Connie and I have shared days filled with giggles, confessions, and plans. I feel 12 again, except I was never this way when I was 12. We even shared a pair of silver earrings, each taking one as a token, the image of a sun on one side and the moon on the other, promising that the one would go to the other only upon death. I found out her mother is Finnish and her father is Dutch and she went to school in Switzerland, but she has never spend more than a year in any one place since she left at 14. She calls herself a ‘European bastard’. We talk every available moment and then crash asleep exhausted. I am not able to keep up with my journal entries and I feel I am letting you down in some way. But it’s wonderful to have someone to talk to again. I mean really talk to. Writing doesn’t mean I am not still thinking about you all the time. I’m just doing more and thinking less. Sometimes I feel things are moving too fast and I take myself off to a quiet corner and look at your photos. I miss not having my walkman, my music. The tears still come. The ache still presides. But I can dry my tears and come back to talk. It’s different somehow. I feel different.
With torches together we have explored the dripping, eery cave above the village of Psyhro where Zeus was reputedly born. “That sexist boor” declared Connie with disgust. “What did he know about women and life? He was an idiot!” We walk for miles. Eat in every taverna on the Plain. We have both declared the village of Agios Georgios the most ugly, dwarfed by its enormous unfinished cathedral. There are so many unfinished buildings in Greece. Connie told me why. Taxes are paid only when they are finished, so always the top floor is left incomplete. What you might call a loophole.
Connie is in a quandary about what next to do with her life and asks my advice. It feels good to be asked for my advice. I question her, “What would you love to do that you haven’t done already?”
“Nothing. I do what I want when I want with whoever I want. Why should I wait?”
“Well, ok, let’s start with your skills and talents. What are you good at?”
“I am an excellent liar. The best. Go on, ask me anything and I will lie for you.”
I laughed and told her she should be an international spy. She liked that. After a few days we left the Plain for Iraklio, which had little to recommend it, except a stall in the market that makes the best yogurt in Greece.
I feel like a large weight is slowly lifting off of me. Is it because of Connie? Is it because time seems to be passing quicker? Or because I have settled with the knowledge that I am going to have to live anyway, so may as well try to enjoy it a bit more? I can’t tell. Walking and talking, shedding all sorts of feelings and thoughts with Connie I feel Greece is the most beautiful place in the world, a place of sun and wind and crashing blue surf. Mangy cats, olive oil, sweet tomatoes, fat ladies in black, flirting men. Dry white wine that tastes of pine, fresh white bread, blue shutters on white houses, honey coloured churches, furs, gold, and sponges. Fish hung on lines, excess oranges dumped in lanes. Copper paint, gold icons, pebbled mosaics. I sigh with an odd sort of pleasure. A world that holds such beauty deserves time spent living in it. 
It’s all enough for me, but not for Connie. Last night she said to me, “Bah. What we need is some Greek nightlife. Come on.” We found a bar with music spilling out into the street. We drank raki. There was dancing. Two Greek youths in the tightest pants imaginable slithered up to us.
“Ah German girls. Come. Dance. Very special.”
Connie’s eyes flashed. “We are not German girls. I am speechless with anger. We do not dance with stupid Greek men. Idiots!”
Not daunted at all they stood by and one of them stroked Connie’s arm. I thought she’d go ballistic, but she looked up at him with her piercing eyes. He tried again. “Do you know my island? Do you know Symi?”
Connie said, “Yes I know Symi.”
“You like Symi?”
“Yes, it’s beautiful.” He shrugged.
“Issa dump.”
Connie laughed, which was their invitation to sit. I sipped my drink and listened to the banter, then Connie surprised me by asking, “Do you know Matala? Do you have a motorbike to take us there?”
“First you dance with us”, the arm-stroking one said.
“I’m not into threesomes tonight.” (Oh, this girl’s good, I thought.) She turned to me. “Get up. You can dance, I know you can. Look at you. You have a dancer’s body. It’s time for you to join us.”
What could I do? No protestations were acceptable. I reluctantly got up and we all joined a large circle of people holding their hands high in the air and did a sort of repetitive shuffle back and forth, faster and faster, legs kicking and laughter ringing. Back in our seats with her shining eyes she said “There you see? That was fun. Now you can’t say you didn’t get anything out of this evening.”
I have to admit it felt good to dance again.
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