As soon as he finished school, Ignatios Karathodoros knew he wanted to escape: from Komotini, a town consisting of "a square and a fountain"; from his mother, who was always cleaning a house filled with old and heavy furniture; from his father, whose mind was constantly in a ridiculous calzone shop; from a boring life.
That's why when he finally moved to Athens, Ignatios decided to become another person. As a student now, he is inexplicably happy. Everything seems "crazy" to him, and he enjoys it insatiably.
However, the more Ignatios explores his new life, the tougher it seems to become. His new girlfriend, Virginia, is made of bizarre materials. Why, Mr. Markeze? A very strange case of an employer. Not to mention Mr. Gopa: the man always wants more, more, more!
Ignatios does not want his new life in Athens to fail at any cost. However, in trying to exhaust all his possibilities, he exhausts himself. And as he sees himself changing within an immense digital world where everything is possible, he learns firsthand what it means to lose everything.
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My name is Ignatius Karathodoris and I feel that I need to speak. Not that what I write will matter to anyone else except myself, but I will say it anyway, even if no one reads it. Where I am now, this choice seems logical and deliberate to me. I was born and raised in Komotini, even though none of my parents are from there. My mother is from Xanthi, and my father is from Thessaloniki. They met in Komotini when my mother was studying Law and my father was out with his friends to meet girls. On one of these outings, he happened to see my mother. She was at a masquerade dance in a bar in Irenis Square. She must have fallen madly in love with him, but he was not so much. I have learned that for two years, the poor girl believed they had an exclusive relationship, unaware of the truth.
To keep it brief, my mother finished Law (I don't understand why, since she never became a lawyer) and decided to stay permanently in Komotini. Sad, if you ask me. Soon after, my father moved into her house, supposedly because he realized how much he loved her, but I suspect that a significant reason was that he had no money and wanted to leave immediately from my grandparents' house in Kalamaria. He would do anything for that, my grandparents "drowned him until their death," as he used to tell us. My mother's parents have quite a substantial estate, okay, not huge but satisfactory, one could say, so I assume that Litsa seemed like a good investment at that time.
He hasn't told me this last part, honestly, I only assume it myself. On the other hand, some things don't need to be said. Mother Litsa is a bit of a peculiar case. I don't mean this to her detriment, God forbid. Nor do I say it because she uses words like "Sportex" and "Exantrik." I just always believed that my father was completely simple, unlike my mother who, let's say, showed some complexity. If my parents were paintings, my father would be something monochromatic and my mother something with a hundred colors, which would have been added on top of an older painting, which in turn would have been painted on an even older one, depicting who knows what — probably a jungle. At least, that's what I believed until recently
