In the winter I get very sad; it is a seasonal sad, I think, but it always feels like it’s going to be forever. I’ve been solving this by getting out of town, since part of it is certainly the darkness, the sun that comes up briefly and barely, and by being with people who I’m sure love me, since part of it is the feeling that nobody does. A motivation for moving to my wee perfect apartment was making it possible for me to do this for at least 2 winter months: pack it up, pack it in, turn everything off, and fly somewhere brighter. Birds do it after all and their brains are quite small so I should be able to.

I am sitting on my bed with a new black carry-on suitcase, which is what I’ll live out of for two months. I have a very good travel dress (black, wrinkle resistant) that I spent the last 2 hours looking for. Well I thought maybe I’d put it in the box with summer clothes so I hauled the box out and there was mold behind it so I cleaned that up and then moved a bunch of other things around in the closet to check behind them and then went through several boxes not finding the dress and then finally thought of where it might be (fallen to the bottom of the wardrobe) which is where it was. So now it’s in the suitcase and the suitcase is full and all the boxes are neatly packed away again. This felt much harder than it needed to and I was thinking maybe I shouldn’t go anywhere when it’s so difficult to just pack a suitcase but of course that’s just the winter brain wanting to select out of more and more until I’m too sad to even lift a finger.

Last night was closing night of the play. Wednesday we’re doing a comedy show and Thursday I leave. You’ve got this, I say out loud to the room, you can do this.

The buildings are narrow, taller for being so narrow, each one its own slender pagoda except each floor is different, where one is a shop decorated with my idea of authentic, some curly gold-scaled dragon, mouth stuffed with shimmering pearls, then a floor mostly plain but with window shutters that remind me of New Orleans more than France exactly but is French colonial in the most absolute sense and then the third floor is corrugated tin and lines of laundry. The buildings line up like jagged teeth, the front six of which, we are told, are filed down to indicate maturity. At night I grind my teeth and wonder. In the city everything is crowded, four people on a scooter, four zeroes to buy coffee on the sidewalk (though no sidewalk), and I remember how to cross the street like I could kill a car or die trying, a fierceness in myself generally untapped and when no car takes the challenge I am both triumphant and weary. Young women in silk and fur pose at every storefront and their pockmarked photographers dutifully document it and then they both gaze into the reflective surface to evaluate the results. Outside the city we travel by bus past whole towns of row upon row of identical houses, a contrast to the city in how empty they are, and how pristine, ghost towns, no cars or influence in sight. We take a boat into a bay full of limestone mountaintops, now worn at the base, and the guide smiles and we smile back; and his tobacco-stained teeth echo the islets. There are dozens of boats, giant and gleaming white, and dotted amongst them are small entire villages of primary colors selling fruit and fish that later appear on our plates in beautiful bite-sized pieces. Many things are tiny and precise, carved and chopped to fit in the palms of a thousand hands. We learn how lacquer is made, I've dismissed it as kitsch but now I want it the way I want anything shiny and possibly poison. At a rest stop where an uncomfortable level of aggression is used to encourage us to buy a coffee, use the toilet, or spend money generally, there is a woman cracking eggshells with a mallet into smaller and smaller particles of white which will become conical hats in a grouped image or maybe a moon rising over a rice field, equally authentic and unreal.

I've been thinking about politeness. I think the intended function is to make social interactions move more smoothly, I think we try to be polite because it's a busy planet and we're going to bam into each other and it's nice to try to not do that and to say "excuse me" when we do; we don't intentionally set out to hurt anyone, most of the time. And of course if you do hurt someone and don't say excuse me, that makes the hurt seem intentional.

Many years ago, I threw a party and some people didn't come and I was hurt that they didn't come and I was hurt by the alternate absence or flimsiness of some excuses to an extent that I ended some friendships over it. Because I felt like: those are people who are not interested in watching out for my feelings.

But generally speaking I understand that they weren't interested in the party, and they couldn't think of a way to say so directly without hurting my feelings and they didn't understand that the last minute sudden memory that they needed to wash their hair was actually much more hurtful. Unless the intention was to indirectly communicate that they didn't think that highly of me, in which case: mission accomplished, buddy. 

Other times I've been scolded for not inviting people to do things and I think: but you regularly don't do those things when invited, so what could I do but assume that you didn't want to do them? So is their scolding (now that the event is past) a kind of politeness? Why does it seem to me that it hurts more than if they would just say "Oh, sorry I missed it" and move on? 

Also of course why do I feel responsible for decoding other people's feelings? When I was younger and would ask people to do things with me and be refused I would agonize over why they didn't like me. Agonize. Now I just think I'm trying to spare everyone all this coded conversation and if you don't return a call or two I assume you're not interested and I move on. I mean it hurts but it's not agony. See, I'm working on it.

There are people whose company I don't enjoy, much in the way that I imagine these people who don't accept my invitations don't enjoy mine. And so based on having been on the receiving end I would like to be able to say: I like you but not that much. I'd like to give them the directness that I would like to receive. 

The scene in Tootsie when Jessica Lange, having told Dustin Hoffman that she wishes a man would just say he wanted to have sex with her, throws her drink in his face when he says so. 

Why is it hard to just be direct? Last night I spent the bulk of my evening at a party finding excuses to avoid a person I actively dislike and who doesn't take subtle hints. Why do I feel like the fact that I picked up my drink and moved multiple times was Real Progress for me? I felt like I was being polite and at the same time that I was doing a better job of expressing myself than usual. Me who usually freezes, hoping that they'll just go away eventually. The deer frozen in headlights, afraid of the damage it will do to the car. But honestly, why not throw my drink in their face, after all? So conditioned to season even my scorn with pity that I cannot imagine it. 

And the times that I have said "I don't want to hear from you anymore" have … not ended well, generally. Could be part of it. I mean it's not just not wanting to hurt someone else; there is a fear of being hurt, myself.

Last night I dreamed I was trying to explain what it feels like to weigh my own discomfort in the moment against the discomfort that may occur if I express that. How it feels to sit very still flooded with a feeling and drowning in the fear of expressing it. Of making things worse. So partly it's a fear of hurting someone but let's be clear that there is in the background also the fear of getting hurt, a constant barely audible high-pitched whine. Even explaining it was too hard. I woke in tears and no clearer in purpose. Still not. 

A man told me once that all the bad people
Were needed. Maybe not all, but your fingernails
You need; they are really claws, and we know
Claws. The sharks—what about them?
They make other fish swim faster. The hard-faced men
In black coats who chase you for hours
In dreams—that’s the only way to get you
To the shore. Sometimes those hard women
Who abandon you get you to say, “You.”
A lazy part of us is like a tumbleweed.
It doesn’t move on its own. Sometimes it takes
A lot of Depression to get tumbleweeds moving.
Then they blow across three or four States.
This man told me that things work together.
Bad handwriting sometimes leads to new ideas;
And a careless god—who refuses to let people
Eat from the Tree of Knowledge—can lead
To books, and eventually to us. We write
Poems with lies in them, but they help a little.

We did not make love on a rooftop in Japan during a typhoon. 

It's cobblestones and crowds, narrow alleyways and giant plates, it's cat herding and the root of familiar. It's an art, like everything else; it's the art; it's art.

It's complex mythology, explanations and origin stories. Passions, betrayals, abandonments. The synesthesia of allegory. The conviction that a story that has been told endlessly can be told again, one more time with feeling.

It's one announcement after another, the messenger you don't shoot to the left, glittering at times with news, the receiver to the right in various states of shock and dress, once holding her finger at the page in the book she was reading, as if she might presently return to it, as if her life hadn't completely changed.

It's babies of varying largeness and golden-pinkness and hideousness, thighs rippled with fat, their fingers making rabbit ears against a world that has not yet mastered light and shadow or much of a sense of humor.

It's zombies washed with tears, bleeding into cups, tortured and medically impossible, pulled down repeatedly to fall into the arms of friends who could not save but believe themselves saved, the legal collection of evidence, the takedown.

It's the one in almost every scene, the one who looks back at you instead of at the action, locks eyes across time. Says "I did this." Says "I paid for this." Says "Please get me out of here."

So it's the Ionian Sea and my love of cultures nurtured at a crossroads is getting satisfied. A group of children throwing globs of wet sand at each other, until one of them catches it in the eye and cries. At the canal of love either lovelorn women cure their sorrow or couples seal their promises, depending on who.you ask. Maybe both. A man out near the buoy teaching his daughter or girlfriend to float, the bright pink of her swimsuit flashing every time the water rises. Kalami was made famous by Henry Miller and by Lawrence Durrell, who was my introduction to Rashomon storytelling. The tops of my feet already have the unfreckled lines of sandal straps. Corfu Town is a UNESCO site. The beach umbrellas, spelled ambrela on this beach, advertise Ben and Jerry's and Nestlé. It's almost too hot for ice cream. I can see Albania across the water, dim in the heat haze. Once only noble families whose names were on the list could walk on this promenade. A man comes out of the water and stands drying in the evening sun, tells us he loves America, Al Pacino, Saturday Night Fever, Harrison Ford. One last dip in the sea and it's time for dinner, something with feta and tomatoes that taste like rich sunlight. It's only the first day.

Wake at 3 and roll around with jet lag and unspeakable regrets until 5. Put on sweater and warm socks, a beach towel like a scarf jaunty, a cup of cold coffee from yesterday's breakfast and a bread roll only slightly stale from last night's dinner. Perched on the retaining wall feet dangling into space but well above the waterline, the tide going out anyway so that when the sun rises the broken concrete and rebar from the collapsed hotel wiill be exposed, but now it is dark and peaceful by starlight. The sky turns bluer, then pink, nicotine orange and there is a woman on the beach shivering slightly in a bikini, doing sun salutes in the direction of the upcoming sun, which is both completely appropriate and annoyingly pretentious. You have a three-day guacamole belly already, sitting sweetly in your lap. The cloudline makes an extra horizon for the sun to get past and people are emerging onto balconies in various states of undress, eyes shielded, coffee cups steaming. The air is already warmer. The birds fly across the water basically illustrating the word majestic. Finally it is a ball of fire you can't look at anymore and it's time to go inside.

Can

Really

Explain

This

Easily.

photos

So this is the beach then. Salt the best thing for all wounds: tears, sweat, ocean. The waves are a good reminder that everything comes and goes and everything repeats, it's both relentless and soothing. Here  is a beach umbrella under which I hide my white white skin which burns anyway, fancy italian sandals on the sand beside me, a cold cider from the supermarket wedged upright. The umbrella attendant walked on his hands into the ocean and retrieved someone's ball; everyone seems to want to play pingpong in the strip between beach and water but when a wave crashes over your feet sometimes  you miss your shot, that moment of startling warmth that still feels cool for a moment on your sunburned feet. When it gets hot even in the shade I swim out to the buoy, further than it looks, and float beside it, eyes closed to the dazzle, almost sleeping, listening to the ocean the way I used to listen to seashells my  grandmother collected.