Status Updates From The Island of Missing Trees

(…) and so she retreated into that liminal space between belief and doubt.

(…) knowing that bridges appear in our lives only when we are ready to cross them.

The human mind was the strangest place, both home and exile. How could it hold on to something as elusive and intangible as a scent when it was capable of erasing concrete chunks of the past, block by block?

(…) the bullet that had entered him perfectly hidden, as if ashamed of what it had done.

Now it was only Kostas and his mother left in this house that had shrunk and darkened at the edges.

Michalis lived inside language, always searching long and hard for the precise word, as if meanings were something that needed to be chased and hunted down.

While religions clash to have the final say, and nationalisms teach a sense of superiority and exclusiveness, superstitions on either side of the border coexist in rare harmony.

If families resemble trees, as they say, arborescent structures with entangled roots and individual branches jutting out at awkward angles, family traumas are like thick, translucent resin dripping from a cut in the bark. They trickle down generations. They ooze down slowly, a flow so slight as to be imperceptible, moving across time and space, until they find a crack in which tot settle and coagulate.

Her aunt’s suitcases lay open like gored, bleeding animals, clothes, shoes and accessories scattered everywhere.

(…) and he would marvel at his mother’s fear of this world so full of wonders.

(…) the middle one (brother), was left with a layer of fog, a frustrating illusion that if he could only part the cloud with his hands, he might find his father’s face in there, (…)

Both eternally grateful for the chances life has given them and scarred by what it has snatched away, always out of place, separated from others by some unspoken experience, like survivors of a car accident.

They know, deep within, that when you save a fig tree from a storm, it is someone’s memory you are saving.

Bright, blinking garlands dangled from shop awnings and stars twinkled in house windows, offering furtive peeks into other people’s lives, which always seemed less complicated somehow, more exciting - happier.

The world turned the colour of melancholy.

So many times in the past she had suspected that she carried within a sadness that was not quite her own.

(…) because it attached her, in an inevitable way, to a place that hitherto had existed only in her imagination.

(…) she carried in her pockets, words which, though curious and colourful, still felt distant and unfamiliar enough to remain impenatrable.

- Whispers of distrust and conspiracy rippled in the dark.

- (…) and when they prayed, the islanders, it was seldom to the same god.

Branching ropes of wisteria climbed up whitewashed walls, aspiring to reach the clouds, hopeful in the way only dreamers are.