The thing I remember the most about Greece is the darkness of the sky, the emptiness of the sea and sky when the night came. The blue, of course, from the ocean at three in the afternoon, when the sun was at its peak, mostly reminded me that I missed my yearly ritual of reading Bluets by Maggie Nelson as the summer ended and the air got colder, and my heart felt some sort of longing that could not be cured, not by the last days of the solstice or the beginnings of a new one, crisp and red. Maybe my days of withering have stopped and instead, when I am on the phone in the hammock of a hotel run by a mother and son duo, in the far outskirts of the island named Paros, I can finally see the pink sunlight for what it is. I wish I had taken a photo of this light, but instead, I watched it change as the wind got louder around me and the matron of the hotel clocked out and undid her hair clip, switched her work flip-flops to her casual pair, and sat at the bar behind me to have a drink. The light. I wish I could describe the light, I wish I could have saved a piece of the light in my mirror compact or the underneath of my tongue, and when someone asks me about the light I could have opened my mouth and let them peer inside of it: the light was pink like a baby’s soft mouth eating equally-pink cotton candy, and then it melted into the orange of a tangerine, sitting in a field of trees surrounded by the noise of cicadas as the light turned green, like the color of the little flies eating the oranges from the inside, until the green turned blue to match the ocean’s temperature, then finally black, like the sand I sat on alone my first day here, watching father and daughter play in the water with a mountain behind them glittering the surrounding air with the artificial lights of the locals’ homes.
When it went dark and my friends and I put on lipgloss and tousled our salty hair and threw on whatever was in our suitcase and not wet, we walked a dirt road and watched the long dry wheat extend from their designated plot holes and through the weary moon, only visible through the one cloud that surrounded it in protection. We ordered fish, big whole fish and I plucked out the eyes with my fork to eat, and small anchovies, marinated in olive oil, laying on a bed of fava beds, their small bodies split in two ready for our devouring. We drank two bottles of wine and then the girls taught me how to drink ouzo, mixing tentatively with sparkling water in small glasses but I could not do it. The taste reminds me of a long car ride with my parents with nothing to snack on but anise mints from a Peruvian restaurant we frequented; the sky through the car window is similar to the one that joined us at that dinner, but the crashing of the waves against the cliff we are sequestered on is different, safer than the rain against the street we drove on. The cats in Greece are not afraid of humans, but hesitant to our touch, except when there are three dumb Americans at the table and they’ve ordered too much, so a piece of octopus is used as a haggling tool between us and feline. They curiously eat by us, and let us steal a few pets and some purr in enjoyment. Some are grabbed by waiters and nuzzled, some are left alone to sleep atop chairs and underneath patron’s feet. The cats in Greece are well taken care of, you almost feel bad for the house cat of America, confined to a collar and a dull window perch. Some, my friends in Athens tell me, are raggedy and dusty and missing a few toes or pieces of ear, but there are always little bowls of cat food left around for them. Waiting for the ferry to the airport I sit on the bench where a small cat is sleeping, and a Greek woman approaches it and takes out Tupperware filled with food to feed it, so the cat thanks her by moving onto her lap to snooze. How do you let them go, I wonder, as she puts the cat back down after a few pets and departs to her ferry. Later in Rome, waiting for a taxi I overhear a man behind me, in a thick British accent recounting how he found his now-dead cat outside a pub, where he sat having a pint on the plaza, and the cat jumped on his lap and stayed as he drank, now less alone. When it was time to go, I scooped her up and carried her home. We had four years with her and didn’t get another again. Our taxi came.
There were no cats at night in Santorini, when we stepped out for a late-night drink, perhaps because we accidentally found a pair of dogs (the only dogs in Santorini, it felt like) and we named the dogs, so the dogs followed us through the street and we thought it was cute until we realized what they were doing was hunting the cats hidden away for the night, stopping us every time they got a scent to attack. Everything changes in the right light, I think over a superfluous piña colada, which I ordered as a half-joke. The streets are quiet then we turn a corner and there are not only lights but music and the voices of men, huddled around small crookedly placed tables, with few women joining them. They like my friend, long blonde hair and glasses, and they ignore me, which I don’t mind. We talk about the past, we search for a better tomorrow, we let no words surround us, just the stares of the men and the smell of cigarette smoke coming from a woman seated next to us with long brown straight hair, a turquoise bracelet, a big laugh. What the fuck do we know about anything, I think, about love or memories or regret? I will say one thing definitively tonight and in five years, I will laugh at myself. What will we know after tomorrow, after this sleep, or the next? The pink flowers, Bougainvilleas, my friend swears are fake, but they are not, she’s just not used to their papery thinness. I remember these flowers from Miami, my first apartment where we lived with my grandma. In the same apartment is the room where she died, but before that, she collected aloe from a nearby plant while I buried my pet goldfish in a small patch of dirt. The Bougainvilleas bloom around us but not much else, Greece in September is arid, the olive trees stand alone in their bushes, and the grapes are saddened, close to the ground, the winery where we spend our first afternoon smells like wine and manure; a smell sour but satisfying.
Our last night together, we walked in the dark on another dirt road, this time with a chorus of dogs in our background. A, our newest companion wore the wrong shoes so I stayed behind walking with him, holding his hand. The girls walked faster down the slope away from our Airbnb, where the owner left his clothes still in the closet, until they looked like pale flecks in the night, two faerie running away from us slow and quiet humans. We crossed the street to a restaurant filled with cats, including a kitten I spoke English to, drunkenly, and he understood me with pensive eyes. The owner of the restaurant sat with us after our meal, pouring us pitcher after pitcher of his homemade wine. We spoke through Google Translate and he guessed all of our zodiac signs. Pointing at me, he says Toxótis, like me. Parthénos. Kriós. Léon. So much fire in the room that the warmth hovered above us, the leftover meats, and the shy cats, and our faces matched the color of the brass wine pitchers. I think now, somewhere on the internet, a transcript exists of our night, but we just let our digital silence linger in the empty room until the restauranteur took us home in his early-2000s BMW. I don’t remember the darkness of the night afterward, but I remember watching the setting sun through semi-closed eyes from my window before we got drunk, the reeds and chicken noises combining into one chitter, the faraway Greek coming from faraway neighbors, as A ate me out and I felt like a vast cradle of ocean, my orgasm blue, perhaps from all the blue in my past periphery — for once the sex was blue, a color I had never seen before, then yellow.
So much more yellow too, on our last island, as A and I drove in our small acrid green Peugeot towards the cliffs of Tinos, to a house with four tabby kittens blending with the empty fields they prowled, or slept on the backyard table or played amongst the tools scattered in the backyard, and a new set of old friends, another couple finding themselves on this strange island to celebrate love. The Peugeot, lovingly named Booger, took us through the winding roads up and then down, to eat more fish and submerged in crashing waves of a stranded beach, with a burnt blonde Greek woman and her pitbull our only company. We stopped at what we thought was a fossilized tree, then a fabled meteor, then a full myth. I kissed A under the dry mountains and above them, when a moon illuminated the fields of goats, grazing with empty eyes. I saw my oldest friend get married, the lace in her veil catching all the light of the island from the church window, all the light in Tinos, in Paros, in Santorini, all the light I saved in my mouth to show a stranger later. As an even older friend climbed a broken ladder and shook our nearby fig tree I saw the bride’s hands teaching me to properly cut pomegranates in my East Boston kitchen, with the light of four in the afternoon and the fruit’s red juice hurrying down her skin. That light came to wish her veil well too, and the light of her mother and I’s tears when she held me by my hands and said our girl is married. The light of the plaster plates, stacked neatly in cardboard boxes waiting to be smashed by the father of the groom in jubilant and masculine dance. The light, faint on the couch, where A and I sneaked off to so we could make out. The light from the fireworks and the pool and the cake, the smile of her groom whenever she touched him or said hi to his Greek guests, the light from the first bedroom she and I hung out in, the first pool we dipped into underneath the mango trees that scattered her childhood backyard, the first confession of guilt or hardship or anger — towards the world or to each other, the first hours-long phone call, the last hug before she moved abroad. How fast it was all changing, as we dropped my friends off at the port and then went back to the beach, to taste the salt of the Mediterranean a little more, so I could lick it off my lips as my body dried in the shallow island wind.
At one in the morning, the night after the wedding, A and I meet my beautiful, wisest, newly married friend for a drink. As the morning starts to turn, and the bottle is empty, I listen to them talk. They love me, have given me a love so palpable I can almost burst into a wet, salty, and drunk cry, because I love them more and more, with every sound of their voice, every laugh, every question they bounce off one another, then to me, then back onto our round table. My oldest soulmate and my newest one, meeting each other in this dry and holy land, the cliffs and the goats are still but the rooster is crowing. It’s a full moon, my friend knows. We hug goodbye and I see, one final time, the color of the ocean morphing as it does when the moon soaks into its surface.
Hello! I am back to writing after my travels, which were long and beautiful and also very tiring. Traveling is exhausting, although always worth it. I came back and my body crashed, so I slept and watched tv for two days straight while nursing a migraine that only broke this morning. Thank you, like always, for not only your support but also your patience in my writing this issue! Fotocopy #38 will be released on Friday, and then we are back to our Monday schedule.
I can write so much more about Oslo, Greece, and Rome, but I’ll spare you for now. It’s the same as my Mexico City writing, it’s hard to let it go from my heart and brain, but I know I’ll do it when the time is right. Writing this month has been hard, usually when I travel I carve out time for writing or painting, but this time around, with so many wonderful pals and events happening, it was hard to find space for myself to do that. Maybe that’s partially why my body crashed so hard coming back; it needed lots of time and space to breathe. I’m nervous that my seasonal depression is coming back in full force (laying around is not my thing, usually) so I’m excited to be back home and restart my creative routine.
I barely listened to music in Greece, but while writing this I played Dorothy Ashby’s album Afro-Harping on a loop. I think she’s one of the coolest and most innovative jazz musicians ever. It’s a great listen when I need to get into a creative groove, and it was a great companion as the light in the living room while I wrote this changed <3
On Monday, instead of writing (this is me being hard on myself) I laid around and watched three movies, including His Three Daughters on Netflix. It’s absolutely one of my favorite movies I’ve seen in a while. I’ve had a huge crush on Carrie Coon since I started watching The Gilded Age this past year, after my Downton Abbey obsession. All three actresses in it are phenomenal, and I love that the movie works so much like a play, watching it kind of spurred an old seed I have in my mind of one day writing a movie. I highly recommend it if you need a slow watch!
Yesterday my friend (and roomie!) Kelsey showed me a book she got, Some Trick by Helen DeWitt. DeWitt’s name sounded so familiar, so in between sleeping and watching bad tv I also googled her and found this amazing article from Vulture, Publishing Can Break Your Heart, in which DeWitt and her various struggles after publishing her first novel, the cult classic The Last Samurai, are profiled. I am extremely charmed by her wit and general grumpiness. Both her newest book and The Last Samurai are now on my reading list for the final months of the year.
I also can’t stop thinking about this piece linked in the article, in which DeWitt writes about her stalker. It’s a work I’ll keep coming back to for many more times.
On my travels, I took three books with me (I’m unwell). I got around to reading Service by Sarah Gilmartin, which is one of my favorite reads of the year. I learned so much about the Irish legal system, which reminded me of watching Anatomy of a Fall, for some reason. It was a great portrait of three people existing in the service industry, how the culture can suck you in and only in retrospect things look more fucked up than they seemed at first. The parts written from the Chef’s perspective were infuriating in the best way possible, a good writer can make me hate a terrible character, but a great writer makes me want to know more about said character anyway.
I also finished Conversations with Friends, which I liked more than my first read, maybe because I went in knowing the characters weren’t going to be likable so that softened any blow, but also maybe because I am older now than when I originally read it, so now I can see the characters as younger and therefore give them more grace? I don’t know. It was the first time a book made me feel old. Anyway, fuck you Sally Rooney I love you.
Finally, on my flight to Rome, I started Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino, and I fell in love with it from the first page. It’s the kind of book that makes me go fuck, I wish I wrote this, and also, fuck, writing weird things is so good and I want to do more of it. If you need something to let your mind dream, read this book.
I just took an edible, so I’m outta here but not without a photo of my soul sister, the most beautiful bride, who I am missing already and am sending much love to her and her man <3
Til Friday!
-gabo