7 Letters

7 Letters-1

Stopped cars along the seafront avenue that connects the two edges of the Athens basin. Like a bridge, it connects the opulent Vouliagmeni to the lower status Kokkinia. The sea adorns without caring for human rankings and classifications. Summer afternoons near dusk. This route is blessed by magnificent pictures. A salvaging encounter from the bottleneck that puts the endurance of man and machine to the test. A city that has surrendered itself to a heavy atmosphere, yet concrete possesses times and places that may win you over. At a time like this I find myself entrapped in my own car. I just follow the slow drag on the avenue. A metallic snake, a shadow of red, drenched in the reflections of the taillights. A ceremonial procession, a litany before suppertime.

Life can be beautiful when you gaze upon this dusk in the beginning of June breathing in fresh summer. The melancholy mood sweetens its taste and is welcome by the heart. A weekend affords the necessary breathing space to all those who have acclimatized themselves to the rapid metropolitan city rhythms of Athens. It has burdened its inhabitants with all the features of the metropolises of the world. Driving the streets is tough.

Another day manages to win a few meters of distance. We share plentifully in the fests, the tragedies, the events. People are like living covenants. Unsung heroes who keep on driving their cars, running to catch up with their urgent errands. I am amidst them. I look just like them. In the metallic snake, calm, I let the colors of the orange-blue horizon caress me. Yet another Friday, another week is over. Time rolls by differently in times of joy and times of sorrow. The see besides me reflects the seducer sky like a lake. I smile instinctively in those thoughts. My eyes turn to the co-driver’s seat. Onto the envelope that escorts me in this route. For all those looking at me from their own cars, I am alone. But I don’t feel like that. I can smell the scent. I can hear the heart beat. There is another life in the car with me. We have a worry-free weekend ahead of us. On a small villa by the sea.

Ideally situated small villas surrounded by the sand of a small cove looking at the Temple of the God Apollo at Sounion. A self-invited heat wave in one of the first weekends of the summer. Although it is still Saturday morning, the temperature has gone over 38o C. A calm slumber has absorbed all the shocks of the week. Two glasses of Jack Daniels helped in the way as a dessert after a light supper at the terrace of the boutique hotel. Sitting in the room after my morning shower, I look at the double bed, the knee-length bathing shorts and the envelope. The shorts in shades of blue. A beloved color. I believe unappreciated. I used to prefer it in all my choices of men’s apparel I used. I could see how that color managed to add to the image of someone with structural problems in appearance. I smile, I am thinking. How antithetical the word is when it comes to describing a human being! I was able to, I could bare using that term provoking the people I was conversing with. I had the chance to confirm I had their attention. The habit of wearing words on sentences that look like a kaleidoscope scarf on a austere dark suit, infused me. Yes, words, speech, yet another sensation. Apart from the five already existing, hearing, smell, sight, taste, and touch. It becomes either an ear capable of perceiving even lower-pitched sounds or a nostril that breathes in the perfume scent without ever getting enough. Sight is enabled with yet another dimension and sees more than before. Another limb, an arm that is not unbalanced. To be able to enlarge an embrace.

Words, the weapons of mankind. They can seek the target. To effect greater damage than real weapons. To haunt time in their memory. They are capable of bringing forth tears of joy. The sign of love. To color our pictures. To conquer before of after wars. I am a visitor this weekend. I found the strength to face up to my own war. My words are processions in it. I have a chest full of them. In an envelope. They are hers.

They belong to her.

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An embrace under the stars. I isolate the moments that life offers me so stingingly. I roll them in my mind. I have a hearty laugh. What power pushes my body to lock all of its edges on your body? I am mesmerized and the only move I can make is one, a centrifugal one around you. The turns, similar and unchangeable, press on my mind, turning you into a necessary component of life. A life that came to be anew. I am here ready to devour whatever I can from you. I have prepared the places inside me to accept whatever is yours. To be able to be filled with you.

I soil my underwear.

A word, an image, a caress are enough. I discover my desire for you and I want to achieve being near you at those moments where all but the classical are speaking.

The sun is particularly bright today. The blinds in my office window are pulled up and the light enters clear and unhindered. I am deluged by the strong blueness of the horizon ahead over the palm trees of the seafront avenue. They stand tall and defiant like sentinels protecting humans who experience joy. Humans who want to live.

I could not care less about all these around me. What are you doing now? What are you thinking? How long do I have to wait to see that look in your eye again? What respect must I show to life?

I am crazy. I can live breathing out the happiness you offer me so abundantly but at the same time pretend to be he whom I used to be before. I still haven’t lost it. I stand on my feet embracing your embrace under the stars communicating through thousands of pores and contact points in various dialects what I find so hard to realize what is happening to me. May the universe be my witness.

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I am just off a meeting. I found it tantalizing to manage to meet the demands of the meeting. My mind was endlessly caressing you. I was playing with your image in a midsummer noon. I must hold myself from phoning you but I do not know if this is in my power any more.

Better not ask if it is not you. I pull up my defenses the moment it dawned on me that you are playing with me, life. I have waged wars, you know that, and now you are provoking me again. I will just proceed as you know I would. With the only difference being that in this war you will have to face someone who not only fights, but one who cares not about death.

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My mind was to you, yesterday. My goal is to earn my daily life. If I can manage to live as I used to after all this, then I’ll be a lucky man.

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I finally phoned you. Another meeting, a two-hour distance just to see your sweet face again mocking me through that fatefully cold look in your eye.

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I wish I could find out things about you. Perhaps it is not proper to express such a wish, but still I wish to know how easygoing or intolerant you have been without denying my being able to discover and adore you all the same after a hundred before me.

I never liked to know only one side of the coin; I feel like having read half a book.

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I am not after illusions. I want to know because I suffer as much as because I am joyous. I wish for no myths but seek realities, I long to know about you. Perhaps you can help me in the war that has been declared.

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You walk away bathed in the golden sun on the big avenue. You walk up tall and proud, in full cognizance of your sovereign. You enjoy the tyranny you spread, wearing your tough mask you chose to wear for all to see. Which sky can possibly wrench my eyes off you? I look at you just as I feel desirous of seeing light parting thick pitch-black darkness. You enforced your laws of my slavery. It is as if I find myself in another era. Were they not the sirens, those magnificent women, who enthralled the mind and fuelled the passions of the great Ulysses? He who defied the Gods? Every day that passes by plunges me deeper in my need for you. Every time I see you, I enjoy watching the effect of the August sun gradually wear off your skin. I watch you just as the scientists watch the universe in awe through their state-of-the-art telescopes. The moment I open my eyes every single morning, an image appears in front of me. Three words blink and send the message LIVE WITH HER to my brain. This message is received by whatever has logic in me. I will sometime find the time to describe in full detail all the miracles that take place these days.

I keep deep inside me every discovery I make on you. Where on earth did I ever muster enough courage to lift my eyes and gaze at hell? Where did I dig up the strength to imperceptibly sketch your outline? What price shall pay for all that is happening to me?

You loom in my life as a savage animal and you knew from day one that I would not change my way.

You knew; every day I look into the eyes that hold my freedom, I discover what you knew. You are so potent that you dispirit your opponent.

Yet, you are also vulnerable. You simply can’t but be somewhere, and whoever wants to save himself from your lethal embrace must discover your Achilles’ heel. You soar high like an eagle who selects its prey leaving it no chance of salvation after such an attack.

I am dying trying not to think of you. I am split asunder, feeling savages hurting by being, when the thought crosses my mind that I shall not be able to hold the soul I discovered forever mine. I despair at being incapable of growing by the hour or day by day the love that has swelled in me. At being the recipient of life’s sweetest torture.

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Amazing days in a summery October. This is Greece with its sparse winter. For so many years trying to resemble more of the East. In a geography that possesses everything but a stretch of desert. I keep on the tottering path of the acrobat. A thin high wire under my feet and me trying to balance on it. I sweat and get scared but I stand enjoying the distance I covered when I look behind; nobody but you can see what I have achieved. You are by me and smiling. Many times I wonder what you might be thinking. It’s not out of curiosity. I want to be in your mind. To snatch the images that are called thoughts. To swim in you diving into the depths of your brain, none of which belong to me.

Incessant steps lead me to you. All the more every day. You never stop calling me. Silently but intensely. You have tied up the edges of your life on me, and that burdens me.

But this is what I am here for. It’s not just the passion that you share with me. For some time now, you can see through my eyes all that is coming. I do not care to find a human law to describe your presence beside me. I am the one who loves you the most in this world. Your joy inebriates me and your sorrow plunges me down into the cold dank dungeons of Hades. How can I possibly spend a day without you, you that is my day? I wake up to stare at another Sun. Just as bright and warm as the one that belongs to the creation. You know, that’s enough for me to live. I can live better that ever. I just stare at the lines next to your mouth. They remind me of crystal doors. They move in symmetry with every single smile of yours.

They are the borders on your face. They guard the mouth that says so much without talking.

At the office I witness many such moments. These times possess the sweet freedom of escaping the here and now and transport myself into a dimension where time is defined by the day or night. I can work…with you. You are here at every meeting. You are there with me in the car. No earthly power can possibly dislodge you from inside me. No court will manage to get a confession of guilt from me. Time is my enemy and is overpowering, yet I also manage to have my victories. Size does not matter. It is still victory against one of the most relentless and inexorable of adversaries.