The Things I Keep Choosing – Mykonos

I woke before the alarm this morning.

This almost never happens when I have somewhere I am supposed to be, and happens constantly when I do not.

The room was still blue. Not dark exactly. That hour before sunrise when you can see everything but none of it has decided what colour it is yet.

I put on shorts and a sweatshirt over what I had slept in and went outside.

There was nobody by the pool.

The villa is up above the water, not dramatically, just enough that the sea appears beyond the wall without very much land between you and it. At night you cannot tell where one ends and the other begins.

In the morning you can.

I sat on the wall with my knees tucked inside the sweatshirt and watched the first light come across it.

I have always loved sunrise.

Sunset gets all the attention because it keeps civilised hours. You can dress for sunset. Order something. Find a table. Invite somebody.

Sunrise requires a little more commitment.

You have to meet it where it is.

There is something about being awake before everybody else that makes the world feel briefly unclaimed. As though the day has not been assigned yet and you have arrived before anybody can tell you what to do with it.

The sun came up.

Nothing extraordinary happened.

It was enough.

By seven I was walking.

Not toward anything particularly important. There is a path above the coast that eventually becomes a road, and then becomes something that is barely a path again. I followed it because I could see where it went for perhaps fifty metres and could not see what happened after that.

That is usually sufficient reason for me.

I like walking more than I remember that I like walking.

The first twenty minutes are negotiation. Shoes, hair, whether I should have brought water, whether the hill was really necessary.

Then something changes.

Your body gets on with it.

I have ridden horses since I was small and perhaps it is related. There is a point where thinking becomes less useful than movement. You stop negotiating with the hill. You simply go up it.

The path climbed through dry grass and low stone walls. Somewhere below, somebody started a scooter. A dog barked at something I could not see.

At the top I could see the villa again, very small now, and beyond it the Aegean.

For a moment I thought about the old stories.

It is difficult not to in Greece.

The gods in them were forever appearing on mountains and islands, falling in love with people, punishing them, rescuing them, turning them into trees or stars or something equally inconvenient. Nobody was ever permitted simply to have a quiet morning.

I think I would have disappointed them.

I sat on a rock and ate a peach.

That was the entire drama.

By the time I came back, the day had become hot.

I took off my shorts, left them on a chair and got into the pool.

There are days when getting into water feels recreational, and there are days when it feels like returning something to its correct state.

This was the second kind.

I swam a few lengths and then stopped pretending I was exercising.

I am very good at this.

The pool has one of those edges where the water seems to fall directly into the sea. I rested my arms on it and stayed there until my fingers wrinkled.

I love being in swimwear.

I am not sure there is a more elegant explanation for it than that.

A bikini means the day has narrowed its ambitions. Nobody expects very much from a woman in a bikini except that she has probably remembered sunscreen.

It also means water is somewhere nearby.

Both seem excellent arrangements.

I ate lunch outside with wet hair.

Tomatoes, cucumber, feta, bread, olive oil, something with lemon that I kept putting on everything. Food that looked as though nobody had spent the morning trying to impress it.

I like that too.

Perhaps more than I used to.

There was a time when I thought having taste meant preferring complicated things.

It does not.

Sometimes the tomato is good.

You eat the tomato.

In the afternoon I did almost nothing.

There is a hot tub beside the pool, which in the middle of a warm Greek afternoon is an objectively ridiculous thing to have.

Naturally I got in.

Not for long.

Long enough to establish that it was indeed hot.

Then I sat on the edge with my feet in it and read. Or attempted to read. I got through perhaps six pages because the sun kept moving across the book and because every few minutes I found something else more interesting to look at.

I have begun to suspect that I am bad at relaxing in the conventional sense.

I do not particularly want to lie somewhere and disappear.

I want to look.

Maybe that is why I travel.

Not because I need to be somewhere different all the time. I think I just like the period before a place becomes ordinary.

A road I have not walked.

A hill I have not climbed.

A menu I cannot quite read.

A house with a gate I want to know what is behind.

The first morning somewhere.

The last evening.

I suppose exploring is curiosity with shoes on.

At four I went looking for ice cream.

Stracciatella.

I am writing that down because apparently I have been accused of being predictable.

I reject the charge.

Mostly.

I ate it walking back, which meant there was a race between me and the Greek sun that the Greek sun was always going to win.

Some of it went on my hand.

This is the price of happiness.

Later I changed.

I had spent most of the day in almost nothing and then took an unreasonable amount of pleasure deciding what to wear for dinner.

I love clothes.

Properly love them.

The fabric, the line of something, the completely unnecessary shoe that changes the way you stand. I love the small private transformation of getting dressed when there is somewhere to go.

I also love an old sweatshirt, bare feet and shorts I have owned too long.

These things do not seem contradictory to me.

Maybe that is the mistake people make about fashion. They think loving clothes means wanting to be dressed all the time.

Sometimes the luxury is taking everything off.

I did not go straight to dinner.

The sky had started changing.

So I stayed.

There was still warmth in the stone around the pool. I sat beside the hot tub again, this time dressed, my shoes beside me because I had already taken them off.

The sea went silver first.

Then peach.

Then that impossible colour between pink and orange that cameras spend their entire lives failing to understand.

I have always loved sunsets too.

Of course I have.

They are shameless.

Sunrise asks you to come and find it.

Sunset performs.

Perhaps I like them for opposite reasons.

I stayed until the sun was gone.

And somewhere in those last few minutes I realised I had spent an entire day doing almost nothing I do not love.

I had been outside nearly all of it.

I had walked until my legs were tired.

I had gone somewhere simply because I did not know what was there.

I had been in the sun and in the water.

I had worn a bikini most of the afternoon and something beautiful in the evening.

I had eaten a peach on a rock and stracciatella too quickly.

I had watched the day begin.

Now I had watched it end.

This should not have felt like a revelation.

Maybe it wasn’t one.

Maybe at some point you begin noticing the things you choose when nobody else is choosing for you.

I think that is probably a more honest list than the one you make when somebody asks what you love.

Mykonos has been strange for me that way.

I came for Delos.

Then I stayed because of the light.

Then I stayed because I wanted another day.

Now I am beginning to think there are places that do not necessarily give you anything new.

They just get quiet enough for you to notice what was already there.

The old Greeks would probably have assigned a god to this.

A beautiful and troublesome one, naturally.

I think I prefer the simpler explanation.

I was happy today.

And I knew why.

I am grateful for that.

For the ridiculous luck of being here. For a body that carried me up the hill this morning and into the water afterward. For the sun coming up whether I was there to see it or not, and for somehow being awake when it did.

For another day in a life I am still figuring out.

Mostly, though, I am grateful to you.

I know that sounds sentimental.

You will survive.

There are people who have been reading these pages since I began writing them, and people who found me last week. Some of you write to me. Some tell me about places I should go, books I should read, things that happened to you twenty years ago, or what you ate for breakfast.

Some of you simply say you were here.

I read more of it than you probably imagine.

I am deeply curious about the world. That part must be fairly obvious by now.

I want to know what is behind the gate, what is at the end of the path, why somebody painted the door blue, what happened in the house before I arrived.

But I think I am even more curious about the people in it.

What you love.

What you regret.

Where you would go if somebody handed you a ticket tomorrow.

Who you still think about.

The thing you want and have not told anybody yet.

I like knowing these things.

Not because they are useful.

Usually they are not.

I just think people are interesting.

Perhaps that is another thing I keep choosing.

People.

So to those of you who read these little records of my life, and especially those of you who take the time to write back to me, thank you.

You make the world feel larger.

And somehow less lonely.

V.

More images from Mykonos