ATHENS, the strange loneliness of the capital, the people of August and me alone facing them, searching but not knowing for what. I was searching for witches... that’s what I was looking for. And I found it in the face of Aunt Lili. If I could, I would still call her "aunt," even if she got angry. I would treat her to cognac, whole bottles of many stars, and she would reward me with knowledge and words.
Words from her, rich. I would ask her to give me her answer to the question she once asked me: “How is your life now?” That’s what I would ask her. At the age of 30, I left behind the decaying ghost of the island province to find myself in Athens in the 1980s.
If you were to ask me what I would keep from that time, I would answer: Love! That’s what I would hold onto. A great love, like ours, the kind that people say lasts forever, that never dies. But it died, and with it, I died too. A love I believed would take us far, to the other end of our lives. That’s what we both believed.
To take us to some other strange Augusts with caravels like the ones we sailed together in the travels we took with our minds. There, on the hill of Strefi on those urban August nights.
