Entry #9

   Someone I knew died recently - he passed away noiselessly in early October and it was not until recently that word of his death spread quite like fire from mouth to mouth. Or, to be more exact, from screen to screen. In a year full of ups and downs, heading from one small disaster to a new one, this one death shocked and shattered the quietness of quarantine. 

  I thankfully spend the second quarantine by myself, in complete isolation using the excuse of empty days to empty my mind and balance whatever there is left of it after a roller coaster of a year. A lot of things remain unprocessed and I do wonder not just when the world will go into some sort of balance but also how long it will take for each community and individual to do so as well. In a state of collective trauma that varies in levels, reality is sometimes difficult to stay in touch with. 

  And that is exactly how I have been experiencing life lately: in a state of disassociation as if most components are not real, as if we have entered a parenthesis that at the end of we will be able to go back to our lives as we knew them from before, except not all components of our past will be there. And this crisis has pointed out all the many ways in which our previous reality was fragile at best.

  But I digress. On a quiet evening in Athens, looking at the building from across the street at the opposite apartment, death slid quietly in my DMs. For the first time I realized that there is no normality to go back to. For once everything opens back up, whenever that happens, whenever we can hug friends and acquaintances that we see on the street without wondering whether or not we have exposed each other irrevocably to harm, we won't go back to life as we knew it for that life will no longer be there. Going back to our favorite places, the bars and schools we frequented, we will realize that stepping out of our house will also feel like stepping in a photograph with holes in it. 

  We will go back, maybe, but not all of us. 

  And it makes you wonder, who will I go back to? How long and what quality of time do I have left with people I love? How have I been using it? How will I use it? Time feels more and more elastic but more often than not it's as if we're experiencing it on the verge of breaking. We feel the cracks around us seem to thicken, how do we grasp life truly back? 

  I struggle for the answers.

  I have not found one. 

  I hope you found the peace you craved in whatever you went. 

Entry #8

  I was not aware that the closing of a door could have such a finite feel to it. And yet looking back all the ends almost always include the closing of a door; the door of the airplane as it shuts closed, the door of your previous house closing after you have handed in the keys, a taxi door, a class-room door. Sometime the sound of the door does not accompany the ending itself, it is only later, when you return to your current adobe and you close the door behind you that you even become aware of an ending. And more often than not, those moments are hardly melodramatic.

  When he left I closed the door behind him in relief. It does not bug me in the slightest to admit so. This was an ending to our chemistry, the thing that had been building up under the surface and had to be released at some point. And once that door closed he was back to being himself, another man, in a way a boy, in many ways lonely. I have tenderness for the lonely people but I do not delude myself with what is an extent of a need and what can be rooted in genuine emotion. And I felt relief for once the line is crossed and you see what was on the other side you can comfortably go back and move on.

  When I closed the door behind me that day, I looked around at was my new house and could not help but think back of another house into which I had entered with a feeling of elation, with so much positive feelings for what the future would hold. This now, this was a different matter, a different feeling. It was the first time I moved in someplace feeling near sick to my core, disillusioned, tired and wishing to be away from every one. I still think of those moments with a bitter feeling, sometimes the bitterness is directed to myself.

  When I came back last night and closed the door, knowing that in the next three weeks I will be in complete quiet, with very, very disturbances from the outside world, I was filled with bliss. Things are never allowed to be quite so simple, of that I know. But the bliss was there none the less. The present situation removed any need for a pretext, for a reason to sit back and remain reserved and keep my mouth shut. And with that I drew in a deep breath.

  And I allowed myself to plunge inwards.