A slice of life to deter premature depression

The sun sets in a spectacular city in northern Greece.

Taken over a year ago, during spring.

Taken a year ago - having lunch by the peaceful sea.

A flower blooming in the darkness of a modern city.. No one is paying attention to it, but still it rises in beauty and grace.

Rock Museum, Munich. My special admiration for rock'n'roll makes this rather trivial photo special for me.

A bird, strutting freely and carelessly on the pavement, unaware of its special beauty to the eye of a passer-by.

This photo was taken at Nafplio a profoundly exquisite city in the Peloponnese. It is editted - this is why the branches are red.

This post is more like a nostalgic trip back to previous years for me. The years in which the photos were captured range from 2008 to 2011. It may seem like a short period, but during these years I experienced major changes both in my life and in my character. I have evolved for the better (I hope). I finished school and entered university. I turned into an adult. I have spent a lot of time thinking about people and behaviors and drawn my own conclusions. Generally, I have changed a lot and I have experienced a lot. I am grateful for what I've seen and for the people I've met and for the different situations we've confronted together, and hope that I will see, meet, learn more in the future.

Expose yourselves!

Picture yourself standing in front of a large crowd, a bewildered sea of faces that awaits every single word that may fall out of your mouth. For a couple of seconds, every single fiber of your being is lying naked. Every unique sentiment that springs out of your precious little heart, shows. This is love. Exposure.

Don’t be scared, don’t run away! Exposure is beautiful and intimidating at the same time. It’s an indication of power and weakness at the same time. Exposure is the power to give away all your secret weapons, all your smothered insecurities to someone else so you can have bits and pieces of love back.  It is a weakness for some people – trading parts of your precious life for instants of Eros. But…don’t be unsettled; expose yourselves!

Being exposed is the act of being bare-naked in front of someone who is going to be able to tinker with your feelings and weaknesses. You are not in the position to know whether they will caress your insecurities or drag them sick and half-dead out in the street. It is a game; a game in which you can be either equal or a loser. It is a risk; a temptation naturally difficult not to succumb to. It is the essence of our very existence as sentimental and fragile entities in this world; the profound substance of both happiness and misery. But, you can never earn seconds of happiness or seconds of misery if you don’t participate in this game; so, take a big breath, step to the front and expose yourselves!

The girl who went away

The girl who went away

Part One

“Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean,

Tears from the depth of some divine despair

Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes,

In looking on the happy Autumn-fields,

And thinking of the days that are no more.” , Alfred Lord Tennyson

I picture me and her on a mountain, in some reverie, wild and free

Laughing and joking, smoking, drinking our worries away.

Her timeless beauty, the way she moved and melted, they captivated me

And If I sinned, gladly for her the price I would pay.

She stood at the edge of the mountain reciting heartfelt poems

And her eyes were shining with unbridled, honest joy.

My mind was blown, deprived of worries, anxieties and problems

As she kissed my mouth and tenderly called me her little boy.

Her memory is one of those that rejuvenate in the summer

When the smell of the sea and the grains of the sand form her pretty face

These times I’d drink and wake up lonely and desperate the morning after

Helplessly looking for this girl that inspired in me so many tales.

And as much as I’ve tried to lead this girl astray

From my fingers she slipped like a careless sun ray

Who would imagine that this girl would go away!

Part two

“I hurt myself today

To see if I still feel

I focus on the pain

The only thing that's real

The needle tears a hole

The old familiar sting

Try to kill it all away

But I remember everything

What have I become?

My sweetest friend

Everyone I know

Goes away in the end

You could have it all

My empire of dirt

I will let you down

I will make you hurt

I wear this crown of shit

Upon my liar's chair

Full of broken thoughts

I cannot repair

Beneath the stains of time

The feelings disappear

You are someone else

I am still right here…”, Nine Inch Nails, ‘Hurt’

I saw her again, on a cold winter night

When my heart was frozen and my feelings were numb

Her eyes pierced me, full of sadness and fright

As I looked at her with signs of some once powerful love.

She looked cold and her eyes were shining no more

And her smile was gone and her voice

Like a little girl that made a wrong choice

Was barely heard any more.

“Where is my little girl gone?” I asked her gloomily.

Expecting a careless, happy, pretty response

With a wild and excruciating force

She replied to me somewhat crudely:

“Who are you, what do you want, why do you talk to me?”

Shocked by her attitude towards her little boy, me

I told her if she remembered those hot August nights.

When I’d hold her tight and let her sleep in my hands

And she’d whisper to me “I hope this never ends”.

She waved negatively, and I tried to grab her hand

Only to see wounds, painfully red.

All her fears and insecurities, dreadfully fed

To the demon that escaped his lair under the bed.

I looked her in the eyes, that were blank, sad and mad

Tried to speak a word of love, but my mouth went numb

If I kissed her, she wouldn’t remember

If I loved her, she wouldn’t know

If I sang her songs, she wouldn’t hear

She is long gone, a memory dimly lit.

And all the poems she recited play in my mind

Like a song that hasn’t died of the typhoon of time

And I hear him say “For thine is life”

Then, why do I feel this strange impulse to die?

Part Three

“My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still;

My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will;

The ship is anchored safe and sound, its voyage closed and done;

From fearful trip the victor ship comes in with object won;

Exult O shores, and ring O bells!

But I, with mournful tread,

Walk the deck my Captain lies,

Fallen cold and dead.” , Walt Whitman

A few months later, as I lay in bed

With a couple of diverse poems tangling in my head

I heard her name on the noisy TV

Clear and free, excruciatingly clean

“Emma Lee, a young beautiful girl was found dead

In an alley, after a heroin overdose.

She was a 20-year-old student…”

What shall I do now? Help me! I’m lost in dismay

How can I live with the fact that I won’t see her someday

Smiling to me, singing songs, playing in the sand with my hair

Reciting poems and crying for things she wished she hasn’t said

Drinking with me, emptying the bottle and dance in the moonlight

Embrace the sky with her hands, longing to fly like a kite?

How can I live while dying of so much torturing pain?

How can I live while my girl has silently gone away?

The Canvas

And as I walked down the street, it was dark, and the darkness filled my eyes, burderened my soul and killed my strength. I had to urge, to put my mind to work, and find a way out of this life that I never agreed on living.

When I was young, I bought myself a canvas. A blank, clear canvas, with no color stains on it. Not a single sign of interference. It was all mine to draw, to create from the very beginning. But from the very beginning, while I was still trying to figure out what to draw, I had instructors, tutors, people I never knew telling me what to draw. They didn't focus much on the content, but on the techniques. I never liked techniques. I am a lover of impulse, of spontaneity. I like using my heart, the only organ I need to be alive. What would art be, had I ripped my heart out and used cold logic? But, no. I was wrong. So they said. They told me I had to draw straight lines, not curved ones. Not a single drop of blue should be found out of these lines. I was to be persecuted and rebuked had I made a single, impulsive mistake. I had to be fully prepared, with carriages of knowledge in my head, with a notion of perfection without having experienced a single moment of mistakeness. I had to be infallible without stumbling, falling and getting back again. How could I be perfect? They all say perfection does not exist, but we all must strive to gain it. But how? How can you gain something that doesn't exist? I had questions. But all people ever did was moving my hand on the canvas and showing me how to do the perfect without having encountered the imperfect. 

Now I have a perfect, according to the general standards, canvas, but an imperfect dazzle and confusion.
Thus, whenever I walk down the street where the canvas store is located, I wonder, why did I let people paint the canvas? Why did I never release my hand from theirs? Why did I never try to be indepedent and let it shine?

Bits and Pieces

My soul is everywhere in this town. Bits and pieces of my most secret thoughts lie in its streets, reflect themselves in the water of the melancholic, sudden, cleansing autumn rain. In the background, you can hear the Smiths singing "Asleep"..."Sing me to sleep...sing me to sleep...don't try to wake me in the morning 'cause I will be gone...". Nothing's gone. Everything is still here. The stain on the clothes, the broken window, the dusty old books lying idlely on the floor. Everything that happened here is waking up, brought back from the dead, rejuvenates and sits opposite of me, reminding me of its constant presence and effect on my routine.

When I lay my body on the bed, I'm trying to think of stories that bring a smile to my face. Stories that I can tell and be glad to narrate. Stories that are only bright-colored, with touches of gold and silver and exquisite beauty. Suddenly, the world caves in. I can feel a thousand people lying in beds like me, and thinking about stories, memories, events so selfishly bound to our minds, so inevitably important for our future. All these people, like me, recollect bad stories as well. Sad stories ,full of gloom, full of darkness. Not everything we have is showered in light. Without dark, there would be no light. What is light? The mere absence of dark. Without the one, the other ceases to exist. Beauty cannot exist without ugliness. Beautiful memories would be a waste of time without the ugly ones. We collapse but we get back up. This is the magic of being a human; one has to constantly deal with the contrasts of life; the painfull challenges and the enchanting triumphs. The essence of life.

It's night and I cannot get any sleep. I can hear the wind blowing outside and a million leaves landing on my balcony. The melancholy of autumn, the serenity of the night, the reluctant light that sneaks in my bedroom are enough to fill my mind with thoughts, assumptions, dreams, hopes. I capture my own mind dreaming of what it could be, living in hypotheses. I'm addicted to hypotheses. They offer me this uncomparable feeling of change, this feeling that someday, things aren't going to be the same as they are now, on his dead hour of this still night. I know, that one day, I won't be lying here, on this bed, addicted to my dreams and trapped in my stable life. I will be somewhere else, discussing, or just staring at the sky. Simple moments matter, because they are enough to rejuvenate the lost joy and hope.

I live among assumptions and hopes and dreams. But there is a certain thing I promised to myself and I will never break this promise. This promise is the meaning of life, the reason why I'm still fighting. I made a promise to myself; I will never, ever play the role of a mere spectator of my own life. I will be the protagonist, I will shape it, I will make it the way I want it to be. This is the core of life, the hidden treasure of it; not let it pass before your eyes, like a movie, but direct it yourself.