leaving

today's thought on my favourite hobby

I can only live expecting a next sojourn; gifting myself dead space among certainties. Nothing out there like the thrill of setting off, the abrasive noise of a plane, of an opening, of a question. The great in-between.

I am leaving for Athens tomorrow with my parents, so my life can be left behind in the same way I imagine you have to hoist yourself from your seat in the case of an emergency landing ——— guilt absolved in the face of momentum and urgency and dazzling motion, of whichever direction.

Are there gauche losers with warmth in their eyes in the suburbs of Athens? Am I finally getting prodded in a convertible this summer, immutable in my seat? Is there totalizing light in Greece, electric water (yes, there is), some form of catharsis? I’ve been down there and sat in the exact same beach chair years and years following, but I still think of it the solemn way I am thinking of death: sweet and unerring and riveting. I reminisce about it in the template of an Instagram story, in a frappe that only the Greek can make, and incidentally the guys down the street at Lorentzplein, serving it by the pseudotavern with gaudily blue chairs in the middle of the trashcan that is lorentzplein in and of itself ————— flashy little imports beckoning into the possibilities of the real deal. I pass it by as I walk to work, all astray in my Greek reverie. How I hate mapping my way through here when i’m late for tram 15 (literally every day), it’s nauseating and I get all brain-zappy in the same way Margaret Qualley did in The Substance when she forgot to switch back to her less promising form. Something is not holding in Lorentzplein, something is not holding in my body when I have to confront my surroundings. I don’t know what the seagulls are doing here, apart from aggrandising this weird saccade of lorentzplein and the southern coasts, of each of their individual materialities diverging and confounding. It’s the same every morning when I walk to the office, the IJ pooling its smell almost ostentatiously beneath my mechanical feet: fishy and improper to the time of the day, to the moment in my life; mean teaser of my little heaven.

I am in the tram, and I am late, and I plan for all the days of my absence and naturally, this very specific form of transience (trams and time and thoughts and hypotheticals) is fruitful and tantalizing. I keep overworking myself dutifully, a facsimile of a breadwinning ant, blindly squirming in an escape from a grimy life burried underground. At work (but also just in general, in this whole city) it’s so silent, too silent for imagination, and it only makes me think of the Greek cicadas yelling all day, their song fooling me as a young child into believing it was the sound of warmth, of distance from home. Here it is anything but warm, and I dressed so inappropriately today and I caught a glimpse of my slinky feet in their cold tremor, bolted in the path of whatever place I am affixed towards, my mind stooping into the Aegean, a mild sunburn, a dimension-warping nap in the lurid UV blaze.