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White Stone / Instant Coffee

from My Big Break - volume 1 by Ben Seretan

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about

Laying in bed in a small house on a cliff on the island of Santorini, the Cyclades, in the Aegean Sea, Greece, summer 2016. A chill night, salt in the air, the smooth, white rock walls of the bedroom cool and disarmingly smooth to the touch. The wind was picking up as the night was getting deeper and darker, knocking the deep blue shutters open and closed, open and closed, loudly clacking, their creaks in the breeze. We couldn't sleep, so we tried to watch Before Sunrise on my phone, my one arm around shoulders and the other bent up at elbow, holding the tiny screen above our faces. The wifi in the house could just barely handle it - the movie stuttered and stopped and felt a coded message radioed from another distant planet.
We had spent much of the previous 6 summer weeks on trains together so this absurdly picturesque getaway was to be our actual vacation after a pretty grueling tour schedule of shows in Italy. Watching the movie, I couldn't help but identify with the two young people - traveling trains, looking for a connection, maybe kind of bored. I noted on this particular re-watch that they seem to seek each other out mostly because they have time to kill and nothing better to do, why not encounter a stranger. We, the two travelers in this white stone room, would be in Vienna soon, where the movie takes place - it was the only direct flight off of Santorini that we could afford - and I wanted to go to some of the places featured in the movie, to go to that one graveyard, to cross the same bridges (but when it came our time in Vienna was more about weed tincture in bottles of coca cola, slowly wandering through the amusement park, watching television, eating sausages at 2am, drinking a lot). I saw myself in these two characters, I wanted to walk where they walked, but more than that I wanted to feel what those two characters seem to feel, I wanted to sit too close together in a listening booth in a record store in Austria and put on a Kath Bloom record like they do, I wanted to walk around the old bombed out cobblestone streets late at night and talk with big hand gestures and with real curiosity, with real interest, with freedom from resentment. I wanted my body to feel fresh and aflame and kinetic, I wanted to stay up all night with this person beside me like we used to, when just being around each other kept us up at night, how we'd drink coffee at dawn in the park and watch the dogs run around, filled with electricity. I wanted the long and surreal trip out to this white stone house (busses through mountain towns in Albania, dogs in the street, daytime ouzo) to be something else than what it had become, how it's stayed lodged in my memory since.
At one pause in the movie while the wifi was strained she asked me if I felt that the wind blowing that night was evil, too, her voice deadpan.
When we first got to the island - after a long and totally surreal trip on an enormous ferry through the Aegean, playing cards in our windbreakers for hours - we went straight to the little office from which we had rented a car online a few weeks previous. There was surprisingly little paperwork done before they handed us the keys to our shitty little car - it was green, it looked like a skittle with wheels, our bags barely fit in the back, it was some kind of bootleg reverse engineer automatic transmission that never shifted properly when it needed to. And having picked a mid-August weekend to arrive there we were stuck in traffic for an hour just leaving the harbor, the road out wound up and up an around neck-creakingly, and for every two inches forward we would lightly stall out and roll one inch back, me nauseous and white-knuckled, our car sandwiched between busses. The wave of relief I felt as we crested the hill high above the deep and preposterously azure ocean below us nearly knocked me unconscious. It felt like we had crashed the gates of heaven, like we had snuck in to a delirious and happy dream via a back door (like my brother's story of hopping a barbed wire fence to see Bob Dylan, his friend's gouged hand bleeding in his pocket the whole show through). We drove from the port to our house, the roads curved, the clouds soared, everything looked like an instagram post, the air felt fresh as it came in through the windows, both of them all the way down. Our place for the week was quiet, low-slung, secluded and just up from a private beach, you could hear waves crashing in the kitchen. I ran my hands along the stone walls as we walked in the door, feeling for a light switch or looking for traps. Everything wonderful and the dread therein.
We had an hour or so of light left so we drove to the closest beach bar and had white wine under umbrellas, me in a Hawaiian shirt and her in a red one piece and a sarong, a total parody of vacation but giddy, we made it, we willed this into being, we took selfies with the dog that came over to us, panting.
At some point the power line buzz of giddiness we felt that first evening on the island - that buzz we used to feel - went dead. We had become very sick of each other, we bickered, we almost never touched each other anymore. We were constantly compromising and at a certain point neither of us was ever fully getting what we wanted. At first this only applied to what to eat but eventually it applied to everything.
One day we followed a tip we had gotten from the American expats at the book store - there was a pristine and unbelievably beautiful white sand beach that was accessible only by motorboat from a certain remote point of the island. We located it on the map and pointed our little green car there. We turned left off the main road and descended down the cliff along a dirt road at what felt like a terribly sharp decline, the kind of driving where you have to turn the radio off in order to concentrate on the road. Almost immediately we felt that our gps directions had made a mistake - this was not a road to drive down, we were in danger - but we continued anyway, down and down. Finally we got to a parking lot, flattened gravel with a few logs to indicate where to put your car. We grabbed our things and headed for the beach which, unlike a lot of the other beaches on the island, was not glamorous or particularly full of people - the little cafe attached to the dock appeared to be run by a single, large family, a family that appeared to live in a complicated nest of additions on top of the cafe. There was a large rock wall that shadowed the cafe/house and part of the beach and jutted out impressively into the water and the sea there was calm and clear. We went in the cafe to drink coffee and ask about the white sand beach we had heard about, could we go there? With some difficulty it was explained that her son was not awake, but he would take us in his boat. We went swimming.
Hours later the woman we had spoken to beckoned to us and introduced us to her son, a young shirtless teenager who never met our eyes. We followed him down the dock to his boat - a small, gray inflatable dingy with a motor on the back and climbed in. We puttered out gently and around past the rock wall, bobbing and swaying up and over the waves. That power line started buzzing again - it was a beautiful day, the wind was in our hair, and the three of us were on our way to the most beautiful beach in the most beautiful place I had ever been. As we came around the bend, we could see the fine, white sand and the blissful emptiness of the beach, but the waves began to pick up, we gripped the sides of the boat a bit tighter and after 10 minutes or so of idling, we wordlessly turned back around. We asked, can't we go to the beach? He shook his head. Later his mother told us that the waves were too big, that we would try again later when the tides changed. We tried again about an hour later and it was more or less the same, although this time was more painful - we could see it, we could imagine ourselves hanging out there for the rest of the afternoon, if only circumstances were different, maybe we could make it there, standing in a river with a fiery thirst but the water recedes no matter how gently you try to cup it in the palm of your hand. Never made it there. We took our little car back up the hill, hyperventilating the whole time.
Also: pausing in the middle of the show I was playing on the roof of the bookstore because the donkeys tourists could ride were being brought in for the night and the bells attached to their necks and the sound of the hooves on the stone were drowning me out. The sun was setting behind me and it seemed like an unending amount of donkeys, how could there be so many, it felt impossible. The crowd of 10 or so people waited patiently for me to start singing again.
Also: last meal on the island, eating an entire salt roasted fish, taking little morsels of food from the hundreds of tiny bones, constantly feeling like I was choking, lemon seeds and rinds in a pile, weighing the cost of each little morsel, was it worth it, a map of the cyclades in a deep blue on the white plate beneath the skeleton of the fish.
Also: watching the sun rise after a night of evil winds, crescent moon still in the sky, restless, cup of instant coffee beside me at the little metal patio table, open notebook, pen in hand, nothing to say, feeling like there was no greater torment than granting ourselves access to paradise, couldn't bring myself to write it down.

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from My Big Break - volume 1, released July 16, 2020

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Ben Seretan Climax, New York

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