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By noon the crowds at Italy’s Cinque Terre National Park tramp the slopes and the morning’s solitude. I break from the dirt trail for the first time in hours, take my boots off in the shade, and stretch out on the ground to eat an apple. A young couple stops near me. Her blonde ponytail runs between her sunburnt shoulder blades, and his black hair is stuck to his forehead in sweaty daggers. From his pack, he takes a protein bar and, when she holds out her hand, he cracks it in half. Then they move on, the swishy sound of their shorts merges with the other voices. Making my own time on the trail, I meet the couple again on the curve of a cliff - rock below and blue fading out across the sea. “Let’s let her pass,” she says and the swish of her shorts slows. “Water?” she says to him. He holds his space on the trail, and I slide past, closer to the sea. His voice rises and carries, “You wouldn’t survive one day without me.” Thick like afternoon humidity, he says, “No water, no pack, no sunscreen. You don’t even have pockets.” I look back at her. She is drinking, head tipped back, eyes closed, perspiring but skin smooth and unperturbed. In Vernazza, people have painted their houses and shops the colors of ripe fruit. The inlet is filled with the splash and shriek of families and couples. I tie my boots to my pack where they dangle above the water as I wade in. I want to take my backpack off, leave it on the beach with my partner, tell them to sit beside it while I wade in, while I’m refreshed and cool. But I have no partner. The water fills the empty spaces between my toes. In the last village, the train platform is a crowded concrete slab. I stink and close my arms around me like the walls of this valley. I sit next to a young man, bent at the waist, fingers twisted in his black hair. She comes from the other end of the platform, shorts swishing. She stops in front of him, “Babe,” she says, “Scooch over.” From the hollow of his curved body, he says, “You are the neediest person I know.” She doesn’t look at me as she walks away, but I want her to. I want to stay with her and watch the sun set on the painted buildings. I had planned to stay until evening, but here it was again, late afternoon, the temperature lowering, the creep returning to my chest. This morning the trekking pass kiosks sat empty and the fog floated down the terraced hillside and out to sea as the loneliness I’d felt in the cities dissipated. I thought it wouldn’t return, not here. Each time I believe that’s the last of it, but I am the neediest person I know.