It may seem ridiculous now, considering my age, but it’s been only in the last few years that I’ve understood that independence and love need not be mutually exclusive, that we don’t have to give up one to have the other. Fady and Dimitra, both independent, both continuing to grow, to do their work, to make friends, yet something so solid between them. My parents had given me a controlling, smothering, nearly aggressive love, and I had never allowed myself, not with Aris and not with any man before him, to give myself to a relationship. How could it be that it took me until I had nearly turned forty to begin to know something of love, that I’d spent the greater part of my life living inside the rigid boundaries I’d crafted for myself?
I had not realized what I had been missing. The beauty of growing up with a person. I had had that with Aris, in a way. Sometimes we’d lived together, other times apart; sometimes we broke up and would see other people, but then I’d come back to Greece or he’d come to the States and all would be forgiven. Yet in my mind I always imagined we’d end up together. Whatever that means. He was for me a representation not only of love but of Greece, of the place my parents and I had left behind, and as such I had somehow thought we were beyond the more common stresses of a relationship. We had become proficient at long distance and I mistook this for our relationship’s strength. He was always waiting for the relationship to begin, whereas I’d thought what we had was the relationship. Maybe I’d given him strength to move on. A solid foundation from which to leap.
I didn’t drive back to the port that night, opting to stay in the guesthouse. As I crept through the gate, down the stairs, I couldn’t help but peek in Nefeli’s window, which was wide open, the light on. But she wasn’t there. The bed wasn’t made, a tangle of sheets. I glanced around the courtyard, expecting her to come up behind me.
When I got back to the guesthouse, I went to the small bottom drawer of the bureau, the one where I always left my things. A few T-shirts, underwear, a few notebooks, and a plastic baggie full of makeup and pens. For a moment, I hesitated. Like Schrödinger’s cat, they were both there and not there until the moment I opened the drawer. I tried to remember the firsts: the first time I’d slept here, the first time I came to think of this space as my own, the first time I learned Nefeli was sick. I could barely recall a moment. I could barely recall chronology. I could barely recall what was mine.
I’ve always slept soundly on the island, but Nefeli’s earlier scorn had unhinged me, as had being back in this place without Aris. I drifted in and out of awakenings, strange dreams, and paralyzed wakefulness. Finally, I was overcome with the desire to be outside.
Three o’clock in the morning, midweek, and the village was quiet, so quiet I felt exposed, half expecting faces to emerge from the shadows, or figures to hold lanterns to my face. I focused on objects: doorknobs, the shadowy center of a tree trunk, an alcove, or a plant beneath a door.
Strolling through those narrow streets at that hour, I experienced the same eerie sensation I’d felt sleepwalking through my own house as a child, unable to recognize it. I had to ask myself a few times if I was indeed asleep.
When I reached Thanassis’s, I relaxed at the familiarity, though now that it was closed, empty, the huge plane tree seemed different, the restaurant spacious, cavernous. I walked right up the three steps and sat at a table, as if expecting to be served.
My mother sat at the bar with my father and several other friends, and Thanassis was behind it. A carafe of raki in front of them, a haze of cigarette smoke. I didn’t recognize all of them. One of them was Traianos, a friend I’d loved, who died the night of my thirtieth birthday in a horrible, senseless accident. A woman with long, straight black hair, her back to me, swayed her hips, and when she turned for a moment it looked like Nefeli, but it was not. There was no sadness in their faces. They were laughing, singing, drinking. For a brief second my mother caught my eye and she smiled—something warm and playful—but then she turned back to her friends. Somehow I understood this might be her last drink.
The chairs had been placed on the tables. I sat down at my usual space, in the corner, where the seats lined the walls, a long booth along the side of the restaurant, facing the open canyon. I took one chair down and propped my feet atop it. From there I could see the tiny cemetery lit up, the lights from other villages, all the way down to the lights that lit the port, still bustling and alive at this hour. I felt sleepy, my body suddenly heavy. I wasn’t ready to go back to bed, but I felt as though I could sleep right there.
Moonlight drenched the taverna. The village was so still I felt hypervisible, as if I were walking through the deserted terrain of one of Rami’s video games. I took a photo of the landscape in front of me: a physical correspondence to remember this numbness. The lights from a few clusters of houses lit up the side of the mountain. If I leaned over the edge of the half wall—up to my chest—I’d fall down into the ravine, into the valley. I felt
