“You go through your day so oblivious of the world here. I don’t mean that to offend you. I don’t mean it to say that you don’t look outside your life. I mean that you don’t understand the way things here kill you in small ways. I don’t judge the people here anything they do. Not the affairs, or the drunkards, or the women who don’t drink at all and only dress in black and pray every morning at dawn. It’s all the same thing, different answers to the same question. What to do with a life that has no future and never had a future. I’ve lived my entire life within five minutes of my childhood home, Nathan. It was not easy growing up here. My father was not a happy man and my mother could only see religion, and nothing else. My father was very brilliant. He designed cars and bikes and other things. He could fix anything. He would sometimes take my sister and me out for rides in the mountains on his bikes, just flying through the groves and down mountains. It was so unsafe but we loved it. He should have lived somewhere else, but because of the war and the famine he had to stay. His unhappiness hurt my mother. It hurt her very much. I don’t know why they had been together, maybe because they had once been happy together, but by the time I was old enough to understand, all they did was hurt each other. My mother could not understand why my father could not be happy living here. She did not want to leave. I was very much like my mother, at first. My sister was always out with my father and I was always helping my mother cook and clean. I prayed with her in the mornings. I wore the braid, and the conservative clothes. I spent a lot of time with her. My father would go out and drink with friends, play cards and backgammon. It was the life they lived, the men stranded here. He was not violent, but just very, very sad. Sometimes he would take an axe into the woods at night and come home with hands bloody. It hurt my mother so much. She did not know how to fix it. So we prayed. My sister married at 18 but then she could not have a child. My mother blamed her and my father for resisting God. So one day we all went to Tsampika, the monastery for infertile women. My sister was so desperate to have a child that she went. They make the women wear a wedding dress and crawl to the top of the steps on their knees, wailing. It’s so humiliating, to watch your own sister like that. But what I felt was validation: I had been right and she had been wrong. She crawled and wailed with my mother, and my father sat at the bottom drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes. Later that summer, my cousin came home from University in Athens. He was 23 and I had just turned 15. It was the first time he’d seen me ‘beautiful,’ you could say, and he was so much smarter and more composed than the boys here. He made me feel grown up, he made me feel like I was bigger than this place. I think it helped me to understand my father. I fell very much in love with him. We would argue about religion, and he would tease me, and I would feel so foolish for believing in God. I began sleeping through morning prayers with my mother. I found excuses to go to my uncle’s house to see my cousin. He was so cool, like he was unaffected by this place, like he knew he would never have to be here. I’d come over to ask my aunt for butter or milk, and pretend not to notice him, and he’d be sitting there reading and watching me out the corner of my eye, and I felt something so strong inside me, some great fear and joy. It shocked me, that he could do that to me. That I could feel something for him that was so much stronger than anything I’d felt for my family, or for God. That I could want something so badly. He kissed me for the first time in September. We were at a traditional dance in our grandparent’s village in the mountains. He asked me if I wanted a cigarette. I don’t smoke but I wanted to be alone with him. So we went outside and walked down the street to the edge of the village. It was a cold night and we were looking at the stars and I was so scared I couldn’t say anything. I was shaking so hard. We stood there and I was watching my breath, and the shapes it made, and then he stepped in front of me and put his hands on my shoulders. I still remember what he said to me. ‘I’ve wanted to do this since the moment I saw you this summer.’ It was somehow perfect, even though now I think it sounds so stupid to anyone but me. But it made me want to cry, it was the greatest moment of my life. I dipped my head and he put his hand on my chin, looked at me, and kissed me. After that we snuck around to meet one another, going to the amphitheater in the groves, or meeting on abandoned beaches. He took my virginity in early December. We were inseparable after that. We found excuses to meet anywhere. Whenever his parents went out, I would be over there. We promised to marry, and he talked about the home we would have in Athens or New York. Far away from here. Looking back, I think maybe he was a dreamer. I guess that’s the term. He liked to dream. But now, I don’t know if he had any skills, or if he could work, or if he was only good at dreaming. But to a fifteen year old girl, dreaming is the best skill. Or, for me it was. He talked about businesses in Athens, businesses in New York. We’d lie in my parent’s bed smoking, laughing. So in love with the other body. So hungry for the other body. He’d dream about our house in New York, our kids going to good schools. It was so much what I wanted to hear. My life was so small. Everyone assumed I would marry one of the nice boys in town and be a very good wife. Even my own parents, or at least my mother thought that. All I was to them was a village girl who would someday be a village wife. That’s all. No one had any idea about me and my cousin. We hid it very well. Other boys would flirt with me, or try to take me out, but I barely even saw them. I was so young, I didn‘t know how we would go to New York, but I trusted him, I trusted he loved me so much that he would take me there. We were together that whole spring and summer. God, it was the most beautiful time of my life. I floated through that spring I was so happy. I didn’t know that kind of happiness existed. Now, of course, I think back on that and wonder if it would have lasted. I wonder if my parents were ever that happy together. I wonder if that happiness would have lasted or if his dreams would have died and he would have blamed me. And then I would have blamed him. Or if I would have outgrown him and realized he was nothing more than dreams. I guess it doesn’t matter. He died in a motorcycle crash in August. It was a Saturday afternoon. His parents were out so we made love all day. But I had to go help my mother with dinner. So I remember running out the door, kissing him good bye, not stopping in the doorway to talk to him a little longer, to see the way he looked at me one last time. I was in such a hurry, so worried about being late. I was angry at him for keeping me so late. Maybe I was already coming to the end of it, no longer appreciating the little ways he touched me or looked at me. That night his mother came over crying. I knew what happened immediately, the way we all know certain things in our stomachs. The way intuition feels so real that it almost feels like destiny, like you’ve dreamed of a scene before it happens. When I saw her in the doorway, it was like remembering a dream, like, ‘Oh, yes, this is what happens.’ He’d been riding his motorcycle, which he loved to do, just like my father. And a truck coming the other way, at that single moment, had it’s back tire come loose. Someone hadn’t tightened it enough. It came off and hit his bike before he had time to do anything. Bad luck. Just bad luck. Perfect timing for bad luck. I thought I would never get over that. I couldn’t mourn openly, because no one knew about us. It was so hard, because I couldn’t tell anyone. I was destroyed. I cried and cried alone at night. I thought about suicide. I wore a black bra and panties every day for a year. He liked blacks bras and panties. I was such a child. I thought I was done with passion. I stopped believing in God, of course. That was a rupture I couldn’t mend. I would openly mock my mother, which I regret now. I would taunt her and my sister while they prayed for my sister’s fertility. ‘There is no God,’ I hissed, ‘and if there is, he’s condemned this family.’ It was so hard for my mother. My father spent more and more time away. Eventually he left for good. Then, I started to feel a little better. It surprised me. I remember once I went a whole hour without thinking about him, and that seemed like such a miracle. A sad miracle, too, because it meant I was losing him. I didn’t want to hurt but I wanted to live. I couldn’t hold onto him and live my life. Around then Petro started talking to me. I’d known him for as long as I can remember. Everyone knew him and his brother, Mike. Mike who owns the bar in Haraki, is his brother. Their father owned the café we now own, and they all worked there. Everyone knew one of them would eventually run it, but no one thought it would be Petro. We always saw them at church and at the festivals and dances. Dances were very popular back then, back when life here was completely quiet and isolated. It was all we had. We had them every few months. Now it’s every few years, and none of the kids know the dance steps. But we all knew the steps then, and sometimes Petro would dance with me. He was very shy, unlike his brother. Almost too shy. He was so sensitive. He was a few years older than me, and we talked in school sometimes. After my cousin died, not many boys talked to me because I was so sullen and detached and mean to them. But Petro still talked to me. I remember he would sometimes wait for me in the morning and then be too shy to talk. I don’t think I felt anything for him at first. I could not see past my own sadness. There was nothing else. But then I started to see him. He started to write me letters, funny letters, or sweet letters. He’s so funny in quiet ways. I came to like his shyness and sensitivity. He wanted to leave this place, too, in his own way. He was too sensitive for it. Not like his brother. His brother would get into fights, and was known for breaking women’s hearts. Petro would just walk quietly. I finally had to kiss him one night, not because I wanted to but because I thought, well, might as well be him.” She rolls over and looks at the ceiling. “That’s unfair. I came to love him slowly. So slowly that it surprised me. There wasn’t a point where it hit me. It was just one day I realized I loved reading his letters. And that I expected him to be outside in the morning. And that on the mornings he wasn’t there, I felt a strange absence, a yearning that I could not name. I remember thinking, ‘Oh, this is love, too.’” She sits up in bed now, fumbles for her cigarettes. “I don’t think I ever wanted anything back then because it just seemed pointless to want it. It’s very difficult to get out of here if you’re a woman. It’s very difficult to do it without a man. Greece, Rhodes, these aren’t places that are made for women to succeed as their own person. It would take a great amount of courage to leave on your own. There was never talk of leaving on your own. Of going to school, or having dreams more than being a wife. I liked dancing. I liked playing piano. But I never thought that maybe I could do them for my life. So when Petro asked me to marry, I said yes, because he was kind and funny and because he talked about wanting to leave. And we were happy. We had our son and talked about going to Athens. But then Petro’s father had a stroke and couldn’t run the café. And Mike had opened his own place in Haraki and said he couldn’t run both of them. Petro was too kind. He was always going to be there for his family. That kindness, maybe it has hurt our lives. It is always other people before him. Which I love, of course. But we were saving money to leave. We had our son. And when he started working at the café he never said it would be permanent, and then we had our daughter and I was so happy being a mother, that soon we couldn’t leave. But I was ok then. I was happy with my kids in a way I never thought I would be happy. It was like feeling I had found what I was supposed to do, except I had never thought that I was supposed to do anything. I don’t talk about my children because they remind me of you and because it hurts to know that they have gone off into the world and now what do I fill their absence with? I made sure that my daughter wanted things, and wanted her own things. She was going to want her own life. Petro understood, I think. I love him for understanding. They were very beautiful years with our children. Spending the winters in the orange groves and by the fire at the café. The summers at the beaches. This is such a good place for children. You don’t realize that it’s trapping you, because it’s so safe. I would come home from the café and find the three of them asleep in bed together, and I would feel so much happiness and love and also so much sadness at the smallness of this life, at how quickly it was going to leave me. And I started to miss my cousin in those years, as my children grew older, grew away from me and into their own people. I started to wonder what life I had missed. There were days when I felt like he died all over and I would cry in back of the café and my husband would look at me and would not know what to say, or what was wrong. He would look at me with such confusion, and that hurt me even more. It was losing that future. That was the loss I felt. Feel. What was past, that is always to be lost, eventually. Memory is always lost, no? But that future I could look to and imagine and say, ‘Now we would be in New York,’ or, ‘Now we would be at the beach in New Jersey with our two kids.’ That loss of future is so hard, and people do not understand it until they have also lost it. You lose it again and again. It runs next to you, just out of reach, like some ghost life.” She bows her head and smiles, closes her eyes. “God, he would take me out on this bike, this motorcycle that he loved so much, the one that he would die on. And he would take me riding, especially at night. We’d push the bike out of town and ride into the mountains to see the stars. He loved that bike and it was such shit. Sometimes we would trap ourselves up in the mountains because the bike would die and we would have to hitchhike back to the village and I would have to sneak through backyards just to get back in my window. And one day in summer - it was a hot summer, brutally hot - he came riding up to our house with this huge grin and this fucking giant watermelon under his arm. I watched him riding on the street, wobbling like a sick bird back and forth, the watermelon under one arm, the other trying to steer. And he waved to my mother at the end of our drive way and held up this watermelon. I think in that moment she knew. It is such a dumb cliché, but it is true. Mothers always know with daughters. It was like that with me and my daughter, too. It was winter when it happened. It was like this winter: very much rain, too much. And Sophie was still in school in Archangelos, and she would have to walk home from the bus in the rain, if it rained. And one day I was standing in the kitchen listening to the rain, and I checked the clock without having any idea the time and thought, ‘Sophie will be home soon.’ So I went to the door, the way I sometimes would when I was younger and Sophie was very little, and I watched, and soon she was there, walking in the rain with no umbrella, just walking in the cold rain with this boy I knew from around town, a quiet boy I’d never heard her mention before. And they weren’t holding hands, or touching. They were just walking. But I knew. The way she didn’t notice the rain or care. Her posture. She was such a beautiful thing to me right then, so much a woman, and I could not believe how that had happened, because I also felt like I was still in that very same moment with my own mother, running out to help my cousin with the watermelon, my mother watching. Like I was somehow myself and my mother in one moment, or like she was opening some window in that moment for me to look through so I could someday see myself. Does that make sense at all to you? I don’t think it does to me. My words can’t get too close to it or it disappears. But I knew then. And my mother knew. And she suddenly had errands to run that afternoon. We were alone and we made love in a cold shower, laughing, and then we stood in the kitchen in our towels cutting up the watermelon with a huge sharp knife, hacking it into pieces so the pulp went everywhere. We kept eating, our tongues and lips and teeth turning red, seeds slipping down our necks and down his chest. Laughing. Just laughing so much for no reason. And how fucking good that watermelon tasted, how sweet and perfect. I will never be able to eat watermelon again in my life, never so much as see watermelon, without thinking about that afternoon with him. Ever. I think I could be 105 and have lost every single memory of this life but I will still remember that summer afternoon if I see a watermelon. I just…I remember thinking, ‘We have a whole life of this ahead of us.’ And I guess that’s what all sixteen year old girls in love think. It’s not special or remarkable, but it feels like it is. And that’s what I thought. ‘We have a whole life of this left.’ Four months later he was dead.” She’s crying now, softly but visibly. I take her hand at her side. “We expect some kind of symmetry to endings. To the deaths of our lovers. And to our own deaths. We think things will be made clear. Nothing is made clear. My cousin died and I never said good bye and he didn’t see it coming. My father eventually left my mother because they were so unhappy. His drinking got worse and he ended up in the hospital on Skylos. My mother would visit him and they would walk and talk in the yard. He died on a Tuesday, suddenly. No one was there. They just found him in his room. My mother died three years later, on a Wednesday, walking home from the market. She just said, ‘My, I’m tired,’ sat down in the heat, and died. There was no symmetry, nothing atoned for or made right. My last interaction with her was an argument about jewelry of mine she didn’t like. That’s how it all ends, despite what we want to believe. But we still believe it will be different with our lives. That there will be some reckoning and some kind of answer. There’s neither. Especially not in a place like this. There are good moments and they end quickly, and then there is the long orderly decay. But that’s how you remember the good moments. They are the ruptures or voids in the system. The surprises that shock you from your habits. And we sometimes get those things here. A rupture.”