Mitilíni, 1984

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I had only been in this city for about a week, and already, I was completely enamoured. The cramped, winding streets twisted in every direction, and I lost myself in the labyrinth four or more times a day, happily.

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In the morning, the world was quiet. The winds breathed softly and brought fresh air from the nearby sea. Lesbos wasn’t my home, but the way the island wrapped me in her serenity and grace every day, I never stopped wishing it was.

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My ridiculous and wonderful friends had planned this trip a year ago, and my ravenous desire to become more spontaneous devoured me in the final hour, compelling me to go with them just three weeks before their departure. They had asked, begged even, for me to go the since the beginning of their planning stages, but I felt too confined to accept every time.

 

Finally, as I sat on the edge of my bed in my quiet flat, as the evening colours leached the last lashes of sunlight from the horizon, my mind drifted back to my familiar daydream of a new life, and I felt something begin to expand in my chest. I barely registered the change at first, as my eyes continued to gaze without seeing at the clock on my bedside table. I shook my head and shut my eyelids tightly, and when I reopened them, their focus was fixed on the numbers displayed there in black and white. It was 7:51 pm, and all of a sudden, my world was different.

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A cool, seeping sensation had begun to spread across my chest and up into my shoulders. It felt as if the knot that closed a small balloon filled with nighttime sand had been untied beneath my ribcage and the chilled grains were spilling into my body. It was exhilarating. There was only one thought on my mind, and it was the solemn and lucid belief that I needed to go to Greece. I was sure of absolutely nothing else, and for once, that didn’t seem to scare me. In fact, it hardly bothered me at all.

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I stood from my bed and went to the bathroom down the hall, where I turned on the shower and disrobed. I didn’t bother to wait for the water to reach the perfect temperature before I stepped in, letting it run freezing over my hair and face. I closed my eyes again and noticed that I could feel my skin and my hair in a more real way than I had ever felt it before. I felt myself being alive.

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I have known a lot of grace in my life, for indeed, it hasn’t been a very hard life overall. But I don’t think anything in this life or the next could have prepared me for the grace that I felt overtake me that spring evening in my room.

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I spent the rest of the night arranging details, quickly, but not hurriedly, for I discovered then that there is a patience that rises from deep within ourselves in times when we are absolutely certain of the correctness of our actions. I packed a bag, wandered through each room, collecting items I thought I would need, and also saying a silent farewell to a place that had treated me with kindness over the years I had lived there. I was grateful for the solace that flat had provided me. But I also knew, somewhere in me, that I wouldn’t be coming back to it anytime soon. Through the night, I worked, calling my mother on the canary yellow telephone downstairs at midnight because I knew she’d be up. She talked with me for a while, listened to my strange explanation for departure, and agreed to come by the next morning to help put some things into the storage unit. She and my father, though I never knew them to agree on more than ten things over the course of my entire life, had always agreed they would help their children whenever they could, as long as we were honest with them.

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I hadn’t, to my shame, always been honest with them, but they had always helped me nevertheless, and sometimes the guilt that arrived when I thought about that overtook me and made hot tears well up in my eyes. It threatened to wash over me then, just after we said goodbye, but I refused to let it. I turned from the shore and walked back up the dunes, back to the reality I needed to face instead.

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By the time the sun rose about six hours later, my flat had been through a whirlwind of activity I scarcely believe either one of us was prepared for. My bag was packed; my belongings, everything I wasn’t bringing, were in boxes piled in a tall stack in the foyer, and the furniture, little that I had, was shoved close together nearby. I paused for the first time in a while to look out the window. From the fourth floor of the building where I lived, I could see the dawn breaking over the adjacent buildings. The yellow and white was pale at first, splitting the deep blue of the night and edging its way in. I reached for the phone laying nearby and called my father. Early riser that he was and always has been, he answered after the first trill. I asked him for his help, told him that Mum was coming by later today, and that I didn’t know how long I’d be gone. He sighed and paused for a minute, holding the silence between us. When he spoke again, his tone was resolute. He was like most fathers I know would have been in that moment: he knew my mind was made up, and he knew the wheels were already in motion, and so he set about the business of being the useful, dependable man he thought he should be. He told me he had work until the late afternoon, but that he could pop in after to do whatever else needed doing. I thanked him and told him I’d talk to him later, and he smiled through the phone at me, telling me to get some rest.

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Rest, I would get, but I didn’t feel tired yet. After dutiful conformity to the regimens of sleep and exercise and diet for so many years of my life, I felt that if there was a time I was allowed to deviate, it was right now.

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I got dressed to go into the office, and unlocked my bike from the rack on the ground floor, walking it the first few blocks out of the building. Eventually, I got on and pedaled gently, taking the long way round. I found that the sleepy streets I rode through every day in my up-til-then orderly life looked changed somehow. I still knew the way, of course, and recognized their shapes and names as ones my eyes had seen a hundred thousand times before, but something in their character seemed to have shifted. It felt to me as if they knew, too, that I didn’t live here anymore. Some part of me had been sent out away from here, never to return, and my little town knew it just as well as I did.

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When I got to the office, far earlier than I ever did usually, I saw the only car I expected to see: my boss’s blue Ford Sierra, sitting neatly in the first spot in the row. I was glad, because she was the one I had come to talk to. When I walked into the office, all the lights were off, except for one fluorescent light breaking the silence of the dark through the cracked door of her corner office. In the time that I had been employed here, I had found a friend in her that I did not expect. She was, if you listened to the teasing words of her staff, a “workaholic”, a person who spent countless hours at her desk, unconcerned with the idea of a social life that drives the rest of us slowly mad. I saw myself in her, in many ways, but what I appreciated about her most was her surprising and secret empathic ability. Sometimes I was truly shocked to find out just how much she knew and understood of the world. I never should have underestimated her.

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I knocked lightly on the door as I pushed it into the room, and saw her lift her head somewhat unwillingly from what she was writing on her desk. Her eyes were briefly out of focus, but soon she saw me standing there and smiled. I moved towards her in the small room, and began to explain why I had come. I was not thrilled to be having this conversation, for I did enjoy working for her, and it saddened greatly me to be telling her this, especially so unexpectedly. She showed me the true depth of her wisdom then, however, because before I had figured out exactly how I wanted to word the news of my imminent departure, she stopped me and told me it was all right, that she already knew. It was a beautifully rare moment in time, when two people can understand one another’s meaning, even without having to find the words to speak about it. She stood, and gave me a hug, one of those hugs that is long enough and warm enough and comes right exactly when you need it. I hadn’t thought about the sorrow I felt at leaving very much at all until then, but the way she held me made it billow up in my heart and made me gasp out in tears. She stayed with me until the embers cooled, and then reassured me that she would always be glad to be my friend, and that my job would be here for me if ever I needed it again. I couldn’t then and cannot now imagine a way that that meeting could have gone any better for me, and if there is a heavenly force in charge of our fates and lives, I can’t begin to express my gratitude to it for that moment alone.

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I rode back to my flat after that, stopping briefly in a bakery I had only been in twice before to buy a pastry I had always coveted but never given myself permission to buy. It was delicious.

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I spent the rest of that day loading boxes with my mother, carrying furniture with my father, and calling an overjoyed Diana and Caroline to tell them I would be coming with them to Greece. The next day I spent with my landlord, and by the end of the week, I had moved out and booked a one-way airline ticket. Diana and Caroline, ecstatic as they were when we spoke, didn’t ask about how long I was staying, and for some reason I didn’t feel inclined to tell them. To be truthful, I didn’t even know myself.

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The last two weeks before the trip blew by me, and before I knew it, I was on an airplane, headed toward some unknown but certain marker in my destiny.

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We dined and explored, tasted and experienced a brand-new world in that week, and it was magnificent. I don’t think I’ve ever had more fun in my life, and each day that arrived I never wanted to end.

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One morning before I awoke, I lay in my bed enfolded by a dream. This dream felt strange in a way I have trouble describing. It was so natural and familiar that it seemed a piece of my life, but when I returned from it, I had no memory of any event I had experienced even remotely like it, and so I knew there was no way it could have been real.

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In the dream, I was staring out into a churning ocean from a soaring tower. The sky was dark and angry, and rolling charcoal clouds were drawing nearer and nearer to where I stood. The wind whipped in in harsh gusts, almost knocking me to the ground, but something told me I needed to stay standing. I needed to keep looking for something out in the water. There was a profound longing in my heart, and I knew that I was looking for someone, not something, and that this someone would be lost without me, just as I would be lost without them. I discovered that I was holding a lantern in my right hand, and that its flame burned bright out into the darkness. Suddenly, I saw another wall of wind heading towards me, and just before it hit, I opened my mouth to scream in terror.

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When I opened my eyes, I was not in a tower, but instead completely safe in the same bed I had gone to sleep in the night before. Breathless, I rolled to my left and read the face of the tall grandfather clock standing against the wall. I watched the minute hand twitch to the next number, and saw that it was 5:17 am. I groaned and rolled to the other side, closing my eyes again in hopes of getting more sleep, but it didn’t seem to be in the stars for me that morning. So, after lying in bed, sleepless and pensive, for another hour or so, I finally got up, got dressed, and walked out the door into the city.

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Yesterday, I had turned right when I left the building, so today I went left. I passed a plethora of different stores, some butcheries, some tiny boutiques, some cozy cafés, most not yet open for the day. After about fourteen blocks of aimless wandering, I turned right and found myself looking down a desolate alley, completely empty but for an old woman sitting outside a shop and admiring herself in a handheld mirror. As I got closer to her, she seemed not to take notice of me at all, and continued to examine her beauty in her reflection. And she was beautiful; if the phrase “age becomes her” was invented for any one person in the world, I think it was this woman. You could tell that she had been beautiful all her life, for the radiance she still possessed in her face did not look like it would make such a foolish decision as to ever abandon her. Eventually, I was standing right in front of her. I had not taken my eyes off her, nor had she taken hers off herself, the entire length of the alley I had walked to get to her. Once I stopped, she glanced up at me and greeted me briefly in Greek. I confess to you now that I don’t speak Greek as fluently as I might like to, and I was nervous to respond to her in that moment. She got up from her chair, still holding the mirror in her hand and looked me up and down. She asked me a question, pointing to the closed storefront behind her, but when she recognized the obvious lack of comprehension on my face, she reached out her hand and touched my shoulder. She had a compassionate stranger’s look, and she spoke a few more words to me before smiling and gesturing with her head towards the other end of the alley. She patted my shoulder twice, and with that, I turned and kept walking. I don’t know what exactly she said to me, and I still regret how ill-prepared I was for her, but in thinking about it, I feel as though she was telling me I wasn’t supposed to be there with her, that there was something else I needed to move on towards. And so I kept walking.

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Eventually the night fell, and I returned to the house to reunite with Caroline and Diana. We had promised each other that tonight we would venture out and find a party of some sort, one big enough that we wouldn’t be reviled for crashing.

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My mind was still on the old woman, and the strange dream that had awakened me this morning, but I did my best to shake those thoughts out of my head and be present with my friends as we navigated the narrow, uneven streets in the darkness.

 

We walked the lengths of the city, eventually ending up in the outskirts near the ruins of the Ancient Theater. As we traveled down a path through some trees toward it, we heard laughter and music coming from somewhere close. I could see Caroline get excited, and I saw her smile as she sped ahead of Diana and me. Finally, we came upon an old stone building with light and voices streaming out of it and people milling about. As I paused to take in the architecture, Diana dove straight into the crowd after Caroline, the two of them grinning at each other and exclaiming with joy and relief after hours of otherwise-fruitless walking. I don’t know why, but right then the only thing I felt like doing was sighing.

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I looked up into the sky to see if I could catch a glimpse of the moon, and I found her quickly, though she was only a sliver of a crescent that night. I smiled up at her, and opened my heart silently to her, as I often did. She responded like she always does: by filling my heart with a calm and devoted warmth that never fails to comfort me. I sighed and put my hand on my chest, and then slowly looked back down to the fete that lay before me. Despite my mood, I decided that, at the very least, I would go in and search after my friends. I walked through the open archway and passed a large group of people gathered in the atrium, sitting and standing, talking and drinking, and generally enjoying each other’s company. I caught sight of a staircase behind them, and headed for it, making my way up to the roof, where the music seemed to be originating. As I looked out onto the platform, I saw a large set of speakers and lots more people, most of them dancing. I glanced down at my watch and was surprised to see that it was already one o’clock in the morning, which meant that we had been walking in the city looking for this place for almost four hours prior. I moved towards the dance floor, looking left and right for any trace of my long-lost friends, but I didn’t see them anywhere yet.

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The upbeat song that was playing when I had arrived faded out, and I heard the familiar melancholy synth of another song take its place.

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Frightened by a dream,

You’re not the only one

Running like the wind,

Thoughts can come undone

Dancing behind masks,

Just subtle pantomime

But images reveal whatever lonely hearts can hide

Lady, lady, lady, lady, don’t walk this lonely avenue…

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My head turned towards the speakers, and my eyes drifted across the sea of bodies and faces.

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All at once, I was in the tower again, looking out onto the waves. The sky was nowhere near as dark as it had been before, but I could see clouds gathering on the horizon and I could feel the wind starting to pick up. I began to search frantically for the person in the water again, hoping to every heavenly power that I would be able to find them before the storm arrived. I held my lantern up higher, willing it to shine as bright as it could to guide the lost one into safety and away from the furious danger of the water. Suddenly, I saw a head breach the surface, and I could see someone swimming for their life out in the middle of the waves. I screamed, and the head lifted abruptly, turning in my direction. I could see it was a man, and though he was paddling with all his might, it looked as if he smiled at me. The clouds were advancing toward him and the water was growing choppier as he swam. He seemed so close, yet so far from me, and I felt utterly helpless to his plight. The only thing I could do was hold the lantern high, and make sure that it did not become extinguished, for I was certain that if it did, he would lose his way to the shore and drown. The wind blew harder and harder, and I, high in my tower, felt each gust as if it were a slap in the face, delivered with all the wind’s might. But the man was almost to  shore, and I knew if he could reach me, the danger would be ended. To my horror, I saw the largest wave I had ever seen building behind him, and I could not stop myself from crying out in panic. It caved in on top of him, and I could see him no more. Another forceful rush of wind blasted in from the horizon and put out my lantern, knocking me to the ground in the process. The glass shattered around me as we both hit the cold stone floor, and I felt my abdomen lurch inwards in anticipation of a sob that robbed me of all the breath in my lungs. Tears streamed out of my eyes, rolling down from my cheeks and hitting the floor where I lay. I was certain that the man was dead, for how could he not be? No one could have survived that wave. And now that the lantern was destroyed, all hope tore out of my heart and into the petrifying darkness of that dreadful storm.

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I let the tears come for as long as I had water left in my body, for what use was there in stopping when I had nothing left to live for? I felt content to lay there among the shards of glass for the rest of eternity, withering away until my eventual return to the dust from whence I came. Heaven only knows how long I really lay there before I began to hear something. I could not recognize what it was at first, for indeed I felt so lost to this world it took strength I did not know I possessed to return me to it. I turned my head away from the window and toward the door to the room and heard a voice calling out to me. A man’s voice.

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In my shock, I was not filled with joy but instead with confusion. ‘Who could that be?’, I thought. There is no one here but me. I am alone in this tower, imprisoned, as I always am, and not a soul can save me.

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The door swung open, and from where I was on the floor, I saw only the man’s legs, dripping with salt water. He came over to me and placed his arms under my body gingerly, lifting me until I found myself cradled against his chest. I looked up into his face and understood then who he was. My memory of the tragedy of a few moments before came rushing back, and he smiled at me, embracing me tightly. I gasped and kissed him with all the love in my heart, holding onto him with all the strength in my body. When at last our lips parted, I looked to meet his gaze. As soon as our eyes locked, I found myself again transported, the music from before still playing loudly from the speakers. I blinked confusedly, awakening my consciousness from the vision of another life, and discovered that I was staring at someone across the room. She was staring back at me, on her face a look of bewilderment that I can only assume mirrored my own. She made her way through the crowd in my direction, and I moved toward her, neither of us losing sight of the other. When finally she was standing in front of me, as she took my hand in hers, I looked for words to speak to her, but could find none.

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After a boundless expanse of time seemed to pass between us, she opened her mouth and asked.

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“Did you see that too?”

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The End