I was fascinated from probably age 12. I pictured a world of women with strong features, full lips, thick hair that tumbled in coils down flawlessly smooth backs. In university, one professor told me not to visit until I’d let go of the idea that it was fixed in time and I knew he was right so I didn’t try. I went to islands, seaside resorts, towns that disappeared in the off season. Blue roofs and white stucco walls, winding stone streets hostile to cars and flimsy shoes, the soundtrack to Zorba in every cafe, garlic and feta on every table, olives on the plates, in the oil and in the soap, every place a potential postcard and wish you were here. Sunrises or sunsets to assure me that life had gone on longer than I could imagine and would continue to. 

Now I’m finally circling the actual mountains, the remaining structures (faded but amazing for being there at all). We’re down at the sea now; we’ll be in the center next. I have no expectations of meeting any gods though I do think a lot about beauty and how it assumes different forms. The only English we hear is when we speak it. Every word is made of different letters that blur on the phone before taking shape as something I sometimes recognize. The rooftops are bars or solar panels, the streets have sidewalks except when they don’t, and the music everywhere is a recorded version of a song I know but as if played by a band in a second-rate hotel. The sunrise still renders the clouds pink and purple as bruises, bursts through and blinds us.

We wash our clothes in the sink, walk single file past indifferent cats and walls crumbling or covered with graffiti or both, talk about aging and friendship and authenticity, eat garlic and feta and olives. I am not forgetting the rest of the world, which does not let you forget, but I am, in these moments, happy. 

The feeling of not belonging is particularly keen for a single person during the holidays, when one being uninvited feels unwanted and even unwelcome. And the same one, if invited, feels it as a courtesy, a kindness, pity for the stray cat. It’s odd that the times when I had family and invited similar strays I felt like I’d won some marvelous extra but I don’t usually feel like a marvelous extra now that the tables have turned, barking my knees on the edge of a limited space that comfortably fits one less me. The feeling that you should earn your keep, sing for your supper, or at least put forth fresh daily conversation topics. Blush with shame later when the person who invited you inevitably says something about how they don’t usually do things the way you just did them. We don’t usually eat that with our fingers. We don’t usually drink so much. Worse: we don’t usually feel like we need to keep the conversation going for no reason. 

The story you told yourself before you left is the same one you tell yourself every morning and evening. Be gracious. Be kind. Compliment everyone at least once every day. Everywhere is interesting so anywhere is good. Be flexible. Be a leaf on the wind, a twig in the river, go with the flow. 

There is a sea, for which you are grateful, and the tide rolls in and out every day. There is a sun and you raise your face to its warmth and track it across the sky as it rises and sets. We find it beautiful, we imagine Sisyphus happy, and at the end of one city we put everything back into the suitcase and roll to the next place.

It is unfair how much of the work that we have to do in order to be fully human is necessarily devoted to overcoming false narratives. This sentence came to me fully formed while standing in a very long line and then I had to hope I'd remember what I was thinking about and how clearly I was thinking it if and when I was able to write it down. I am so easily distracted. It was probably better before. And I'm pretty sure now it's not an original thought. Letting go of the idea of The One after having been told it's true for years is an example of this, though that wasn't such a struggle for me. But I am of the age that was taught by books and films and television that almost every villain could be redeemed if you just practiced sufficient patience with them (and maybe sent them a ghost or two but mainly that you personally had to be patient and forgiving). This patience and forgiveness was not to be extended when they were sorry because they didn't have to be sorry and it wasn't based on them trying to do better and then you forgiving them because often your forgiveness had to come first, the first step in their redemption was yours. We set up generations of people to believe that "sensing the good in them" was enough. I was talking to a friend who said that she views people on the basis of what they do and she is thus less likely to be surprised when they act how they are. In that conversation, I said I view people on the basis of what they say they are, but even that's not quite true. In honesty, I think I often view people on the basis of the good I think ("sense") they're capable of, and then I'm always knocked flat when they don't do what I expect. But that's the mythology I grew up with. It's not a new thought even to me but apparently it's time for this seat on the ferris wheel of my recurring thoughts to have its moment of a clear view: today's a reminder that redemption arcs are considerably thinner on the ground in real life than they are in Hugo, Dickens, Lucas, etc. It's unfair that I've gone about forming my current view of myself as a "good person" in part because I make myself see the good in people even while their knife is hilt deep in me. I have found myself fighting back the urge (sometimes unsuccessfully) to justify for them how much they hurt me, as if I could somehow empathize them into good behavior. It's unfair because I don't actually think it's "good" of me and certainly hasn't been "good" for me, and yet part of my recent life has had to be devoted to tearing myself away from a dream narrative I was fed and consumed dutifully. I swallowed it whole. I'll see the good in them and then they'll be that good. Delicious! I do still want to be good and kind and empathize. I just don't feel like I can or should give people the unearned benefit of that anymore. It's so hard. You who already know this truth don't get why I'm struggling but take my word for it, it's a bitter pill. But if I'm going to live another five years, and those five years wouldn't involve this pain, feeling betrayed by my faith in people who usually never asked for it, it would be sweeter. Ten years twice as sweet. Maybe that sweetness would be worth more to me than pretending to myself that I'm good. Probably worth a try.

I don't understand why we were told that curiosity killed a cat as if this were a reason not to be curious but a lot of people definitely aren't curious and it always seems weird to me. It's fun to know things. When I was younger, before the internet, I would call the library or go to the library to find things out. Flipping through card catalogs was fun. After the internet but before I could look things up on my phone I would write down questions that came up through the course of the evening and then send the answers in a next-morning email to whoever I'd been with when the questions arose. I thought it was a way of saying I'd been paying attention. I've been given to understand that not everyone finds this charming so I don't do it much anymore. But now that we all have libraries in our pockets, I'm regularly flummoxed by people who don't seem to actually care that there are answers to the questions they ask the air. And I'm even more perplexed when people lack curiosity not only about the world of facts but about the people they inhabit the world with. I am the sort of person who has forgotten things like birthdays since I started writing them down on paper, and I stand in awe of people who remember them (or most things like that) but more like baffled when people seem almost actively uninterested in a view of the world that is a different perspective. I have been in situations with people when I didn't want to hear their opinion because I thought it would change my view of them for the worse; this doesn't seem to be the case though. It doesn't seem like a fear of what truths are out there but an active lack of interest in any truth beyond the one they currently possess.

Maybe related: when people describe situations to me based on their understanding of those situations with no regard or interest as to what my view might be, even if those situations are ones I lived through and they did not.

To be curious about why people aren't curious is a Mobius strip that won't take me anywhere useful but at least I wrote it down, this moment of gazing, dumbfounded, at how little some people seem to want to know, even when it's right there. Even the cat got a good look. 

Last night, sitting on the balcony and watching the birds swoop across the sky in waves, like schools of fish, and trying to decide if that's a murmuration or just flocking without looking at my phone to see what the difference was. Our voices got quieter and hushed as the dusk shifted the sky to darker shades of purple or violet, a difference I also don't know without looking it up. You told me about a discussion or debate you'd recently had with a friend over whether theater can still serve any purpose in a world like this one. This one incorporating climate change and now a war that is not quite at our doorstep. You'd argued that of course it did, of course stories, always, as long as we've been here. Of course. But you came away wondering if you were right. It was my job to hear that fear and to tell you that of course you were right: of course stories, always. As usual with rehearsals I didn't do as well as I could have, so now I try again.

Of course theater, because of course stories. This, our humanity, how we pass our knowledge to each other most effectively and longest. Cave paintings. Ancient cultures. Acting it out. Stories are how we tell each other things, with and without words. What do we tell each other? Where the food is. Adventures we had. What to look out for. We tell each other stories to inform and to warn and to entertain. Stories to pass on to the future what we've learned so far, so we don't have to learn it again. We tell each other stories to hold back the dark, or to make the dark less frightening. Shh, go to sleep. I will tell you the story of tomorrow: how the sun will be hidden from us and then rise again.

I cannot imagine a world without stories, without words. And yet, as a wise woman has pointed out, we seem to be living at or near the end of the world. Well not the world altogether, just the world as we inhabit it, humans. I think so. So the stories we are telling are not stories for the future, but stories we tell ourselves. The sun will continue to rise and set with or without our observation; starlings will fill the sky and will not care if we know what they are called. Do the stories we tell continue to have value if they do not continue beyond us?

I didn't think I'd live past fifty. At this point every year is a combination of a revelation and curiosity to see how much further I'll go, and to be honest at this point whether I'll outlast the world. I try to love what I can while realizing each time could be the last time I see or hear or smell or taste something. There is no smell in the world more sweet and primal than a baby's head, but when my son say he'll never have children and I'll never be a grandmother I only feel profound relief. On some level I've already said goodbye to almost everything but that would be really very hard. 

Theater is not dead; theater will not die until we die. The issue of whether it serves a purpose now, while we are alive, is not the part that frightened your friend and that in turn frightened you. The real fear is the realization that this will not be for very long, and that the darkness is coming. We're only telling stories to ourselves now, I think. But the darkness is always where we told stories anyway. Stories in general and theater specifically: the shared experience of telling and listening is literally vital. Let's put on a play, let's do what we can, not because it makes a difference to our future, because I don't believe it does, but because it's how we connect with each other as long as we can.