*

   In truth I write still. Every morning, on the kitchen table, once I ensure that I am alone in the house. It turns out that this temporary immigration did suit me in the least but I have been making the most of it, or at least the most that I think I can make of it. After months of heavy rain the clouds have blissfully parted and I can feel the sun on my skin. Around me it really looks like spring, the incessant fall of rain encouraged the local flora to grow at a maddening pace. I imagine that by the middle of the summer it will have all dried up and resolved it self into the muted yellow colour that I encountered when I moved here. It should be alright.

  All this time I have been waiting for the nearing of the end, the time where this self-imposed exile will finish. I even set a reminder on my phone for it, in case I grew too accustomed, too complacent. I did it in the first few weeks when there was hardly any privacy for one to cry. This house still does not feel like my private space but at the very least there are hours in which all is good. I am alone. And now the deadline is drawing closer, just a few more months and I look at it with some confusion. For I am still unsure what I will do after I leave and everyone has questions and I have questions too but I would like to feel that just this once it ok to not have answers, to not have a plan that I felt was so necessary all my life.

  It dawned on me that I have forgotten how to be idle. There is always a clock somewhere, or a screen, something to which my mind inevitably gets glued to. And so time passes, and I stuck watching, waiting, for who, for what I know not. But all this immobility has made a bit more aware and awareness brings stillness and it doesn't feel the same as being un-moving. 

  There is no plan, just a vague sense that something might follow or nothing might follow. I would like to stay idle for some time, after I leave. And I think I would like to go to the countryside for some time. It will be nice if I get to go to the countryside with him, but I am also considering just going down to the village of my childhood, in the little hut with the toilet separate from the house but with good proximity to the sea. In the summer the sun is unbearable and the food is quick simple and meant to be refreshing and there's little to do after the luncheon apart from taking a nap and reading, perhaps even studying a bit. 

  Last time we went we used to leave the door open, I have similar memories from a past that has long since turned into dust. The people of the place has died and with them part of the identity of the place as well.

  I find it odd that I long for those moments of stillness, for the absence of most things of my daily life, while at the same time I enjoy languorous pleasures, I aspire to certain power, certain independence. I have often been teased of being equally a person of the port and the salon as well. I want to be alone and also to my solitude. 

  I have become aware that contradicting character traits are not a bad thing.

  I

The way out is in

 I have actually been writing a lot in my diary in the last couple of months and it's a little bit odd for me to see. I have not expected it of me, it has not always been standard procedure that I should fill up page after page after on daily basis. When I get I make coffee and in the meantime I drink a glass of water. I bring my diary and my pen to the kitchen table, I look out of the window and then I dive into the page. 

  I have always looked out the window or balcony door or any opening to the outside right before starting to write. Sometimes in hope that something will be distracting and enticing enough for me to focus my attention there, others as a look to the outside before I turn my look inwards.

  And lately my writing turns more and more inwards. I have managed to write down things that I have never dared speak out loud, things that hurt me deeply, ways I realised I hurt others. All in an effort to map out what it is that drives me forward but also to alleviate the pressure of what is in the past. The truth will set you free but it will break your bones. I thought that perhaps even talking could help but talking a bit about something is nothing compared to spilling your mind on a page, completely sober, in the morning of the light. When you talk with people in your social circle there's always a bit of a dancing going on and that, that always changes things.

  Writing is cathartic but I end up crying almost every day. None of these are the worst things that could happen to a person, why do they hurt me so much? I do not ponder this too much. We're accustomed to measuring everything, but I am guessing that there is no point in measuring our dicks in the unhappiness, our own individual burden to bear.

  Some times we bleed to death due to a million small cuts - the trick is to keep them all open, to never let them heal. Or to let them get infected and fester. There are so many things that I have not let go and it takes time and forgiveness towards myself to look at them in the eye for what they are. I am sad on most days but often a little bit of the weight has been lifted. Often I realise how many things stem from experiences I had allowed myself to admit they hurt.

  And in my vulnerability, that is scary and painful every step of the way, I am slowly learning to open myself up. I am learning to keep the most important promises of all: those to myself.

  I try not to kid myself that it could be any easier.

*

   There days when it gets difficult to remember who you are or what you want or why. I find myself often in such days and the past two years have intensified that feeling. On such days I find it most beneficial to seclude myself from outside noise - I suppose the one good thing about moving here is that there are much fewer people living in the neighborhood and noise has reduced quite a lot. 

  Nonetheless, I do wonder whether I have grown to become neurotic. On my down days I have difficulty doing the simplest of things, completing the tasks that I know down the line will bring the rewards to me, not only physically but also mentally. In a way I suppose it's self-punishing myself.

  Almost everyone asks me when am I coming back. I give vague answers though in my head it has become clearer now that I will not stay here long either, When I first came I worried that I would get stuck here forever and be unable to move away, stuck in the money that is better from my home country but with all the disadvantages my old life had. But now I know a year here will prove to be a miracle, I know for a fact I might not even stay that long. And the fact that I feel even that I have enough power to do that makes me breathe a bit better some days. 

  Hope is an odd little thing, is it not? Except I am not sure whether it's hope exactly. Just certainty I suppose that I will try to play whatever cards I am dealt with in the best possible way. And to hell with it. 

  That's what I think whenever I low, very low, as I am today. 

  To hell with it.

*

   I did not come to this land to find happiness but I had hoped indeed for some semblance of peace. I had hoped that in spite of the hardships some things would be prettier but often I struggle to breathe.There is one thing that I do to make myself feel better and that is the slow but meticulous closing of old things left open for far too long. Tidying up things I left half-done. And I hate cleaning up any mess that is not physical and I can not simply scrub away.

  I am in complete denial of the ways that I block myself. I have gotten better at some parts though and that alone does bring me some hope. But part of me loathes even starting things that I know will make me feel better. And I am alone here and do not know how to keep pushing myself. 

  I wake up early most mornings. I write, I try to find time to breathe. I started moving my body somewhat just feel a little bit better. During that I feel calmer and more in control and somewhat grateful. Still I struggle with my mind. But I try to push forward, even for a little while. I get up, make coffee, eat some fruit, write, exercise, try to squeeze in a bit of something else. I go to work, I rot, I come back, cook and go to sleep. I often lose a lot of time on the internet. I'm thinking whether I should just turn off my connection past 9p.m.

  I don't find solace in myself these days, that is all. I took all the loneliness and unrest from one place and carried it to another. And there are no distractions here to keep me from facing myself. So I try to find some for myself. How ironic and fitting at the same time that I keep on going back to all those things that hardly ever did me any good. I know what will distract me, what will upset me, I seek it still.

  That being said, I think I like myself better now. It took some time to look square in the eye all the time I let others down and even longer the times when I let myself down. And somehow I like me better now than before I left my home. And much to my surprise, I even feel glad for the bridges I chose to burn. I never thought such a day would come. I was prepared to mourn and mourn and mourn and yet.

  And yet. 

  And yet I realised that there will always be someone in whose story I am a villain. And sometimes I have been exactly that. And other though I have tried, I will not be viewed in any other way than the one comforting to the other person. Let them put all the blame they want on me. I have carried my own. And in learning to tend to myself, I have learnt to carry that too.

  I always thought that I would pray to go back in time to salvage some connections. And though I still miss them, I want to see them not.

  Not now, not ever again.

The house in mountain

   It's been over a year that my thoughts roam to the house in the mountains. The last time I went it was a couple of years since my aunt had died and it was the first time that I came across it with a door locked. The garden was in a bad state, nature and the garbage of neighbors and passers by both taking it over and the house was worse. I went up the outer staircase and went to the upper two small rooms, or what was left of them. There was a hole on the floor in the second floor and I wondered whether the roof would off soon too. That was where her son used to live and paint.

  On the ground floor I could not enter some of the rooms, the bathroom was essentially destroyed and the kitchen I preferred to steer clear off but the bedroom - in the past the bedroom and the living room was the same thing - was easy to access. Her bed was there and the heavy wooden drawers too - the top was marble and the wood was carved because in the past that was what you did when you opened your home. The previous time I was in the house my aunt was on the double bed, she was the cousin - or was she the aunt - of my grandfather and at the time both he and her son were long dead and she had been bed-ridden for years. She called for me to go close and she gave me twenty euros, for pocket money, old habits die hard and all of my relatives of her generation are adamant to give us "youngsters" pocket-money whenever they can. It does not matter if they are bed-ridden in a dingy little room with little light coming in from the shutters or if they can hardly cover the medicine bills. They will slip the paper in their hands as they shake yours, like the bribe of gangsters in the movies. 

  When I tried to back away and refuse the money she grabbed my wrist and insisted, I was surprised by the strength in the grip f a woman who could not bring herself to even rise on her elbows. Her eyes had a gleam like she knew that that would be the last time and chance she would have to gift one of the youngsters.

  She had a soft spot for my grandfather who was many years younger than her and she would always talk of his children in one group, their descent being the thing that characterized their existence. She would always include me in the group of my grandfather's children as well, among my mother and her siblings, perhaps because I was oldest. She tried to give us what she could. When she died, she left hardly anyone behind and I came home to find two big black trash bags filled with papers and pencil - supplies of her only son who died long long before. All the relatives went after he death to the home, to clean out (and I suppose to take) what was left with no-one to claim. Seeing as I was the only other person in the family who still drew, my mother requested these things for me. 

  I found it odd and unsettling but up until those two trash-bags I was completely unaware that my uncle used to draw. I knew he had married and divorced and drank a lot but spoke little. It was unnerving to be around him, his parents felt easier to approach. To my knowledge none of his painting survives. Among the papers I found a doodle.

  Standing there in the living room I recalled being a small kid and having my mother make me pose by the entrance with my aunt and her prematurely-blind husband. When I asked why she did it, she told me so that I would not forget and indeed I did not. 

  Three lives came and went and perished in this house and of them remains a few blurred photographs and an abandoned house in the mountain, trapped in the bureaucracy of the always expanding family tree. I longed for that derelict little house with its generous garden with wild roses and fig-trees.

  I sometimes long for it still.

Salt

   I feel sad here - the same kind of sad that I felt in my own country except the distractions are less, I have less access to things that bring me joy but the pay is actually livable. I suppose you can't always get what you want and in any case, everything takes time. Disliking the job means that I will need to find something else to latch onto for dear life and most of the activities - at least the ones involving people - that I had in the past are all but flourishing here. On occasions when I have been invited to social gatherings I have sat quiet, observing the people around me - they were alright but I hardly felt any incline of a connection and so I preferred to shut up.

  That's another thing that I noticed about me: I really did quieten down. I did not swallow my tongue, it is not the timidity of shyness and shame but the complete disconnection with the surroundings. Back home it was less easy to notice though I suspected it but here, in new surroundings where there's less noise coming in it's become more obvious to me that I have grown a preference to keep my mouth shut. 

  I like the balcony of the house. It does not have a stunning view but the area is not so packed with tall houses - in fact, it has less buildings in general and that leaves an abundance of sky there for me to observe at any time of the day. All I have to do is look out of the window. There are moments when I do exactly that and the expanse of it cleanses my insides. For a few moments I am brought back within my body and I am present and I almost feel hopeful, above the tiredness, above it all.

  And in those moments I remember of going to the sea and wanting to cry and join one type of salt water with the other but there were too many people and that usually brings questions. The hindrance of it did not stop the sea from lending its healing hand to me. As a kid whenever I went to the beach and into the water I would always feel spooked and yet would steal away moments away from others during which I would bring my mouth to the surface of the water and I would whisper my secrets and my thanks. I was naturally superstitious and felt that I ought to show respect to water; after all the sea is capricious, it can give you life and it can also take it away.

  Since no-one felt so present for me to say my secrets, I took my loneliness as far out as I dared to venture and keeping my head from the nose-up above the surface, I whispered it all to the sea.  

  And the sea lent its salt for the wounds to try to heal.

The "how are you"s never saved nobody. But they don't hurt either

   The 15th of August is an important christian holiday in most mediterranean countries and mine is not an exception. Though I no longer identify as a christian, many of my family members are tied to that day and besides we are always tied to the the rituals in our life. I tried calling them but they did not reply, perhaps due to the foreign number they did not recognise on their screen.

  It's been about two weeks since my move to a new country and on the outside I have been really lucky: we found a home easily and came across many people willing to help, in spite of the roadblocks that happen along the way (immigration has never been uncomplicated it seems and I have been fortunate.) The blessing of this has been remarkable, without it I think the last part of me would have crumbled on the spot. 

  I left the country while half of it was burning, watching image after image of forests and small towns being engulfed by flames as the fire progressed. A couple more femicides took place as well and though the new life here started as smoothly as it possibly could in my insides a turmoil took hold. I felt rage and the need to mourn rising, choking me and there were no people around with whom I could share how I have been feeling.

  And that has been the hard part: for all its smoothness, all that happened crushed into the pain of leaving my country not for chasing a dream but rather a sense of survival. And the pain was fueled further by all the destruction and pain I witnessed through the lens of others. And for now I have no space here to grieve, not for the future, my country, the things I felt being torn inside me.

  A few people have messaged me to ask how I am but for the most part the conversations feel almost hollow - there was too much in too little time and I did not know how to embark on this conversations. They were nonetheless appreciated even if I lacked words for answering. There is just one thread of conversation that continues to eat away at me and it's filled with goodmornings and goodnights and pretty much nothing else - I wonder whether perhaps neither of us is at fault for this. I'm working on auto-pilot, focusing on the task at hand and nothing further and he works an abominable amount of hours. When he asks how I am I can only say that I guess I am fine. I want to ask for more but there's hardly the space and time and, worst yet, I'm afraid that not only will I not be able to give any support but also that I will burden further and so I stay mute. I feel the silence grow further, every time he says he'll call but inevitably he never does.

  The mere fact that this hurts annoys me but I feel like I have been slipping back into known terrain, learning how to go about as if there never was another voice on the other side of the line and slowly I expect nothing but silence. I start to wonder who will write last into silence.

  At nights I have difficulty sleeping, especially since for now I need to share a bed until we're able to purchase a second one. That makes things harder because I don't have much personal space during the day and now I don't have ti during the night either. For the last couple of months before I left it was a similar situation back at the other home but all the new changes made the lack of space unbearable. Tonight's the first night that I am alone in the house and I have been almost praying that I will break into tears but instead there has been absolute silence. I picked up smoking again, it won't be for long so I allowed myself that one setback until I get some things back in my head.

  I waited for the tears to come but instead I sit in silence. 

  And again, I begin to write.