Chapter 5 - Southern Europe - oh oracle wherefore art thou?

Delphi has no answers. I guess I never really believed it would, but Delphi was the one place I thought might. My old classics professor would have been proud to know I had taken the historical myth of the oracle so much to heart! I sat in a little dip of land surrounded by ruins and flowering almond trees all day but nothing came to me. I felt just as empty as when I arrived. Deep down I don‘t think I’m even looking for an answer really, but it doesn’t stop me from trying to find some sign of guidance or direction every day. I’m just going through the motions of living, surviving until I find a new place for myself, wandering through time. Survival is the most despicable way to live. It’s not living at all. I eat when my watch tells me I should, I see the blue water, feel the cool wind, listen to the garble of tongues in foreign codes. If only I could keep open and curious, to keep learning, then I might gain something.

I catch myself reading meaning into all sorts of mundane things. Words I read, voices I hear, colours, sounds. Are you trying to reach me in some metaphysical way? Are you trying to tell me to go to you? Or am I being an idiot who is spending too much time on my own, overthinking everything? Should I just get over it, stop and deal with what lies ahead rather than go over and over and over what happened in the past? And what might have been.

What is this journey on which I have embarked? Someone told me it takes a full turn of the calendar to get over any kind of loss, like a divorce or something. It is already almost nine months old and I am as ignorant as I was on that hot, horrible day that started it all against my will. It’s like a growth inside my guts, like a bunch of roots, or a tumour. Nine months it’s been festering inside me. I long to know what it is all about, where I am headed, what my destiny is, and yet I am so afraid of what it might be. I am afraid I will be found lacking for the requirements of the journey, or that the journey will be a long one.

People who mean well write and tell me to come home, to find a job, get on with life, as if what I am doing is somehow outside of life. But the one person who could convince me to alter my path is silent. It’s like I’ve been erased from your life, that ‘we’ never existed, as if our lives never connected. Can I really go into the future without you?