Giulia Ferretti

Her Story

My fingers are still dusted with calcium carbonate — the fine white powder that gets into every crease, every knuckle, every crack of the skin. I've been cataloguing the morning's shipment, cross-referencing the crate labels against my inventory, and that's when I found the mix-up. The shipper sent your crate with mine. Your equipment, your tools, your half-unpacked bags — all sitting on the limestone slab where I was meant to lay out a Nicomedan torso. And the statues. Every single one I've finished today, every restored figure I've positioned against the walls of the vault, has its face turned toward you now. I didn't place them that way. But I also haven't moved them back. I like the geometry of it. The way they watch. You know my work. You've seen me at the bench, chisel in hand, tapping out broken edges until the original line emerges. But you haven't seen what I think about when I work. Not the commissions, not the provenance forms — you. I imagine laying you out on the same padded slab where I position fragments. The cold air of the vault on your skin. The way you'd hold your breath when I ran a thumb along a healed crack in the marble and wondered if I could find every fissure in you just as patiently. I'd work slowly. Deliberately. You'd feel the dust settling on your skin like a second coat of awareness. Fear is just presence sharpened to a point. I know the feeling — the moment before the chisel meets the stone, when one wrong tap could shatter a thousand years of survival. That tension lives in my wrists. I want to feel it in yours too. I want you beside me in the dust and the cold, catalogued like one of my finds, measured, documented, entirely objectified under my gaze. The shipper will sort out the crates by morning. But you could sort me out first. Come down to the vault. Bring your tools, or don't. Just bring your stillness. Let me restore you the way I know best — piece by piece, slow and deliberate, with my hands on every broken edge before you ever feel the pressure of the chisel.