TW // suicide, sexual assault
“Do you have a scheduler?”
I’m lying in my bed in my cabin at Drolma Ling. The woman and I are chatting, by text—she is considering renting one of the rooms in my and the poet’s home. She’s asked if we can speak tomorrow. I’ve said I can’t, but could we speak the following day?
That’s when she asks about the scheduler.
“I would be a lot easier than going back and forth,” she adds.
My reaction is possibly a little overboard.
“A SCHEDULER?” I yell, to no one.
“BACK and FORTH?”
I know how Buddhist this sounds, but I want to throw this woman off a cliff. It’s not her fault. It’s my deep, pent-up resentment at living in a world where it’s normal to use an app to decide when we’re going to speak to each other, instead of just, like… deciding. Or just calling. Remember calling?
I’m including myself in this, of course. I’m constantly rushing to the scheduled things, always feeling unworthy for not getting to the scheduled things on time, and that I can’t schedule even more things. I don’t want to live like this. I want to lie in bed when I wake up in the morning and listen to the breeze in the pine trees. To go for a walk with no destination, listening to Leonard Cohen because I mistakenly thought Leonard Cohen had lived on Rhodes (turns out it was Hydra), feeling all existential, brushing my fingers against the plants I pass and stopping to pat ponies. And then (brace yourself)… take a nap. All of which I did today.
More to the point, I don’t want to feel like there’s something wrong with me for wanting this.
I don’t respond to the woman.
I go to the beach.
I say “yassou” to an elderly woman I pass in the village who’s watering the plants on her porch. She lights up, and I instantly feel better. I get to the sea to find Raymond there with his fishing rod. I ask him if he’s caught anything, even though I already know the answer.
“I don’t want to actually catch any fish,” he told me, this morning. “This is my meditation.”
But, he adds, he did accidentally catch a small grouper a few days back.
“I’ve defrosted it for tonight,” he says. “Since this is your last dinner here. For now.”
I don’t want it to be my last dinner here.
This always happens when I leave a place like this. The life I left behind three days ago, which seemed totally normal at the time—road rage, street lights, banging away at my laptop in cafes, zoom calls, schedulers—now feels insane. Never mind that it’s the tip of the next level insanity that is running our world, telling us that we genocides are okay and money is more important than lives and some lives are also worth more than other lives.
It’s almost like we aren’t supposed to live that way, or something.
Later, in my cabin in the darkness, I remember how when I decided to move to Fethiye, I thought I would instantly have a slower, more peaceful life.
Funny how you can’t run away from yourself.
Being on Rhodes these few days has reminded me of this. For a long time after the Very Bad Thing, I’d thought that one day, I could get rid of it. Not delete it as such, but no longer carry its imprint, tattooed on my being.
But it’s still with me. And as weird as it might sound, while I wouldn’t wish it upon my worst enemy, I’m also grateful for all the growing and learning it made me do. (Again, given how much trauma so many beings on this planet are going through right now, I acknowledge how privileged I am to be able to even reflect on this.) The VBT is tattooed on my being. But it didn’t design that tattoo. I did. Around the scar that it left behind.
The next day, I wander around the shops and streets in the old city before I catch the ferry home. I feel that familiar pull to buy things, eat things, consume things… to take in as much of this”other” place as I can before returning to the familiar, as if that will make the experience last.
But none of it feels right.
I find a hole-in-the-wall food stand at the end of a road. I buy a gyro for 3€—grilled chicken, tzatziki, and vegetables wrapped in a thick, fresh pita; a meal I lived on for breakfast, lunch and dinner during my backpacker days in this country.
I walk far as I can away from the city, and eat it on a bench, overlooking the sea.
Thank you for taking us (OK, me) along on the journey.
You are a good traveling companion.