did I get to leave class in the middle of the day, I always returned with an abundance of stickers, which meant I was clearly getting way more stickers than everyone else. This culminated in a small uprising during one of my regular classes, so to calm everyone down, the teacher patiently explained that I wasn’t American (I was) and I needed special classes to learn how to speak correctly.

One kid got really mad about this. He said if I wasn’t American, then I shouldn’t be getting any stickers. Stickers should go to Americans first because they were there first — it was only fair. While he got in trouble for that comment, I understood the sentiment and I understood that everyone else felt that way too. So, once again, to my little-kid brain, this was a problem that could only be solved by throwing apricots.

As soon as I got home, I climbed the tree, knocked down as many green apricots as I could, and using a little toy racket, proceeded to launch them, one by one, into the neighbor’s yard.

When the neighbor came home and caught me in the act, I refused to stop — she obviously didn’t understand the importance of my mission — so she rounded up some of the other neighbors on the block and confronted my mom about my unruly behavior.

I got in trouble.

At the time, I didn’t understand why it was wrong, but once I grew out of the magical thinking and developed a greater awareness of the world around me, I was absolutely consumed by shame. Shame for being the reason the neighbors hated us, shame for cluttering my neighbor’s yard, shame for believing in something so childish and stupid.

So I never really developed a taste for fresh apricots. Each year, the tree would grow new fruit and they always looked so delicious when they ripened, but whenever I tried them, they were gross.

So, it turned out that Gianni wasn’t actually Italian. Or named Gianni. He was Albanian and his name was Sokol.

He was born in Kosovo. After living through the fall of communism and Milošević’s campaign of anti-Albanian oppression, he emigrated to Italy with his family before the Kosovo War. But, he said with a laugh, “here they don’t like us so much either.”

As an Albanian from Kosovo, he was Muslim by culture and ethnicity. But not religion. He didn’t believe in any religion. This blew my mind at the time, the idea of being both Muslim and atheist, but it was something he was happy to explain and I was happy to listen.

He went by Gianni because it made his life easier when people thought he was Italian. People tipped better. He was also paid by one of the restaurant owners to play in that particular square because it was good for business.

“If he knew I was Albanian, he’d pay me to leave instead,” he laughed. “It’s ridiculous, what some people think.”

We were sitting on a bench in an empty park. The heat was stifling, even in the shade. My cotton sundress clung to my skin with sweat as I looked down at my hands and concentrated on understanding him as he spoke. Every once in a while, I’d look up and try to respond.

“Dai, dimmi,” he’d say, leaning in as he touched his ear. It was his way of letting me know he was listening. And if I gasped like a dying fish, he’d pat me on the shoulder and say it would come. The important thing was to relax and keep trying.

His patience worked. The paralysis passed, but it also came back. I’d speak one moment and then, ten minutes later, I wouldn’t be able to speak at all. It made me want to scream.

Eventually, it got too hot to sit outside so we went back to his apartment, tucked away on the top floor of an old stone building. There was a Joy Division poster on the wall next to a large batik textile, an acoustic guitar leaning against a well-worn sofa.

He led me to a table next to an open window and turned on a fan to get a breeze going before disappearing into his kitchen. I took a seat and listened as he continued his story from the kitchen about his years in Rome, where he perfected his accent.

When he returned, he set a plate of chilled apricots on the table before taking a seat to face me. They were cut into halves, the pits removed, and with a smile, he reached for one and said it was my turn to talk.

I wasn’t sure what to say, but the apricots reminded me of my childhood, so with great effort, I managed to tell him we had an apricot tree when I was a kid.

He asked if I ate them all the time because that’s what he would have done.

I mimed an overhand throw and said I put them all in my neighbor’s yard.

He laughed. In fact, he laughed so hard, I couldn’t help but laugh, too.

“This is already a great story,” he said. “Tell me more.”

I remember looking down at my hands as I concentrated on coming up with something to say but when I spoke, I tripped over my phrasing and silently reprimanded myself for each mistake. I knew how the language was supposed to sound and hearing it mangled in my voice made my skin crawl, and as I stuttered through half-formed thoughts, the paralysis set in again and my eyes teared up with frustration.

“Take a breath,” he said. “Go slowly.”

I breathed deeply, relaxed my jaw, and tried again. Word by difficult word, I told him where I was born and how I didn’t really know English that well when I moved to the States, and whenever kids made fun of my accent, I dealt with it by throwing apricots over the fence.

“Why?”

I couldn’t remember. I remembered doing it and I remembered getting in trouble, and I definitely remembered the years of shame, but I couldn’t remember why I specifically chose to throw apricots. “I was a weird kid.”

He laughed.

I smiled and tried to think of something else he’d find mildly amusing. I told him about the Great Sticker Uprising, how I had to sit through speech therapy repeating the same words until the American accent stuck, and there was this one kid from Boston who also had to do it, but that kid mastered a neutral American accent in, like, a week, while I was the slow kid, steadily accumulating sheets of pity stickers because I kept pronouncing my Rs in the back of my throat. And when other kids got jealous of my growing sticker collection and questioned whether I deserved them, I went home and rained green apricots down upon my neighbor like some kind of low-stakes supervillain.

“But why?” he asked, laughing. “Why did you do that?”

“I don’t know!”

By then we were both laughing, and I told him that when the neighbor caught me, I refused to stop, so she rallied a posse of angry moms to storm the front door and demand an end to my reign of terror.

We were in tears with laughter. He gestured wildly in disbelief and I gestured right back at him, and then I slammed my hands down on the table to announce that I remembered. I remembered why I did it. It was because a girl made fun of my accent and convinced me apricots were only for foreigners who didn’t belong there. That was why I kept throwing them over the fence. I thought getting rid of them would make me fit in.

“Come on,” he laughed, gesturing at me with both hands. “How could she say that to you? You were a little child!”

“I know!”

“What a little witch she was.”

“She didn’t even have a cherry tree. She had a persimmon tree.”

He laughed and cursed, and once our laughter settled, he sighed wearily and gestured an endless circle with his hand followed by an obscene gesture, referring to the way hateful ideas are passed from parents to their children, continuing from generation to generation, and that this cycle of xenophobia could fuck right off.

And then he smiled and said my Italian was good. But I had to keep practicing because while blocks went away, they also came back.

“I think speaking Italian makes you feel like a child again,” he said. “That’s why you were blocked. It reminded you of how it felt when you arrived in America.”

I was skeptical. It was so long ago, I hardly even remembered it.

“Yes, but some memories live in the body, not the mind.” He pressed his hand against his chest. “I have them too. But if you can laugh, you can let them go. Like an exorcism. That’s what I think.”

As I rolled that thought in my mind, I was suddenly aware of how tired I was. My jaw was sore from trying to push all of my words to the front of my mouth. My body was weak. My mind was blank, like I’d officially exhausted my ability to think.

I looked out the window at the red-orange light skimming the tiled roofs and took in the idiosyncratic architecture that had accumulated over the centuries. I hadn’t really looked at the town since I’d arrived. I’d always kept my head down and walked briskly, my mind buzzing with the false urgency of work. But looking at it then, with my mind quiet, it was really beautiful.

I hadn’t really looked at Sokol either. I’d been avoiding his eye contact as if refusing any sort of connection could shield me from the embarrassment of my mutism. But, drowsy and dazed, I took in the details of his face, his warm eyes and enviable brows, his sun-kissed skin and the open neckline of his shirt, the sinews of his forearms, the elegant movement of his hands as he picked up another apricot before nudging the plate toward me.

I tried one. I expected it to be as unremarkable as the apricots of my childhood but it was sublime. Sweet and juicy with just the right amount of tartness, still cool from the fridge. I ate it slowly, savoring the taste and texture, and moaned with pleasure at how good it was.

He smiled and pushed the plate closer, encouraging me to have the rest.

As I ate them, I couldn’t get over how much better they were than the ones I grew up with. Sweeter, juicier, more flavorful. They were like a totally different fruit.

Or maybe they weren’t. Maybe it was just my perception.

Maybe Sokol was right and we do carry our memories in our bodies. We go through life nicked by a thousand banalities, a thousand forgettable moments all leaving their imprints on our perception, muting our senses, paralyzing our expression, deadening our appreciation of the things we once enjoyed.

The perfection of those apricots — and the perfection of every apricot since — would become a slow-unfolding epiphany as that sense memory was gradually rewritten. The taste now reminds me of summer and laughter and the hum of a fan on a warm night. And it reminds me of how it felt to let go of my near-constant self-criticism to become pliant and receptive to sensation, to make eye contact again and speak without terror, to enjoy things slowly and completely because pleasure, like laughter, can be an exorcism, too.

After that night, whenever Sokol stood outside my building to tease me for working so much, I went downstairs to join him. We walked through town while it was quiet and dark, taking our time to enjoy the night, sometimes stopping to sit on the waterfront and breathe the salt air. We talked about everything — music, architecture, the persistence of ethnonationalism — and while I traced the calloused tips of his fingers, and while he kissed my bare shoulder, we also expressed all the buried, forgettable things, unpacking the places where we’d gone cynical and numb, until the lightest touch left a trail of goosebumps, like a soft release.

I wrote this for Age of Empathy’s radical pleasure prompt, which is wonderful and feels especially important these days. You can read other essays here.