Blue
by Gideon Leek
“I hate you I hate you I hate you.” That’s what Nora texts me. Today is her birthday. Two days earlier, I’d mailed her a letter. I don’t think she liked the letter. The letter was Plan A. Now it’s time for Plan B, which starts with a flight. Well, two flights.
JFK to Athens with a layover in Dublin. Sitting on the flight to Dublin, I get to thinking—about flights, about Greece, about her. I wonder if she thought about what I said in the letter. I wonder if she’s on the plane. I walk up and down, checking, but Nora isn’t there.
The trip to Greece was her idea. She sent me a photo on Twitter. A chair on a sunbeaten rock, the ocean stretching out behind. It was the old-fashioned kind of chair, wooden with four legs beneath you and two of them behind you, connected with a curved piece for your back. The curved piece said, in English, “Southern Point of Europe” the legs on either side had messages too: “Smile,” “Relax.”
The chair is on the island of Gavdos, off the south coast of Crete. It’s too far south to attract the normal tourists, who prefer places closer to Athens—Mykonos, Santorini, Hydra. So Gavdos rebranded itself as a curio, commissioning a kitsch monument to prove it. At fifteen feet tall and eight feet across, the chair is a beacon to travelers, not just some errant exponent of a dining set. Some photos show tourists splayed out across it, like cats.
“Why is it a chair?” I asked Nora.
“Because people will be tired from the distance. It’s a long trip to the southernmost point in Europe.”
“Sure, but it’s not like you walk the whole way,” I responded. “Do you?”
“It’s an island. You can’t walk there. You’d sink.”
I never got an answer. The chair was one of several ideas thrown around for a honeymoon. A honeymoon that never happened to celebrate a wedding that never took place. Our engagement lasted two weeks. Two weeks of fighting, tears, and threats, a miserable conclusion to a five-year relationship. A five-year relationship that had been happy.
It’s hard to go back to dating when an engagement fails. Both of us felt rejected. Both of us felt guilty for rejecting the other. We didn’t want to be married, we’d even spoken about it, but that didn’t matter now. Our love had become less than, smaller, temporary. It ended.
It was only after that things became nasty. I missed Nora, missed being with her, and slowly found that I was hurt by her backing out of a marriage neither of us wanted. I began to make comments—to my friends, to her friends, to her. They were nasty comments. Soon, what had been an amicable break became messy, ugly, desperate. She stopped responding to my messages, stopped going to the same parties, stopped following me on social media. I didn’t stop.
The letter was an offensive contradictory thing, like one of those mixed-up mythological creatures—head of a goat, body of a lion, tail of a cow. I said I was still in love with her, told her I hated her for hating me, and, finally, begged her, if she secretly didn’t hate me, to meet me in Gavdos, at the chair, on Sunday. Two days from now.
At the Dublin airport, 9 am local time, 3 am back home, I get a Guinness from a coffee shop. I take a picture of myself drinking—red eyes, hair sticking up, greasy—and post it on my Instagram story with the caption “It’s five o’clock somewhere!” My friend Sam swipes up “Pyongyang?” He’s right. It is five o’clock there. I don’t respond. Sam and I aren’t close anymore. We stopped being friends two weeks ago. He kissed Nora at a party. I’m not sure he knows I know.
When I land in Athens, I realize, as I always do when I arrive, that I still have a long way to go. My Airbnb is in Exarchea, the anarchist district north of the Parthenon, which is an hour train ride from the airport. The distance between airports and cities has always bothered me. Even the most touristy, globalized cities, are barricaded, keeping visitors out and natives in. I suppose it’s a holdover from medieval days, as if inches of castle wall had been laid out flat and stretched into miles of sprawl. Once, when I was younger, I tested the physical distance between cities and airports. I was studying abroad in Amsterdam and had long ago done everything in the city. I spent my final day in the city walking to the airport on the bike path. It took six and a half hours. Some of it was pleasant—there was a petting zoo with goats. Much of it was unpleasant—a bike path in Amsterdam includes tunnels and motor scooters.
That was the last time I walked, but I’ve kept the memory. Every time I spend the final hour getting into a city, I think about what it might be like to be walking. In Athens it seems grim. The airport is miles from the city, surrounded by underdeveloped suburbs. Here, unlike Amsterdam, there isn’t even a path.
“Tourist Go Home” is spray painted across the cobblestone street when I go out in Exarchea. At night, the anarchist district is drab and ill-lit. Younger Athenians, goths, smoke and scowl in the narrow streets. Older working-class Greeks pass by, walking home to dismal outlying areas. I sit down outside a taverna. The waitress is young and pretty. She speaks English.
“The pork chop is good,” she tells me.
“I’ll have the pork chop,” I reply. “Can I have the melted tomatoes and feta too?”
“Americans love that,” she says, laughing. “It’s from TikTok, you know? Not real Greek food.”
I nod. “Can I have bread too?”
An hour later, I am still sitting outside the taverna, smoking and drinking ouzo. I enjoyed my TikTok meal. The pork chop was dry. It needed salt. The waitress from earlier gets off her shift. She smiles at me in her street clothes. I wave. She keeps smiling for a few seconds. I want to ask her to climb the nearby hill with me, but I’ve forgotten the name. I take out my phone to look up “Athens hill.” Briefly, I’m distracted by notifications. Sam has asked if I am liking Greece. I don’t respond. There is nothing from Nora. When I look up the waitress is gone. “Mount Lycabettus” I say to no one.
I don’t sleep. The next morning, before my ferry to Crete, I walk to the Parthenon. It’s a beautiful day—Mediterranean sun, breeze coming off the water, flowers. At the Parthenon, feral cats pop out of cracks in ancient marble, weaving through the legs of tourists. I am denied entry to go up. There are no timed entry tickets, none for the next week. The woman in the ticket booth offers me a pass to the Roman Agora down the street.
I like the Roman Agora. It has the Temple of Hephaestus which is a sort of smaller, crummier Parthenon, and there are some Ancient Greek heads in the museum. I take a picture with one of the heads. Post it on my Instagram. No caption. In the photo, I look sweaty and tired. The Ancient Greek does not. He looks poised and noble. I wonder if he had a hard life, being a warrior. In the shop, I buy a tchotchke of his head.
It takes another hour to get from Athens to the ferry. Piraeus, the ferry neighborhood, is grim. A sprawling strip mall built to capture tourists on a ten-minute walk between the boats and the subway. It works. I sit down for a seafood lunch. The food is terrible. Grilled octopus, tough and flavorless. Until recently this was frozen, I think. I drink three glasses of white wine. The wine is terrible too.
The ferry to Crete lasts twelve hours. Nora is not on it. An American girl tells me that most people fly to Crete. She has blond hair and wears jeans and a t-shirt. The t-shirt says “Pretend this is a Toga” in old-fashioned Greek letters, like on those coffee cups. She is one of very few people on the ferry. The boat is mostly filled with shipping crates and heavy machinery. Heavy machinery doesn’t notice the difference between twelve hours and two. The American girl is telling me that she’s in a master’s program at home, studying English at Columbia. That’s why she’s going to Crete—to do research for her English program. Her thesis is about Joni Mitchell’s Blue, some of which is based on a trip to the island. I ask if she has heard of Gavdos and the southernmost chair in Europe. She hasn’t. Joni never went there.
I fall asleep and wake up in the middle of the Mediterranean. The master’s student tells me I was talking in my sleep. “Smile” and “Relax,” I’d been saying, again and again. I laugh. “That’s what it says on the chair,” I tell her. She smiles.
It is morning again when we arrive. Chania, the western port in Crete, is beautiful. Muli-colored buildings with big windows and a row of mountains in the background. The water is blue. For a moment, I think about diving in and swimming to shore. I don’t. People might get mad, start yelling at me in Greek, and I don’t like getting in trouble. Instead, I say goodbye to the master’s student. She asks if I’ll listen to the Joni Mitchell album. I say yes. I ask her which album to download. She says blue.
In Chania, I rent a motorcycle. I have five hours to get to Sougia, on the other side of the island. That’s where I’ll get the ferry to Gavdos. The bike gets me there in ninety minutes. I have too much time to kill. I should have stayed longer in Chania. Maybe with the master’s student.
Sougia is a small village built around a beach. The beach is three times the size of the village. I divide my time accordingly. I eat a quick lunch of beer and souvlaki and pay the owner 5 euros to store my motorbike and watch my bag.
I walk to the beach. Even in summer it is so large as to appear deserted, families sitting far apart. At this size, it’s more like a desert than a beach, I think. Stripping to my boxers I run into the surf. The water is warm, light shimmers in the surf. At a beach like this I could swim forever.
When the boat pulls into Sougia, there is great commotion. Locals pull out carts to sell snacks and gifts. Tourists line up with their rolling luggage. I check: Nora isn’t there. I get my bag from the store. This boat is smaller, almost dingy. The captain stands on the upper deck waving a bottle of tsipouro. As we board, he laughs and jokes with the passengers in Greek and English. He keeps up the humor during the trip, insisting that every passenger drive the boat (which, on open ocean, doesn’t amount to much) and drink with him (which amounts to a great deal). After my turn to drive (and drink), I go below deck and sleep. I wake up in Gavdos.
Gavdos has four restaurants, a bakery, and one hotel. It has a year-round population of 70 people. The largest family is five people. Barely vegetated, and only 200 miles from the African coast, it is only visibly Greek due to its population. Otherwise, it could be any other dry distant island. On a clear day, you can see the coast of Libya. Today is clear.
I go to the hotel with the other visitors from the boat. At check-in they tell us to steer clear of one of the four restaurants. It is not for tourists, they say. I go there. Initially, this restaurant seems abandoned. The chairs outside are stacked up out front. The deck is empty. No music is playing. But there are lights on inside. I knock.
A brown man in a torn button-down opens the door. Everyone in the restaurant is brown. There must be sixty people. All their clothes are torn. The women wear hijabs. The hijabs are torn too. They sit on the floor eating food from cans and drinking water from bottles. In the corner, there are cots. I realize that they sleep here too. The man in the torn button-down speaks to me in a language I don’t understand. I leave. Nora isn’t there.
Across the street, I go to the Greek taverna. Other tourists have already sat down. They are eating salads and bread. A Greek woman comes over. She has frizzy blonde hair and wears leopard print tights. She tells me about the special, local mushrooms. I order fish. I order wine. The couple next to me gets the mushrooms. They are fried. The couple push them at each other until they fall off the plate. Then they order fish.
I sit on the edge of the pool by the hotel. The bottom has beautiful blue ceramic work, a pattern of horses pulling a chariot. In the moonlight, the horses shimmer and seem to run in place. I take a picture for Instagram. Sam swipes up. “Beautiful,” he says. I don’t respond. I wonder what it would’ve been like to be here with Nora. This would have been a nice time to kiss Nora. Nora isn’t there.
In the morning, all the tourists are headed for the chair. A local man is trying to sell me a mule ride. Another is selling me a hat. One of the refugees offers me a granola bar. I take the granola bar. He keeps his hand out. I give him five euros. He nods and gives me an American thumbs up.
The walk takes two hours. I race ahead to avoid the other tourists. This is easy to do—they are stopping for pictures every few minutes. Thin vegetation sprouts across the hills. Wind from the ocean blows sand in my face. The sun burns my neck. Everywhere I look the view is incredible—endless ocean, so clear you can see right through. I am desperate to swim.
Finally, I reach the chair. It didn’t look this big on Google Images. I take a picture for Instagram with the caption “better in person” and a location tag. No one replies. I sit down in the shade under the chair and wait.
An hour later, the other tourists arrive. They are taking pictures and talking loudly. Nora isn’t there. I start walking back. Why did I ever think she would come? I think. She was never going to come, I think.
A few minutes from the chair is an empty beach. I stop to swim. The water is cool and calm. I swim out as far as I can. I wonder how far it would be to Libya. I wonder if I’m even headed in the right direction. I wonder if Nora would care if I moved to Libya. I decide she would not. I swim back.
I lay on the beach. My shirt over my face, the sand warm beneath me. “Smile,” I think. “Relax,” I think. I can’t. I decide to put on some music. On my Spotify, I look up the Joni Mitchell album. I play it. In that moment, on the beach, the music moves me. I post a song to Instagram. Sam swipes up. “Gay,” he says. “Fuck you,” I respond. “So we’re talking now?” he asks. “No,” I reply. I try to text the song to Nora. My number is blocked. I want to ask if she remembers the time we went to her uncle’s house on Breezy Point and slept on the beach. How we woke up to the high tide washing us away. How I wish we’d just washed away together. I wonder if she will ever sleep on the beach with someone else. Probably. I listen to the rest of the album. I like the album. I wonder if there’s a northernmost chair in Europe. I wonder if it’s in Norway. I wonder if Joni Mitchell went to Norway too.
Gideon Leek has published stories in Volume 0, Wigleaf, Hobart, and Oxford Review of Books. His essays have appeared in The Atlantic, Vulture, and Playboy. He lives in Brooklyn and is at work on a novel.