How do we love?
Here’s a place to begin
Come and go, take and give
Sand goes out, wave comes in

Oh my love, your face is a faraway place

from ‘A faraway place’ by The Guild League, from the album ‘Private transport’

I stood on the beach, not entirely alone but almost, away from the people I had come with, away from any people at all. I stood there with my feet on the pebbles, with my dress blown by the warm wind, and with my ear to my mobile phone. I stood there looking at the waves come in, crash, and go. It was a late Easter, the beginning of May, and unseasonably hot: two weeks before it had felt like winter and now it almost felt like summer, the skipped spring like a word unspoken and almost forgotten in between.

She was telling me of all that she had dreamed the previous night, of her friend and of the man she loved. She spoke of dreams of previous lives, of intrigue and passion and even, I think, of murder. I didn’t know what to think. I didn’t know if I believed in previous lives. I didn’t know how important I considered all that night time dreaming to be. I didn’t even know why I was there, on that particular beach, in that particular conversation at that time of my life, not really — although I felt that there must be a reason for it all, and so I stood, and as I stood I listened.

I remember it as a kind of sublime moment, a moment made of silence and space inside me, of the wind and the waves outside me, and yet I must have been struggling at the time: struggling to understand, to find the right thing to say, to find the words with which to say it. As it happens I don’t remember any of what I said except for the moment, near the end, when I asked her to picture this man, the man she said she loved, the man she was telling me she thought she had killed –out of love and passion and jealousy– in a previous life, to look at him and to tell him, simply, ‘this time I will love you in the way that you need to be loved.’

I have no idea where that sentence came from. I don’t know if what I said meant anything to her at all. What I do know is that I picked up a pebble then, and threw it towards the sea — and then, because that didn’t seem quite enough, another, and then another. It was that kind of moment: the kind of moment that needs to be punctuated somehow, the kind of moment when the whole wide world seems to hold its breath and gather around your heart to listen. It was the moment I found myself alone with the blue of the sky and the blue of the sea, with the brown of the sand and the white of the sea foam, with the wind dancing all around me and with this promise shining clear inside my heart: this time, I will love you like you need to be loved.

I didn’t know it then, but I had just began to find my way home.

July 2001. Paris.

The train rushed out of Paris at a speed that made the lights of the suburbs blur, or at least that’s how I remember it to be. We stood by an open window with the wind on our faces and the thrill of being there rushed into my heart at a similar speed, making the fear and the worry and the loneliness that had been residing there blur as well. I was on a train leaving Paris at midnight. That fact alone was enough to send goosebumps down my arms.

You could, somewhat arbitrarily but no less truthfully for that, say that this was the moment I was born into my new life — tired, heartbroken, and excited. For years, this had been the kind of thing I didn’t even dream of but longed for occasionally; the kind of thing that I considered out of the reach of my young-university-student-in-northern-Greece self; the kind of thing other people did, people I sort of hoped to grow into one day. And suddenly there I was, in France, on the train, moving oh so fast into the night, my old life in tatters all around me, my new one as yet unknown to me.

A few weeks before that I had sat in a patch of struggling grass in my northern-Greek-hometown with my young-university-student friend and asked him to come on a trip to Europe with me. “But wouldn’t you rather we went to a Greek island?” he replied, which I very much wouldn’t. That day I walked home in the heat feeling forlorn in every sense of the word –sad and lonely and abandoned– because for once I had the money to go on my dream holiday, and, as usual, I had no one to go with.

Twelve years later –a few weeks ago, in fact– he reminded me of this moment and all I could do was laugh and thank him sincerely from the bottom of my heart, because without his refusal to come with me I would never have been desperate enough to make plans with an almost-stranger on the internet, an almost-stranger with a story that was different-but-similar to mine, an almost-stranger that apparently shared enough of my dreams and my craziness to be found next to me in the dark corridor, as the train rushed out of Paris at a speed that made the lights of the suburbs blur, as we stood there with the wind on our faces and years of yet-undreamed-of adventures ahead of us, as my world began to grow.

June 2001. Thessaloniki.

He ran to close the windows because of an approaching thunderstorm. There is nothing special about this in itself: thunderstorms come, people go and close windows. It’s an ordinary enough experience. What was not-so-ordinary this time around was that he was in Boston, halfway across the world from where I was sitting, and we had been having a conversation. I had struck a conversation with a perfect stranger on the internet over a song by a band I did not know, and it had turned out to be lovely.

In fact, in a display of serendipity or generosity or grace on the part of the universe that was as spectacular as it looked unremarkable, all of them turned out to be lovely, the song and the conversation, the band and the stranger. The song captured something of the pain I had pushed to the back of my heart, and so made it a bit easier to carry; I would grow to love the band so much I would end up naming a three-year-long adventure after another one of their songs; the stranger would end up inviting me to visit him across the ocean, which I would never do; and the conversation, oh, the conversation was my first encounter with that inexplicable, miraculous experience of truly meeting someone on the internet — of how, against all odds and expectations, this can work better on the internet than it does in real life.

Michael and I didn’t become best friends. He didn’t even stay in my life for long. He hang around for a while, said something lovely things, then faded out; a year later I sought him out again and we repeated this —he hang around for a while, said some lovely things, faded out– and that was the end of that. But despite the briefness and the ephemeralness of these connections there was something in them: something in the way that they sprouted and blossomed, so unexpectedly; something in the way that they sparkled and shone, so brightly; something I didn’t know existed but which I seemed to have been looking for nonetheless. Something that made me smile widely to myself as I sat alone in front of the computer screen, as he ran to close the windows.

Being able to stand outside at night time without a coat on felt as such a gift after the kind of never-ending winter we had been having in England. As I stood outside the airport in the dark, with the wind on my face and the smell of the Athenian March night all around something within me yawned, stretched, and started to slowly unfurl.

On a long, meandering walk on a chilly Sunday afternoon I took photos of trees, of rooftops, of churches with their crosses, of skylines, of the way the sunlight fell against it all; I came home sunstruck, grumpy, with my head full of colours and and the phrase ‘reaching for the sky’ on my mind.

For my birthday we travelled a short way south, to the seaside, and found ourselves sitting on a little concrete pier as the sun set, as dusk fell, as the lights of the stars in the sky and the boats in the sea came on; and in that space created between the departing day and the approaching night I could feel myself expanding, waiting, listening for something I could not make out yet.

There came a night when life seemed to be made up mostly of suffering, of little else besides it. I lay in bed unable to sleep, unable to do anything but catalogue the disappointments, the missed connections, the uncrossed distances — and I waited, half-patiently, half-gratefully, for the tidal wave of sadness to recede. When it did, late the next night, it left me suddenly, temporarily so awake to the wonder of this world that I was lost for words, breathless and trembling. It hurt almost as much.

Sometimes you simply fall in love. It is as if love is a puddle waiting patiently for you to come around the corner –skipping with joy, perhaps, or walking fast, intent on your feet and yet absent-minded, or, as was the case for me, unfurling, sunstruck, waiting, breathless, trembling– and step into it. One moment you are dry and unaware and the next you find yourself with wet feet and sparkling eyes, suddenly awake to a new world, and nothing will ever be the same.

Unfurling, sunstruck, waiting; breathless and trembling; wet and sparkling and awake; I think I’m going to stay.

This is for Georgia, who said she didn’t understand.

1. I stood on one side of the wooden gate; she sat on a bench some way away on the other; our eyes met.

She was four years old at the time, four-and-three-quarters to be precise: a round little face, pink waterproof overalls, her hair in bunches. I was almost twenty-seven: deep in transition, not any longer the person I had been before, not yet the person I would become. She looked at me, and in that moment she was as big as she was little; I looked at her, and in that moment I was as strong-and-brave-and-true as I was lost-and-scared; and as her clear, steady gaze was matched by mine her eyes seemed to say, “oh good, you are here.” As if she had never expected anything less from me but she was happy to see that I was carrying out my part of the plan nonetheless.

She was five and a half when she told everyone I would be her teacher. We didn’t quite believe her, but she knew what she was talking about. She was six-and-a-quarter on the morning she walked down the wooden plank bridge we had build for the start-of-school ceremony. I stood on the other side: twenty-eight, finding my way, ready to catch her.

In the three-and-a-half years that followed, the years in which I was her teacher, I sometime thought back to all of this — always with wonder, often with the sense that I was exactly where I ought to be.
 

2. Places can do this too: take for example the East Coast of Scotland, or, to be more specific, the hills of Fife as seen for the first time through a train window, on the summer of my first big adventure. It had been grey all day, and raining on and off, but as we left Edinburgh the sun burst through the clouds giving me my first experience of that common but exquisite British summer experience, sun-after-rain, causing my heart to burst into something as well, something like joy-after-having-been-scared. The sky was blue, and high, and ever-present, the hills were greener than green, the sunlight slanting and golden yellow, and it was all so new to my southern self, so delightful in its differentness to everything I’d known — and yet a part of me was resonating with a strange sense of recognition, as if the landscape itself was whispering to me, saying, in its own quiet way: “you are here.”

In time this feeling faded –these days the railway line from Edinburgh to Dundee does not call my name in the way that it once did– but for a summer or two Scotland was the place to be, and Dundee sometimes felt like home.
 

3. This is what Athens is doing to me at the moment, what it is doing to me again — it has done it once before, which is perhaps why it is so good at it. It seems to be singing to me with a hundred voices, all of them saying the same thing: “you are here.” What am I to do but listen?

June 2001. Thessaloniki.

I ran up and down the corridor, so full of joy that it was overflowing; I simply couldn’t help it, I had to run. I ran up and down the corridor like little children do, or like my puppy would, later, when he came to live with us. I ran up and down the corridor, thinking ‘they like me they like me they like me,’ disbelief and relief and excitement mixing in my heart, all framed by the improbable but quietly insistent idea, lingering somewhere in the back of my head, that this was the beginning of a new era in my life.

This was just as well — I really needed a new era. Everything I’d known and loved and relied upon was falling apart or losing its meaning, or both. I did not understand why it had to be like this, and it scared me so much I could only think about it in short bursts, but I knew it; and I knew I had to find a way out of the life that I had had, or go down with it. I did not want to go down with it, this I also knew, and so I looked for a way out with all the determination and hope my broken heart could muster — which was rather a lot. What people perceived as my braveness and adventurousness later that summer was fuelled, largely, by a desperate need to reinvent myself.

So when I packed up the story of the previous few years’ birthdays, labelled it ‘My life in six wishes’ and posted it off to a large number of mysterious strangers on the internet –all claiming to be as interested as I was in that equally mysterious thing, ‘life as Belle and Sebastian fan’– I must have put some of myself in it, and it must have shone a little, because there I was, running up and down the corridor; and pausing, breathless, to attempt to explain to my puzzled mother why it was that the fact that five people wrote back to say that they liked what I said meant quite so much.

I wrote something, and five people wrote back to say that it had touched them. Much more than I knew at the time, this was indeed the start of something.

If Honey (without whom the large number of mysterious strangers that was known as the Sinister mailing list would never have come together) or Linda (who was one of the five people who wrote to me) are still hanging around after all this time I would like to say this one more time: thank you, and thank you, and thank you. ‘The start of something’ is many things, I am sure, but also a very wordy song by Voxtrot that I have loved very, very much.

It’s windy today. Very windy. Crazy windy. I went out on my bike this afternoon –I have a bike now– and I could barely move into the head wind, even on flat land. I had to let go of the handlebars to catch my hat, which didn’t help. I pretty much gave up on cycling after that, and concentrated on drinking coffee instead. The wind was cold –cold but not freezing– and playful, and the sky was brilliant blue. In England at the end of January, this is gift not to be taken lightly, so I sat and gathered wind and sun until I got too cold, and even a while longer.

I walked home a little lighter than I’d been when I left.

It was such a good idea. I would ‘remember the magic:’ I would write about the major magical moments of my life. I’d write about them in the order in which they happened, not in an attempt to write an autobiography, but only to bring some discipline into this undertaking — discipline that would, I hoped, work to sustain my inspiration. In turn, this exercise would work to remind me that I have, in fact, come across quite a lot of magic in my life, thus opening up my eyes to the possibilities of further magic. It would, in short, ‘beget new magic.’ While I was at it, I would find my voice again, or at least my ability to write. Oh, and I would post every day for the month of November.

Except that’s not quite how things turned out. I lasted thirteen days — which is not too bad, all things considered. And I did get somewhat unstuck, it’s true. By the end of the first week I could just sit down, think of a moment, and confidently wait for the writing to come. But instead of a renewed faith in the magicalness of the world I was left with a renewed sense of despair — the despair that haunted me in the summer of 2001, which is to say after Constantin and I had ran out of opportunities to miss; which continued to haunt for the years that followed; which was still, evidently, lurking somewhere in the dark recesses of my heart last November.

There was a lot of magic in those years, in that summer in particular, but it was all of the even though kind: even though my world as I knew it had fallen to bits, even though I lost what was dearest to my heart, even though I couldn’t imagine how to go on, even then, great things happened. They were full of good things, these years — songs that pointed the way, places to travel to and explore, friends that warmed my heart. They were the years in which my world grew and grew until it was big enough for me, and also the years in which I grew and grew until I became myself. But even so, there was a hole in my heart, because I’d once found something precious and then lost it again.

There was this one time, perhaps the second or third time we made love, in my room, in my parents’ flat, which wasn’t the best of choices but it was better than wandering around town in the bitter cold, and not making love at all — there was this time when he kissed me gently and said, in the dark, “I will protect you from everything; I can’t stop it from happening, but I will be like a sponge, and wipe it all away,” and I knew just what he meant. The thing is, Constantin and I, despite our numerous and significant differences, we have this one thing in common: we look at the way people move through the world with the same question in our eyes. For that one moment, he knew what it was like to be me, and he had taken this into his heart. As far as I am aware, that was the one time in my life I was looked at in the way that I look at others.

I believed him.

He didn’t live up to that, you know that by now. Of course he didn’t, you’re thinking: he was a boy, it is a tall order, there was so much in the way. I know that, and, mostly, I knew it then, too; and yet the fact that after a while he didn’t even try broke my heart. I took it personally, of course I did, I thought he didn’t love me enough because I wasn’t good enough. All of which is nonsense, of course, but still. For years, I wondered if anyone would ever love me as he had. Eventually I worked out that it didn’t matter, that people love you in their own different ways, and that this is a gift in itself, and I was happy with that. I am happy with that. But I still wonder if there will ever be another moment like that. I fear that there will not. And I dare not hope, for fear of having my heart broken, or of appearing like a fool.

Oh Dimitra. You know better than that.

May 2001. Thessaloniki.

There was magic when we were together. As long as we could keep from sulking and from arguing it would be there, between us, turning being together into worthwhile activity in itself. I have so many memories of it.

Cleaning our flat in preparation for a dinner party, one May evening, I mopped myself into a corner and ended up lying on the sofa, waiting for the floor to dry, my heart bursting with happiness.

Sitting on the front balcony on a bright June morning, having breakfast, listening to the sounds of the neighbourhood, cars rolling by, people talking, the collared doves cooing.

Sitting next to each other on a wall on the island of Mykonos in July, or was it August? A temporary truce between us, ice lollies in our hands, we swung our legs against the wall as we waited for the bus, sunburned and salty, and, no doubt, beautiful.

A night in September when I stepped on some mayonnaise on the pavement outside some fast food place. I looked down and said that it was whipped cream, and he laughed at me and teased that it might be grease from the the Yellow Submarine — implying that I tend to see the world as better than it is.

A November morning when we got to the film festival just in time to see ‘Together’, sitting on the stairs because we hadn’t bothered to book tickets, and we had breakfast in the dark, sneakily. When we walked out we found the gulf bathed into the bright diffused sunshine that only a Thessalonikian November can provide, and we walked along the seafront feeling as if we belonged.

Sitting in the café where he worked with a new Harry Potter book and a lovely new umbrella, while the rain fell outside.

Walking through the night on the first hours of New Year’s Day, on my way to him.

But despite the magic and despite the almost transcendental love we had for one another we eventually ran out of moments like these. We split up, officially, sometime in February. That meant that he went out on his own a lot, and he ignored me when he felt like it; but we still lived together, in twin rooms at the back of the flat; we still made love; and we still argued.

“But why is it that you want to be with me?” he shouted.

I was surprised. That was a genuine question, thrown into the inanity of the argument. Our arguments had stopped making a sense a long time ago. By that time, sixteen months after we had first got together, he liked me as much as he was scared of me, and I was angry with him nearly as much. He was pushing me away, running away, and I hated myself because I wanted to hold on so badly, but knew it only made it worse.

“Because when I’m with you I’m ten times as strong. I feel like I could take on the world,” I said, sincerely, wondering.

“Yes,” he replied, entirely unexpectedly. “It’s like that for me, too.”

And then, somehow, we resumed arguing.

Oh, the missed opportunities. Sometimes I think they’re all we really had.

‘We’ll never get to Paris now’ is a Belmondo song, which you may be able to download here. There is also a wonderful Pinefox version, which you can find here. Go listen to it.

April, 2000. Thessaloniki.

One of the most beautiful moments of my life.

We were both back from church, from different churches, because he felt he had to attend with his family and I was partial to a small Byzantine church with a tree-filled courtyard. I had walked home nursing the flame of my candle and lit a lantern on my bookcase, which cast the only light we had. The scent of roses, a few dozens of pink and red roses that my mum had given me, drifted out to the balcony where we sat. The balcony faced out onto the empty triangular space between some blocks of flats, an ugly and uninspiring place usually — but that night, it was magical. There was nobody out there but us, no light, no sound, everyone was away or asleep, and so we whispered. Not that we had much to say, we were content to just be, together alone in that warm, soft, sweet-smelling night. Sleepy, I lay my on the railing, and he put his hand out to make a pillow for me — and in that space between wakefulness and sleep it felt like our balcony was boat sailing in a sea of darkness, of longing, and of tenderness.

That night we slept together, with the windows open and the scent of roses in the air.