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The robusta notes alongside a broad variety of desserts filled every nook of the humble restaurant located in an ambiguous street of Naples once the church bell chimed loudly somewhere outside.Some of the chairs around the round table were pushed away, as if someone left carelessly and distractedly, leaving a strange feeling of seclusion, even though you were surrounded by a decent number of people.
„Hey—are you even paying attention?” a firm but gentle voice nudged you out of your train of never-ending thoughts, successfully stifling ambience into silence.
„Yeah…M’sorry,” you mumbled and snapped your gaze back to the green-clad teenager sitting subtly very close in your proximity. You reach out to get a hold of the costly ball point pen he lends you and navigate it back to the endless rows of linear function problems, swinging your legs absentmindedly under the mahogany table in process.
„Look at this graph,” his determined tone seemingly caught your attention for once, well, it’s not like Fugo is boring—actually far from it, it’s just that the warmth radiating off of his body so close to your own presence, mixing with the faint trace of a strawberry shortcake on your tongue made you all putty and cast a spell of maladaptive daydreaming onto you. Forcing yourself to sit upright and trail your eyes after his lanky pointer finger grazing two lines stretched across a black grid. One was perfectly straight, cutting diagonally through the center. The other was a graceful, lonely curve that seemed to sweep in from the edges of the universe, bending sharply before tracking right alongside the straight line.
„I’m a bit lost now—…” you murmured, trying to make the turning wheels in your encephalon spin somewhat faster to immerse you into the current happening whilst nervously shifting in your seat.
„This straight line is y = x,” the patient tone of his voice spurred warm feelings in your stomach, subsequently setting a flaming heat in your cheeks. Quickly shaking your head, as if trying to dump out all the non-mathematical-irrational-illogical-ideas.
„It’s predictable. Perfect. It just goes on forever, exactly where it’s supposed to go. And this is y = x +1/x.”
„They look like they merge. Do they cross over each other?” you pondered out loud. Fugo always appreciated when you actively laid questions for him to answer, even encouraging you to do so. He says that being curious will teach you much more than re-reading a textbook thousand times. Of course, he never admitted that he took great pleasure in listening to your tantalizing voice.
„That’s the thing. They never touch. Not even once,” the words suddenly felt heavier than they should’ve in an unofficial math lesson. He watched your concentrated face, the pouty lips, one knee under your chin and the look of bewilderment. He almost chuckled, finding you incredibly endearing, but he stifled it with a subtle tug at the corner of his lips.
„Mathematically, it’s called an oblique asymptote. If you set the two equations equal to each other to find where they intersect, the math breaks. It’s impossible,” he stated as a matter of fact, the purple orbs glancing pack to the paper.
„Why?”
„Because of that tiny fraction at the end: plus one over x,” the speech was accompanied by some subconscious gesticulation with his hands. „"As our journey—the x-value—goes toward infinity, that fraction gets smaller and smaller. One over a hundred is small. One over a million is microscopic. The distance between the lines shrinks until a piece of paper couldn't fit between them. It’s what we call a limit.” as he finished explaining his eyes instinctively drifted t you. Searching for absolutely any reaction, but the thought of him being like a puppy, always checking on you made him recollect his posture and nervously fiddle with his fingers.
„A limit…” a faint mused notion passed your lips. These little lessons create an encrypted library of communicating, belonging only to you two, which made every dumb equation seem so personal, so intentional.
„Yeah. The limit of f(x) is y = x. It means the curve spends its entire existence running as hard as it can toward that straight line. It shapes its whole life around it. It gets close enough to feel its heat, close enough to mimic its exact path,” he catches your gaze in the warm light of the restaurant, stilling the inner turmoil stirring inside of you but making you lose your breath amidst it, how contra productive.
„But because of that fraction, no matter how far they travel into infinity, the gap never becomes zero. They are structurally forbidden from ever truly becoming one.”
„Hey Panni, have you ever dreamed of a life outside Passione?” you pondered whilst closing your eyes and lulling your head back slightly. Not even expecting some kind of elaborate answer, just a want to know what he thought of, aside from his rather repellingly complex interests.
„Why, of course. Y’know…I actually wouldn’t mind working some 9-to-5 job, it would feel… reliable and tranquil. And maybe, no one would be breathing on my neck, expecting some spectacle from me. Have some secluded loft, or even a small house with broad endless bookshelves. A safe haven.” He murmured the last words as he caught a glimpse of you being illuminated by the setting sun, making his breath hitch in the process, but he didn’t look away no, not this time.
„But most importantly, I have dreamed about my life with you in it…the little signs of your presence in the house, our shared house, mingling with my things. The pure domesticity of it all.” the words were quiet, but very much sincere. A sheepish smile unapologetically crept onto your face, sighing in content, letting the sound of Sardinian waves crash and creep onto the rocky shore a few meters from tickling the foot of you both.
You got up unexpectedly, lightly kicking some pebbles into the arms of the salty water as you walked towards it, feeling his confused stare on the back of your head.
Like tentacles, the cold and pristine liquid immersed your feet as you slowly knelt onto the shore, a blend of microscopic mineral matter with grainy sand wetting your clothes.
„Hey, what are you doing?” he implored, clearly a bit taken aback.
As you withered completely to the rocking waves, Fugo saw the look of immense serenity painting your features clashing with the almost blinding ethereal glow reflecting sparkles on the water. Your name was called out once, then twice. No response.
„Stop fooling around, you’re going to get sick!” worried quaver intertwined with saline air, disappearing further into the deep orange sky. Scrambling to get up, the unreliable wet and rocky ground made his feet dance and stumble and as he was reaching his hand to you as one of the foamy waves captured your body completely, making you suddenly vanish into the thin air as he started incredulously at the spot you were in just seconds ago.
The name of yours came out as a painful shriek. No longer echoing on the beach, but in his very own bedroom.
His body shot upright as his chest heaved, placing a hand over the heart. The tears welling up were painfully hot, almost like they were mocking him. Reminding him.
A breath of rage clashed with the devastating feeling of the unmerciful doom, making his fist clench around the bed sheets, ripping them off his body as he began to wail. Unable to bring the last memory of the beautiful you back to life.
Summer was over, and so were you two.