July 10th
I’m sitting on the floor aboard European Express, one of the worst ships of the line that connect Athens with Mytilini. Very few seats, the lounge has some weird round tables that are useless and it’s almost entirely made of huge spaces with lights too bright. Never mind. I’m travelling to Mytilini with a mission.
Get the hell out of there as quickly as possible.
The past few months I’ve been preparing, mentally and practically, for the next big thing in my life. That is my Erasmus. I’d been dreaming of doing it for many years now but this year was my last and best chance since I’m also moving out of the place I’ve called home for the past five years.
So I did pursue it. I sent out requests, I got denied, I meddled with bureaucracy and had my share of incredible stories anyone going through this brutal procedure no doubt have as well. My big thanks to the Aegean University International Office who helped a lot along the way while also tolerating my sluggish ways with filling in applications, agreements, doing this sort of paperwork thing.
In just 14 days now, in the early hours of July 26th, I’m flying to Denmark and I’m going to be living there for the next six months. More specifically I’ll be studying at the department of Information and Media Studies in Aarhus, the second largest city in Denmark. The first few weeks of August I’ll be doing a language and culture course and September will see the beginning of my three courses! I’m so very excited about all the things I’m going to experience and learn there, the different cultures I’ll witness and sink my teeth into, the trips I’m going to make, the sights I will behold, the parts of me I will create and explore all at the same time.
But here I sit, comfortably numb from it all. When changes come creeping closer I never find myself ready to deal with them and flow along as I typically do. In fact, the closer they come, the less active I become. I find myself getting lazier and lazier (and I’m not THAT lazy under normal circumstances) instead of taking advantage of my countdown. I hate it when I do that but it’s very strong with me, for some reason. It’s something I’ve come to call προθανάτιος μηδενισμός in Greek, something you’d call pre-mortem nihilism in English if you’d want to sound especially obnoxious (it sounds obnoxious in Greek too but sometimes the minimum common denominator is not fit for the very truest of verbal expressivenesss). There, I did it again.
That is part of the reason I haven’t written anything about all this until now, the reason I’ve been writing less on here in general. Another reason is that I was afraid of writing this in particular because it is, inevitably, a sort of farewell post. If I’m not good –nay, if I get really nervous, anxious about– at something, it is farewells. Is anyone…?
It’s a farewell post to the five years that changed me from deep inside. The place that was chiefly the background for this change and my coming of age. It has been the equivalent of discovering the New World for myselves. It is a chunk of spacetime, the kind that burns itself into our memories really close to our scent centres, wherne I can say I had the most fun and significant experiences till now. Of course, I met lots of good people during this period some of whom became my friends, others something more, yet others something less. With certain people (I wouldn’t be able to point them all out yet) “Mytilini was the first chapter”. For most, as it happens, it’s also going to be the last chapter. I’m not sure how I feel about that — at least for now.
Now my mission, as stated above, is to push on, pack in and move out of Mytilini in the minimum number of days in order to buy some time to see friends, family and everyone that, if I won’t be seeing for over six months, I’ll miss (in case they don’t visit me in Denmark, of course ~^,) Truth is, I’m not really feeling it. Maybe that’s the reason I’m comfortably numb. It’s the difference between having played a new game for ten minutes and having only read the manual: knowing something and knowing about something…
Who knows? Maybe the empty boxes and the sight of things lying around as they do when a change of residence commands it will kick my ass into (emotional) action. It’s just as possible I’ll only realise the gravity of the impending change when I’m already in Athens, Denmark or somewhere else…
Great, obscure Danish ’70s prog. This, along with The Wall and Calling All Dawns, is the soundtrack of my last days here… Thanks Villy for sending me this.
4 days later
After four days of more lazying around and finally “accepting” what lay ahead I did what had to be done. The empty card boxes I gathered from around town I filled with my stuff. Most of it anyway; I’m leaving a lot of things behind, such as cutlery and kitchenware, dead cockroaches and all of my furniture. If I had the time I would have tried to sell it but it seems its destiny is to stay here waiting for the next resident of 1, Lavyrinthou St.
The moving company came this morning and picked everything up to take it to Athens.
After I’m done writing this, I’m packing my remaining stuff, shutting the windows, locking the door and leaving. I never locked the door.
Life after Mytilini:
So it begins…
Καλό ταξίδι!