mrbungle's journal

I don’t think I have ever felt freer than in those moments under the Greek sun. Waves splashing and cicadas singing, beams forming patches on white as they pass through the leaves, and rocky hills with prickly pear bushes.
I am at the beach Kryoneri in Parga and I am gazing at the Island of Panagia right across from me. In the night, lighted boats will be sailing from the island to the port in the midst of fireworks to celebrate the return of the natives to Parga, after its freeing from the Ottoman Empire. Maybe I should celebrate the kind of freedom this moment gives me by swimming to the island. I tell my friend, he says I’m crazy, but somehow we find ourselves halfway the distance to the island in the sea, me telling him, “See, it’s not that far!”
I don’t know what it is about pine leaves on the earth and churches next to the sea. Maybe it has something to do with the way these things are irremovably placed in my memories of childhood summers, the feeling of absolute freedom I had back then, the firm belief that it would all work out no matter what. You find yourself all grown-up one day, illusions shattered, and all it takes is to walk barefoot and seminaked in a pine forest next to a church to believe in that freedom again. My friend, in the meantime, is still gasping and puffing next to me, so maybe I am crazy thinking all that. But as we walk around the island, climbing at its highest point in the midst of green, surrounded by blue, we are able to see all of Parga: Its rows of colourful houses that seem as if they are climbing as well, but upon each other, to get a glimpse of the sea, and the castle still standing after all these years of it always belonging to someone different, never being completely free. And then, I think I see a smile of gratitude on his lips.
Maybe all it takes to feel free again, is knowing how to swim. And the seminaked thing.