Arrival

Agiou Efstathiou, Ikaria , 2017

Kita pos horevi to nero, a woman said to her companion while leaning on the ferry railing. Look how the water dances.

They stood in silence for a few moments, watching the dark sea, before heading back inside.

The boat took us to the island in the middle of the night. My mother had told me stories of her ferry trips to Greece in the '70s and '80s, bringing sleeping bags for my older siblings to sleep on the deck when she couldn’t afford a cabin room. The country had lived in my imagination as a child through music and photo albums, dances and lore. I had gone with her on one of these trips when I was only a baby. Now, at twenty-one years old, I was finally returning. The island would animate, breathe its own history, and teach me haunting lessons about desire and belonging.

It was 2007 and after studying abroad in Rome for the spring semester, I traveled on a micro budget around Europe with a friend, staying at hostels and meandering through Amsterdam, London, Interlochen—cities that felt impenetrable and cold. I parted ways with my friend in Berlin and flew solo to Athens.

When I landed at the airport, weighed down by my heavy suitcase and worn out by the cities I had trekked over the last several weeks, I felt relief when I heard the sound of Greek spoken all around me. I remember approaching a young woman for directions to the train station. She wore camel-colored pants with a matching vest and she had a gentle and generous demeanor. I was drawn to her beauty, her wavy hair, and chestnut eyes. I soaked up her presence, her warmth and her amusement at my clumsy sentence arrangement. I had not practiced my Greek, nor spoken it regularly since yiayia (grandma) died when I was thirteen. 

~

On the ferry, I settled into a top deck bench with my backpack as a pillow and fell in and out of sleep. The ship maneuvered east under a moonless sky. After the eight hour trip, I began to see remote lights flicker a few hundred feet away. Then I saw the island’s mass. I traced the charcoal outline of its ridges. I could smell the soil, the sagebrush and the pines that lined its cliffs.

My body rushed with adrenaline at the sight of this place. It felt surreal and disorienting to be so near when its existence had only lived in my grandparents’ photo album. The album that held weddings and birthday parties and their handful of vacations to Greece. The bougainvillea and beach days and dusty film skies. I remember feeling envy for my cousins who spent time with them there, in some of their last years together. I was so close to it now. The nostalgia of the place before I even stepped foot on the soil. My grandparents were both gone but I would find signs of their life here, anecdotes and objects so mundane yet so cathartic to my broken heart.

We reduced our speed as we entered the small harbor shaped like a horseshoe. A string of colorful lights, the last remnants of night, lined the inlet where the road met the quiet sea. Daylight unraveled at a ceremonial rate. The village was completely still, the cafes empty and shops still closed.

The rumble of the ship’s hull shook us closer and closer to the dock. Ferry workers rushed to release the massive anchors and lower the ramp. I arrived in the village of Evdilos as the sun rose over the neighboring Karavostamo, illuminating the terraces of white-washed houses that layered the inlet like an amphitheater. I arrived at a place with an entirely different rhythm, where time felt loose and the land shaped the people. Little by little, I would arrive at a sense of home, and I would take it with me wherever I went.