SOPHIE died in Athens last night. I didn’t even know she was still here. I never felt like the music really talked to me but this weird vocalisation, with the voice in-between genders and identities, this crossing back and forth between lives, made a clear impression on me. I was eager to see what she will become what else her troubled mind and soul will create, cause the kind of trouble she was into is very obvious to me and very familiar. I adore SOPHIE’s imagery and universe growing. I think her experimental style, blended with outrageous pop, is definitely how old-school sci-fi queers were imagining future.
Today I tried not to read many things about SOPHIE’s death. I avoided the stoic farewell posts of my circle and advised myself not to be vulnerable with her, because A) since I started wanting to live, death became a bit more scary than before, and B) because I really am processing some other heavy things right now. So I left home almost immediately when I woke up ignoring the fuss on social media and went to meet Vassilia and Alkis at Kypseli. While we were hanging out SOPHIE’s loss occurred every now and then and I realized I was fighting a very certain feeling and it was not annoyance or boredom but it was this deep melancholic sadness of depression, the one that allows hopelessness build hour by hour until your eyes are filled with tears and it’s now nighttime and you start crying with no obvious reason but because you’re feeling small and helpless and alone and SOPHIE is dead and life is excruciating and art is not about the result but about the process and this process is so fucking difficult but also so fucking magical and how the world can be so cruel and obscene and everyone is still so full of themselves and dedicated to minding their own business and never notice or say anything about that? Why the fuck SOPHIE went out to the balcony to watch the full moon at 4 a.m. and fell and why the fuck the world didn’t shut down at this exact moment and why I had to fight this immense wave of sadness about a person I didn’t even know? It’s like a part of me violently crushed and chopped and was taken away before I was able to appreciate and love it and cherish it for what it was.
Last July I got around a very dark place and had to convince myself to survive, using all the outside help I could, trying to find reasons into everything that surrounds me: people, places, events, potentials, situations, objects, aesthetics. I used them as totems, as sources of connection, as anchors to existing and as signifiers of a life and as evidence, listed solely as opposition to my hungry urges for an ending.
One of those totems were my random interaction with a couple of two stranger queers, during a climb on Parthenon, blogged here. I am quoting a part below:
We just went in for an art exhibition, showing at the bottom of the rock and then we kept going up without anyone asking us for tickets and stuff. It was nice, not so hard to climb despite of what I was imagining. But the truth is that we were really out of our comfort zone, socially wise. The good thing is that the whole time of going up, we shared the narrow dusty path with some queers, a greek hipster gay boy who was taking his guide duty very seriously, narrating stories including names and dates and places too far away from now to make sense; and then the beautiful trans girl, tall with long curls in the color of barley and blue eyes full of loving care for her grumpy techno-goth girlfriend with the skin all rushed from that vicious sun and the climbing. Yeah, paint me a hopeless romantic but I felt connected with those touristy people and at that moment I believed deep in my heart that everything in the world is going to be okay if I stay close to them; at least for a while.
29th of July, 2020
And then I saw an IG story published by SOPHIE’s girlfriend, about the loss. First slide was a photo of them during a sunny summer afternoon, SOPHIE was posing with her long curls in the color of barley and her blue eyes full of loving care for her grumpy techno-goth girlfriend with the skin all rushed from that vicious sun and the climbing. In front of the ruins.
Right next to them, out of frame, I was taking my own photo, building connections and memorabilia in my head to keep on living.
Rest In Power stranger. I’ve missed you once when we split ways coming down the rock and I am painfully missing you more, now I know. 💔
life is a horror film synopsis 
