Louder Than the Echoes · Week 38
By Luca Bonafede · September 20, 2026 ·
A lot can happen in a week.
The week opened at a start line. I ran a half marathon, 21 kilometres, alongside Todd, the very first friend I made here in St. John’s, and I beat many of my previous records along the way. It was sponsored by Terre Restaurant and Terre Café, and it was a strong way to open seven days that had no intention of slowing down.
Right after the run, I took Todd to my new home on Water Street. It turns out the place is a remarkable sight for every local who’s now in their forties. He sat down on the couch, told me a few stories about what this place used to be, and then said exactly the words I needed to hear: “Luca, you live in a pussy magnet.”
I kind of knew it already. But hearing it out loud landed differently, because the night before the race, there was someone I cared about that I didn’t say goodbye to. I told myself it was the race: the alarm, the sleep, the focus I needed for the morning. Maybe that was true. Or maybe a part of me just didn’t want to say it, and so I left everything untouched, exactly as it was. Sitting there, laughing on that couch, I finally let go of the one that got away and decided to give my very last days here everything I had. Boom. Sometimes one small switch is all it takes to send your whole Life in a completely different direction. Thanks, Todd, for that.
The song of the week is “Echoes” by Roosevelt (2020), because everyone carries the echo of something, or of someone. A sound doesn’t stop the moment its source goes quiet. It keeps travelling, bouncing off walls, coming back to you when you least expect it. Some goodbyes work the same way. The ones you never say tend to echo the longest.
Once you stop looking back, it’s amazing how quickly Life rushes in to fill the space. After months of quietly living here and flying under the radar, my colleagues finally caught on and decided that wasn’t going to stand. So I got screeched in, properly and loudly, the way it’s supposed to happen. I’ve stood on the sidelines of more screech-ins in Twillingate than I can count, always watching and never the one up front. This time I was the one kissing the fish, and it was a massive one. Thank you to Jorja and the rest of the team for turning “eventually” into “finally.”
The sidelines didn’t see much of me for the rest of the week either. I found myself dancing bachata and salsa again after more than a year, and it reminded me how much I miss those Hispanic and Latino spots, with that specific energy you can’t really fake anywhere else. Some things don’t transplant well. You just have to go back to where they live. Somewhere in between, I had the best mango salsa of my Life. There’s no photo, because I didn’t even have time to take one, so you’ll have to trust me on that one.
And then, as if the city wanted to make its point one more time, I watched a Virgin Voyages cruise ship pull out through the Narrows. It was that slow, deliberate kind of leaving, where the ship doesn’t disappear so much as get smaller until the water simply takes it back. St. John’s has been teaching me that lesson on repeat lately: things leave the same way they arrived, quietly, and the place carries on regardless. Life goes on, with or without you.
Even so, this close to the end, I kept meeting new people. It turns out that endings don’t stop the world from adding to you. There’s always room for one more person to walk in, right up until the door actually closes.
Maybe that’s the real lesson of this week. Ships sail out, new people walk in, and the goodbyes you never said keep echoing for a while. You don’t have to silence the echo. You just have to stop walking back toward it. I can still hear it, but now it’s behind me, and everything in front of me is getting louder.
A lot can happen in a week.
Thank you, and ciao for now.
Luca Bonafede
St.John's, NL, Canada 🇨🇦
* *