Once again I find myself exhausted and drained and chronic fatigue has made me believing I have ‘Rona every two hours. Last Monday I walked into therapy, washed my hands carefully, sat on the couch and started laughing like a maniac in order not to cry since minute one. Then I asked K. if “we could shut the window and pull the blindfolds only for a couple of minutes”, she ejected from her chair and in seconds offered me the most needed space I had just realised I wanted with all the power of my existence. Suddenly I felt I can let go for the next fifty eight minutes without listening or talking or even making sense, I needed to just be for a while with someone but without necessarily interacting with them and once this was achieved – so easily no less, almost by just desiring, no questions asked, no requirements, no judgement – I exhaled, I pressed the sides of my forehead with my index fingers, I closed my aching eyes and cried. I tried to hold it back, to shallow the bitterness of exhaustion, to cover my edge, I tried to control my breath but apparently I couldn’t. The cry itself wasn’t hysterical, you can even describe it as calm, but I couldn’t really stop myself from giving in it. Then K. asked me if I came there to rest and I looked at her in the utmost surprise; yes, that’s exactly why I went. I figured it out the moment it was said but it’s like I know it for days. And that’s the stupid reason why I was looking forward to step into this office all week. At that moment I was bordeline hoping to live in this office forever and never go out again.
Anyway, twenty minutes in I was already feeling better so I thanked her and start talking. No matter what I was saying, the tiresome voice of mine was still cracking every now and then, but my spirit was already climbing between levels, so I rode this new wave of safety and brought it to become a blanket of calmness. I was still exhausted, a human corpse who walks and mimics talking, but I could find some of myself in there and it was enough to start feeling better.
Left therapy and I was still unaware how decisive I have already been for what was about to happen next. Without even noticing, I went straight home and shut myself into my room for the next four days. With the fan rolling from my face to my butt and back again, windows closed regardless of the heat to avoid the outside sounds which are constantly triggering everything that is upside down in me, I got out only to eat, to piss and to check if the world was still a living hell that froze at its peaking worst behavior. I was distant with those who happened to see me the three -altogether – times I left the apartment to buy food counting my spare change cause I am still very much broke and I couldn’t care less about it. And it’s like, the more I was distant the better I was accomplishing to secure my space to myself.
Third day I woke up and cleaned the whole apartment. It was a fuckfaced garbage town, a rusty depressive mess, a fine piece of my worst nightmares but I got on my knees and licked clean every inch of it within thirty minutes, almost without resenting myself at all. I spent the rest of the day in my freshly chlorine and lavender scented bedroom, watching eighties horror flicks and talking on the phone. I even lifted some light weights because I couldn’t sleep again.
On the fourth day I wasn’t alone in the house, so I woke up and left without saying a word. On a super rare and desperate action of relief, I got into my car and went to Alepotrypa, an open air basketball court I wanted to visit before but never had the time or the energy, to shoot a ball in a net. Approaching there a few minutes after noon on a 34° C day, I was holding my breath, hoping to be all alone up there. I get sensitive with crowds now, maybe always have been but resisting. Being the usual self-conscious idiot, I parked outside and pretended I was talking on the phone as I was walking in, to check if there were people. Alepotrypa, officially known as Elikonos Str Hill, is a short hill between Kypseli and Galatsi. Its highest spot is approximately 190 meters altitude and it’s overall surface is about 140 acres (that’s greek feet or something, I don’t do good with numbers). On the top, between the two highest points there is a large piece of land where a basketball court, a soccer court, a 5×5 soccer court and a kids’ playground are built, one next to another. There are some trees, mostly young and skinny, and blossomed bushes with thick pink flowers – should be oleanders. I am thinking they planted so many of them hoping their flowers will cover that toxic smell of cheap sun-flamed stinky rubber grass every poor area football court uses instead of organic grass or even an outdoor sports ground material of slightly better quality. I was unable to escape from the misery of the middle class euro-fantasy effect on which such places are built, but I was able to notice there were something breathtaking in that place: the rocks. Surrounding the basketball court, there are two rock blind spots, full of aromatic herbs, short olive-green bushes and history. Whose history? It depends. Is it the history of our whitewashed crypto-colonial fake ancient past, full of democracy and philosophical success and weird sexuality that have leaved us all with an excessive illusion of achievement, yet unrooted and disconnected from the land before us? Or is it the history of the young, generation 2.0 immigrant and refugee athenians, who are black and brown and of any color, and who occupy the sports fields with audacity, giving echoing life to those old rocks, preventing them from falling on our heads and crush us violently under their fabricated mythical glory? Look, I didn’t seem to have conceived consciously all the thoughts I’m thinking now and the only reason I care at this point is because – being the ultra emotional prick I am and trying to make some sense around me to help me keep existing – I am pretty sure they had an effect before they become actual thoughts so that’s probably what happened: Seeing those rocks carved a space exactly in the shape of the future thoughts I am now having and left it empty hence it flooded with feelings and that’s how I walked back to my car, wait a whole fifteen minutes for the group of boys playing before me to crack a few jokes and say their goodbyes before pulling off in their fancy cars. Then I parked mine under a slim shade of a young tree, got my ball out of the trunk and started climbing up. I played under the hot blinding sun for forty minutes. For every successful shoot I was smiling at the rocks like a weirdo. I could still hear the boys laughing and joking or so I thought and I was laughing with them sometimes. I heard some kids singing some creepy melodic song, sound coming from a white and blue building across the shallow canyon. I didn’t mind. I wasn’t spooked. My mind knew I have some logical excuse to present if necessary afterwards, we’re cool on that level. My focus was the ball and the rocks. I even got to score a three-pointer from a nasty angle before giving up beaten, thirsty and sweaty like an island donkey. I took only a couple of breaths before running to my car and hurrying back to my dark cave.
On the fifth day I woke up and I was ready to ask for some money from my parents because I really had to eat something better than cheap rice, Nutella and stomach pills. I did. I was irritated with myself for doing so once again but when dad transferred fifty euros to me and said to not worry, even though we both know we should worry very much, I stopped worry. I got on my two feet, legs trembling, dizzy from last night’s sleep. My muscles weren’t sore which was a very good sign so I took it as feedback, put on some shorts, thought of changing a t-shirt but voted against it, slipped in my fake Adidas flip flops and went out. I drove a bit around, then pulled over and made some phone calls, carefully letting a bit of myself out there again, scheduling next week’s meetings. I called someone I was mad at and went to see them at work. We talked and we even untied some recent very tight knots hovering upon us for motnhs now. We managed to remove a large lump of rotten thoughts and dark feelings and angry spirals. It was useful. I wasn’t planning on it. It just happened.
Since then the days go by and I am trying to hold that balance, the one of being here for everything but exactly the right amount; right amount being my limits and not my intention.
I am still tired though. And I still feel retired. I am not that social and I won’t be easy to talk to for a while, that I know. But this is a needed space that I have to take, to recuperate from whatever happened this year and the previous. And I need to learn to take breaks. I desperately need to teach myself to take breaks before reaching a no-return point of exhaustion. It is probably going to be the hardest thing I have ever learned but fuck my life I am the best student I know so how hard it can’t be after all?
life is a horror film synopsis 