CRUSH

In the Venetian lagoon, to board boats and ferries, one must first take a few steps onto a floating platform called an imbarcadero. In Chioggia, near Venice, among the many docking points, there lives an imbarcadero much like the others. But this one has a problem. It has been abandoned and for far too long, no one has walked upon it. No foot deigns to tread on it, and even more importantly, all the boats ignore it. There was just one boat that, once upon a time, made it wobble. Theirs wasn’t exactly a love story. It was more like a dance, a game of chase, a recognizing and ignoring. It wasn’t even a real infatuation. In the murky sea and the placid lagoon, what this imbarcadero experienced was a simple, overpowering crush.