As we drove back from the lake, he turned and gazed at me in the car. The jeep followed a road that ran parallel to the sea, the water he loved so dearly, a vast pulsing blueness, different from the strip of azure seen from the mountains from where we’d come. I fought against my seat belt to cradle my head on his shoulder as his free arm stole around me. We laughed about the day, one more chapter of shenanigans in our ongoing courtship. We were old-fashioned, in this sense. We were young, but we savored our love.
“Have you kept note of all these memories?” he asked. He was the medicine-man; I was the writer. “I won’t be able to remember them all.”
Like the time I’d spilled coconut liquor on him? Or the time I kicked his ice-cream cone into the sea when I tried to give him a hug, once upon a sunset? Or the time passion suddenly overtook me so that I lunged to make out with him in the car, right before my parents drove by? These were the mildest of my romantic accidents.
“I keep notes,” I said. “Here and there. Not all together. But yes.”
“Aaaaach.” He exhaled with the typical Greek Male sigh, accompanied by a wink and a kiss of my hair, as if all his troubles and bitterness and frustrations were bundled up in ribbons of air and let out on one drawling comic note. “Den einai n’akousi anthropos ti eho travixi me sena,” he murmured in Greek. The things I’ve been through for your sake are unmentionable, in other words. Not to be made into a book, in translation.
I stroked his face, looked into the eyes that had seen so much death and injustice in their thirty years, eyes that for the past few months rekindled with life, that shone so brightly at my touch.
Love, I thought, I beg to differ.
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