Nightmare on the highway

It’s strange how my nightmares always take the form of great disasters which I always magically survive. What makes them nightmares, I guess, is the fact that others (unknown others) perish and I’m left with a feeling of loss and guilt.

In last night’s scenario the most absurd tragedy occurs on a highway. I have just abandoned my car in the middle of the highway, for no particular reason whatsoever (premonition?), minutes before some truck crushes into a bunch of cars and a van flies over head and (that’s where the absurd comes in) due to some bizarre chain reaction, a plane falls on the highway killing everyone…and all the while I’m standing in the frame of a building’s doorway experiencing this hell first hand. Before the plane crushes though, I see a woman coming out of the building heading towards the highway and an old lady with a crutch slowly making her way to the house adjacent: they both perish of course.

What’s unusual, though, in yesterday’s scenario is the fact that I’m given a second chance to save these two women. So the accident plays a second time in my dream. This time I get out of my car because I know what’s to follow and I walk towards the doorway and this time I’m trying to persuade this woman not to go towards the highway because this great tragedy will occur. And she resists, but I grab her and I hold her and I won’t let her go (and this woman suddenly becomes a cat that I’m holding). And then I see the old woman with the crutch and I try to explain to her – in English!?! – and she won’t understand, so I switch to Greek and she seems so relieved that at last someone speaks her language (so aren’t we in Greece?) and after I explain I take her by the hand (the cat still in my arms) and I guide her inside the building and up the stairs – a very slow ascent with her crutch and all – a painful ascent because I know that any moment now the plane will crush and the impact will destroy the front of the building and we might get killed and so I’m trying to keep the cat and the lady at the back of the staircase…and we finally make it at the top and we are saved….I think, because by then my psyche is so exhausted that it can’t take it any longer so it wakes up!

Oh man, Freud would be getting such a kick out of these dreams of mine…I mean they are so elementary…101 Psychology…to hell with this subconscious!

The making of…memories

The perfume of every single person I kissed and hugged last evening still lingers on my arms. I won’t wash it away; not just yet. I’ll let it rest there while I write this post…

Two days ago when we wrapped the film and everyone was happy and clapping and kind of emotional, I felt nothing. I wasn’t touched. But yesterday, with photos and video from the shootings playing on a loop against the wall, something began to stir in me. As if the present had to become past in order to reach me emotionally. Don’t know why this always happens with me. When everyone’s crying, saying farewells, saying “I’ll miss you”s, I find it hard to empathize. I can’t envision the loss because the people are still in front of me. It’s only later (sometimes much later) that their absence hits me…

It’s like back then…

So how come I feel nothing in connection to the fact of separation? How come no tears come to my eyes? Is it because I am still on my way back? Is it because I have still not experienced the loneliness and the alienation? Will it hit me tomorrow morning when I will be waking alone in unfamiliar (even though so familiar) surroundings? Do I maybe feel too numb to feel anything else? Or am I after all so able to land smoothly after my fall from one planet to the next? Can I re-adjust so fast and painlessly? No scars? How can that be? When is it that I start to miss? And what is it exactly that I will start missing? Voices? Colours? Smells?

People are made of flesh and bones.

The Cities and the Self

(in retrospect)

Going away was almost like an escape. If not from someone in specific, definitely from stagnation. When you live in the same city with the same people all your life, you risk losing yourself because you come to exist through their eyes. The people around you have come to accept you and love you for what you are…you have no chance of becoming different, better or worse. But in a foreign country people do not know you, they do not care about you, so they do no have to justify you, your actions, character or behaviour. The way you behave is the only truth for them and they will judge you by it. They act as your mirrors. The fresh eyes of the foreigners, thus, give you a chance not only to be the real you, but also to be a better you…

When you find yourself away from your home, country and people that know you well, you often experience the feeling of losing touch with yourself. When everything is new, when new experiences “attack” you daily, when you are constantly trying to adapt to the environment and the changes around you, you eventually become alienated from your self. You have no time to talk to yourself and discuss what’s going on. The body and the soul take their own separate ways and never meet. Sometimes you feel bodiless, selfless. It seems like when there are not people to justify and reaffirm the existence of the self, your self, when basically, emotionally you are all alone, with no one to encounter, to see you, acknowledge your existence, all that’s left is the body, so the self disappears; it falls out of use…

I feel so invisible in this strange city. People pass beside me like actors in some play, but no lines seem to have been written for me. I came here with a purpose, but suddenly this purpose eludes me. I do not miss my home which is good, I do not feel lonely, which is a blessing, but I feel lost and purposeless, useless; I make no difference to anyone’s life and this makes me feel empty. I feel like an extra in another’s movie with no role written for me. I want to say something, but I yet know not what. Nobody cares, and why should they? But what am I doing here? Everyone I meet seems to have landed here drawn by love (guys followed their girlfriends, girls followed their boyfriends). I followed no one but fate; she said “this is where you should go,” but she did not say why…

This is my city. Or so it became eventually…mine. I think this happens with every city that you live in for a while. At the end you come to possess it; it becomes part of you in the same way you become part of it. In a way, even, the city becomes you, an aspect of you. A city is like a piece of art. A city is something that you create by putting together the pieces that appeal to you. We all may be living in the same city, but in effect we live in different cities, the cities that we choose to see, the cities that come to life through our eyes…

At the beginning the city looks hostile and un-inviting. It is only gradually that you become acquainted with its odours, its corners, its colours, its people. By the end you are no longer an alien. Maybe because the city and its people stop being alien to you. When the aliens stop being aliens, that’s when they become citizens of the world…