A couple years ago I visited my father's really, impossibly remote village on the boarder with Turkey and Bulgaria, former home of my late grandparents, and place where I frequently summered when I was little. A sense of excitement and fear overcame me as we approached, both of which eventually gave way to a sort of topical melancholy that imbues the barren-from-people Northern Greece countryside, once we finally arrived. It was exactly as I remembered it, but at the same time it was nothing like it at all.
Everything seemed to be in its right place, the layout was the same, the location of the house was the same, with the only glaring omission being the cut down walnut tree that used to tower all over the yard and served as a seasonal swing once you hung a rope and an old car wheel on it. Outside, the whole place was overridden by wild vegetation, and the inside became something like a housing project for an assortment of spiders, flies, wasps and occasionally, small lizards. The biggest change of all however, was the fact that the people who used to live there now don't. I guess the new tiny tenants made sense in a way, life always finds a way to fill the gaps. It had been fifteen years since I last visited the place, but my memories of the last time I was there were still quite vivid.
I remembered pulling onto the entrance all that time ago and having my grandpa welcome us with a big smile across his face, and my always grumpy but equally loving grandma hugging us one by one to the point of asphyxiation. They would then sit us down by the big walnut tree and stuff our faces with various fruits and vegetables from the yard, or fresh fried eggs from their free roaming chickens. I remembered sitting next to my grandpa while he was driving his tractor, and then sitting on his lap trying to generate enough force to change the gear on that heavy-ass gearbox. I remembered going to the nearby river with the whole family, catching a ton of river fish and decorating small tree branches with them as if they were fish-shaped Christmas tree ornaments, in order to be able to carry them back home and feed both ourselves and the local kittens, who seemed to enjoy the river fish way more than we did. I remembered snapping shots of said kittens with my then new, now lost, digital camera, and then taking a rusty old bike on long rides with the other grandparent-visiting kids in the village. I would get back to the house by the evening, spend a few hours reading Harry Potter and playing on my brother's PSP (which I can now confess that I did, in fact, break), and waiting until it's time to hit the village square to drink some Coke, eat some pork skewers and play hide-and-seek with my friends. It was a nice, simple, boring routine, but I did love doing it.
Visiting after all these years was nothing like that. When I last visited, I was a short, thin, feisty little kid with ambitions of becoming a football player (even though I sucked loads) or making video games or drawing comic books or whatever little boys used to obsess about back then. I think I might have visited during my "wanting to become a comic book artist" phase, due to carrying a bunch of semi-ripped apart Asterix & Obelix and Lucky Luke comics with me, gifts from my Greek cousins. In that admittedly brief but quite interesting phase, I was obsessed with comics and comic strips, I even did a whole ass presentation on comics, complete with a very professional interview with a guy who was at the time doing political satire for a local newspaper, and a PowerPoint on why politics would be more interesting if presented in comic book fashion. In retrospect, even though I didn't think it through, I have to give it to little me for comparing then prominent political figures to Porky Pig and Bugs Bunny. It's just objectively funny. In case you haven't noticed, I didn't become a football player (although I did stop sucking eventually), I didn't become a video game designer and the attempt I made in creating comic book characters was met with the kind of shock and awe that only your parents can give you when they think "this shit kinda sucks". In my defense, it's really hard to actually do what you think you'll be doing when you're ten. Hell it's hard to even know what you want to do at twenty. Or thirty. Or ever for that matter.
Despite all that, I was still content with the version of myself that showed up, as it was, up to that point, the best one so far. The village felt weirdly empty and I just wasn't sure if it was because everything felt bigger when I could barely qualify for the "have to be this tall to ride" slides, or if people just stopped visiting. The streets seemed narrower, the village square seemed smaller and not quite as loud, the one tavern that was left had us as the lonesome guests. Yet, I didn't feel the kind of sadness when you feel you've lost something, or the longing that you feel when you get hit by a wave of nostalgia, I felt something more akin to having finished a really good book. When you're reading the final few remarks, and you flip through the pages yearning for an additional bit of story, but there is none; this is it. Going back felt like closing the cover and putting the book back on the bookshelf.
Back in that tavern I felt the need, for the first time in my life, to smoke a cigarette in front of my parents. It's quite odd since I was 27, but it was kind of a breakthrough for me. It wasn't a sad or lonely cigarette, it was one that just made sense. Last couple of days in my dad's village I haven't visited for 15 years, being by far the youngest of the adults that were present. Yeah, a smoke break made sense. I lit it up away from the table, both to not upset my parents and to just get away for a bit and take it all in, the emptiness of the village tends to accentuate everything else. The silence - cricket concerto aside - was deafening. The sky looked as starry as ever. What I appreciate in these small patches of civilization is the relative lack of light pollution, even going a couple of meters away from the central square you could distinguish constellations you wouldn't even dream of in the city. During that short smoke break I just appreciated all the memories that were attached with this place, the games with the other kids, the river swims, the goddamn mosquitos, everything. It was a chapter of my life I'd forgotten about, and one I was glad to revisit.
It's actually not that bad going back to places you've forgotten about or ones that fill you with nostalgia, it's quite comforting really. You've already read that book, but you can now appreciate how it felt to read all those years ago. It might not be what you expected it to be, but it feels a bit like time travelling. You see multiple versions of yourself experience similar events, only the latest version has complete knowledge of what happens at the end. I hope my younger self would be proud of my older self. My older self, if he could, would whisper in my younger self's ear: "Everything will be alright." And it will be. Maybe not now, but eventually.
