From the notebook, written October 6th 2022
Yes. I’m on Crete. It’s for a conference, but I decided to come early, and take a couple of days off before. I’ve been to Greece many times, I used to come every other year with my family. The last time, though, was in 2005. That was the summer my grandma Lilian died.
I haven’t been since. Not on a beach vacation, anywhere, either. Being here now makes me weirdly thrown back in time, to seemingly so familiar things, but to a me I barely remember being.
How they put paper cloths on the table when you sit down at a restaurant. The food.
The feeling of putting on sunscreen on sand-covered skin.
How easy it is to swim in the turquoise Mediterranean water. How impossibly heavy my body feels when I’m getting out.
A new sensation, though: Sitting in the shallows of a stone beach, being rocked back and forth by the waves.
(Because, I wasn’t quite ready to let go of that weightlessness.)
The sound that a wave makes, when the receding water makes the small stones roll. Like rain on a tin roof, but muffled, softer.
Suddenly, tiny pricks along my legs. Small, silver-and-black fish biting me. My 30-something-thighs must have seemed big and juicy among the grey and rust colored rocks.
Katja Malmborg 