Alone but not alone

                                                                  Sounio              Spring            2016

From beneath the gaps in the cold stones, life reached out for the sky. The strong wind left a salty residue on my lips, its taste a childhood memory. Looking down at the Aegean from high above, I was reminded of how it received its name and of what fate lies in complacency. I didn’t come here to look for answers, but to shout questions into the wind, to hear them echoed out to sea, and for them to be lost somewhere between me and the horizon. Regardless of a change of country, environment, timezone or language, your emotions never really leave you, and your feelings and memories, fears and expectations travel with you. Still if you are going to be alone, then be alone, and if you are going to be lost, then best in a place you have never experienced before.

I sat for a while in the dust near a clump of spiky dried out bushes, their leaves shaking with a brittle percussive rasp. I closed my eyes and drifted as the sun warmed my face, red and amber patterns danced beneath my eyelids, I thought of your smile, so far away, I felt light and warm, as the wind gently rocked me and the sun lulled me away. I awoke several moments later, a little disorientated until I put the pieces together, my mind sharpened and my internal voice reminded me, I am here, on the cliffs in Sounio on the Attica Peninsula, alone. I looked to my right and there less than a metre away, clinging to a dried out branch was a large green dragonfly. Maybe it had been there all along and was difficult to see before as its colouring provided good camouflage for the surrounding shrubbery, but my advantage was that I had fallen asleep, and therefore awoke laying down, and it was clearly revealed as a silhouetted outline against the bright blue sky.