The first day
No sleep. My body (or my mind) doesn’t need a rest. It goes on and on. I tried with watching Netflix and it almost worked. But as soon as I closed my eyes, finally falling asleep, my brain was busy again and I was fully awake.
The sun was up, bright outside so I got up. Coffee on the terrace, looking at the water. Beautiful! Everything was nicer at the beginning of a new day.
The beach was so tempting and there was no real reason to resist. I changed and went out through the tiny door and white stairs, crossed the road, got on a narrow pathway that went to another flight of stairs carved into red, volcanic rock down to the beach. And the sea was waiting. Waves crashing on the rocks, sun coming out, still young. I could not smell the salt, but I knew it was there. I took of my shoes and walked barefoot on the the sand and water, timing my pace with waves.
I took photos of the horizon and red and black rocks. I took videos of that power coming in and bursting. I took it in slow-motion to feel the passage of time, wavers rolling in and pulling back. Watching them made me almost sea-sick and I remembered that vacation in Kavala when we kept jumping into the waves, over and over again, playing with danger of being pulled into, down, back to the vast of the sea. We were kids. We didn’t know the split second between being alive and beaming with joy, and being swallowed by a hungry mouth of the Aegean Sea. I lost my footing at some point and I remember that horrifying feeling of primordial fear. When I managed to come up, I stayed closer to the beach, in shallow waters. At the end of the day, when I went to bed, I was still riding the waves up and down, they kept coming at me. For the first time I experienced the sea-sickness, ready to throw up.
