Seasonal Love

Elektra Papathanasiou-Goldstein, Creative Writing

Life on the back of a motorycle in August doesn’t get much better, doesn’t get easier, or freer, or more blissful than this. This blip in time is circled on an invisible calendar, reserved for simplicity and happy little adventures in the small village by the sea. It’s reserved for lying on your chest, releasing dancing smoke through parted lips, and watching it pirouette elegantly around the atoms in the air. Bonfires that make eyes glow, rays of sunlight that bounce off waves, and heat that blurs the air right above the burning sand. Reserved for nights where you hop through the fishermens’ boats anchored near the shore, screaming as one of your friends pushes you off the edge, or gliding in a dive so smooth that you barely disturb the peace of the sea. Maybe one night you’ll have the guts to climb on one of the yachts and jump from there, but you probably never will. Although there’s no speaker, jazz rap floats out of a cracked silver Android phone, drifting into the silence of the beach and mixing with the soft sound of cicadas and calm waves. A clipper lighter flicks, you can see each others’ faces in the dark. The stars are so beautiful and infinite, only millimeters between them and sparkling so many light years away. He holds your hand and traces the Big Dipper with your finger, and the constellations seem to connect and fit together. You look at stars that may not even be alive anymore - shooting stars that leap in the black sky. Photons and supernovas and black holes and the lightyears between them remind you that nothing really matters. We’re just another one of those, made from stars and endlessly orbiting a star, stuck in a loop that lasts forever, trying to make sense of why the planets will perpetually spin around the sun, never letting her go and clinging on in an orbit that circles and circles. We gaze into night skies, into the past, into stars that are so far yet so close. You stare at the sunset together sometimes, watching clouds turn pink, the ocean swallowing the sun, and then night falls, until the sun emerges from the waves and paints the sky blue again. Swimming at 5am, the water is still untouched by kids in floaties splashing around, volleyballs skidding off the surface, swimmers heading towards the horizon alone, or flat gray stones skipping one, two, three, more times, if you’re lucky. Ripples trailing behind them until the journey stops and they sink back to the bottom where another million similar stones sit in underwater peace. An early morning ocean so flat, so clear and almost motionless that you’re almost scared to ruin its perfection, but you’re not that scared so you just let the water hold you as you lie on your back with eyes closed, feeling like this is the one moment in the universe that is truly yours, the moment that everything is where, how, and when its supposed to be. There's a row of rocks that lead to a little abandoned lighthouse, just a bit shorter than a tree. Rusty, but you hold hands to balance and climb up the stairs to where the wind makes it impossible to light the Marlboro reds and could blow you away if it weren’t for the one thin rail on the circumference of this little deck. It’s nice to live nocturnally sometimes, wake up at 5pm and fall asleep at 5am on a sunbed, wake up burned some days, but the water is a cool remedy against it. It’s nice to see the lifecycle of the sun and the town that buzzes at night with bars and restaurants and arcades and teenagers using the steps of the dock like couches at a party. Watching people slowly drift off back home, shops being locked, and lights turning off, the last sounds of bike wheels and laughter fading in the direction of someone’s house or hotel -- while you both stay on the beach and ‘kill time’ until the town wakes up again.