It’s around two o’clock in the afternoon and I’m sitting in a bar on the high street, in the outside seating area, in a backyard garden of sorts. My psych medication helps me function in a way that is physiologically impossible without them. But still, I am not safe from the darkness within my mind; instead now I am dancing above it, as if I am standing on an endlessly deep lake of suffering and anguish, that reaches down far into the void and all that stops me from descending down it, like a lonely rock, to the bottom of the terrifying ocean, is a thin sheet of ice, the medication, and I am prancing along this ice daintily and I can hear the roaring tempestuous waves of misery colliding below me and every now and then I shudder to hear and feel solemn cracks in the ice breaking and sealing with every repugnant step I take upon this doomed and cataclysmic lake.
After writing in the bar, I walked downtown to the church by the Platia where we had George’s funeral, some years ago now, and I stood outside on the large steps alone and wept inconsolably to see Yaya shuddering helplessly as she cried and turned to me and kept asking me, and probably god also, “why?” … “why?” … “why?” in between sobs. Every “why?” she asked cut horribly to the depths of my soul and eventually, when I could take no more, I collapsed – at the hopelessness and the irrevocable and meaningless horror of death, the inevitable decay of life, the bitterly seething grief that befalls us all – like a mangled mess on those old stone steps and held my bleary eyes in my trembling hands and wept not because I was sad but because it hurt more than anything I’d ever known to see Yaya so sad and broken and drowning in grief. I wept for her, not for myself.
As I say, we met on those fabled old steps, steeped in a solemn history of past events, and she asked me where I wanted to go, so I took her back to the bar where I had just been writing and talked for a while, as I had a few more drinks, and then she told me the famous old story of how Papou Stamos, my grandfather, courted her: he saw her when she was fourteen, he being 17 years her senior, and instantly felt the ineffable yet unmistakeable tugging of love at the roots of his gentle soul, he then waited for what must have felt like an excruciatingly long half decade, until she was an appropriate age, during which time he had evaded and ignored an enormous amount of social and familial pressure to marry someone else and start a family – he beingly a vastly sought-after and handsome man – and yet his love maintained and he waited patiently until finally they married and remained so for the rest of his life. After a long talk we parted ways once more, she returning to the flat and I staying in the Platia to watch the world go by and write and digest all the experiences of the day, occasionally smiling to think of her and my grandfather’s heart-warming tale of love at first sight and the endurance of their companionship, ended only by the inescapable tolling bells of death.
Journal Extract by Stamos Mardou