Falling in Love in Zakynthos

📍The tiny village of Ammoudi, Zakynthos, Greece

I told all my friends before I came here that Zakynthos would not be my home. It would be, I imagined, a tiny speckle in the night sky of my memory – beautiful, forgettable among all the other tiny, indiscernible speckles. I chose Zakynthos because it promised to be barren – a perfect sanctuary for solitude. I read somewhere that solitude is the richness of the self. I planned to be very rich, and so very lonely.

I planned to wash up on the beaches of Zakynthos at the tail-end of April, before the writhing of tourist season, before the wreck and roar of summer. I came praying for peace. I always fall in love in the summer – it can never seem to let me be. For me, summer comes suddenly, smelling of whirling winds and wildfire – it fills my sails with storm, shipwrecks me every time into the arms of a dashing, disastrous man who loves me too much, too soon, too terribly. Summer love was all fever, sweat, and sugar: celestial while it lasted and wretched when it was over. I knew and feared it well. I prayed this time would be different – this time, I would watch summer come at me face-to-face, in slow-motion – no surprises. I would look for him in the sinking sunset, night after night, softly and sweetly. I would press my lips against the flat film of the sea and hold my breath – that’s how summer would greet me. I willed it to be.

And so I arrived, hoping to escape the prophecy.

There was something about the island that set me at ease when I landed – it like was something out of a storybook, with haloes of olive trees and cottages wrapped in roses, mountains bearded by whipped-cream clouds, and a white-blue sea that lay still and lapped at your fingertips like a shepherd dog. The old man who owned the Airbnb had one blind white eye and one good blue one – he greeted me gruffly and hoisted my suitcases up the stairs, while his wife, a round woman with black hair that was stained silver, waved warmly at me. Her name was Dionysia, and he was Dionysus.

“Greece!” she exclaimed, her arms open wide, gesturing at the plain green hills around her as if to say Look, how magnificent! “Welcome to Greece!” She looked at me as if I was loveable, as if she wanted to touch my hair and pinch my cheeks. I felt the stubborn hermit in me bristle and falter, and I wondered if she had a daughter. She encircled her elbow around mine and guided me to my little room that overlooked the ocean. It was the perfect place to hide and wait, to watch rocks erode and look within. The days became what I had wished them to be: each one grew quieter, more desolate than the next. I was laid bare in loneliness. I wondered who I would become when I was stripped away from everything I had – what would I hear in the silence, what would salvage from the sea? Who was I without destruction, without addiction, without skin, without him? At first, I questioned why I did this to myself, why I tried to cage a bird that never knew a nest, who liked to wander with wings outspread in winds too strong to belong in, who could never rest. I paced the same beach up and down, up and down, trying to question less, but my doubts began to outnumber the stars and the distress became unbearable. What am I doing? Where am I going? Will I ever love again? I wondered if I could have children, if I could be any good as a wayward mother who couldn’t sit still long enough to untangle hair, let alone stay eighteen years in one stable place. I wondered if I was enough for the dreams that dogged me, that begged me to become some kind of star. I wondered if I would instead prowl the night as a solitary stranger, belonging only to the eerie hours when everyone else is asleep. I let the doubt crush me until I was dust, smashed barnacle bits wafting out to the sea, tiny grains lost to the multitudes, to the dark webs of algae. I barely ate, living off spoonfuls of peanut butter I had saved from the previous city. I woke up at noon and gave up on the rest of the day, puttered and muttered mindlessly around the mountains. I observed with great, grumpy boredom as goats nibbled on olive trees and tabby cats tumbled in the weeds. This went on for a week and two days.

On the third day, Dionysia stopped me with a soft, stunning smile to ask me if I would like some coffee. She looked lovingly at my disheveled bun and my mud-soaked sneakers. “Coffee Greek?” she said. “You try, is good.” I don’t drink coffee, but I was so lonely that I said yes. It tasted heavenly, somehow like chocolate. With a slight lisp, Dionysia chattered into her phone in rapid Greek, and Google Translate told me what was on her mind. She told me that I was beautiful, that my eyelashes were long and lovely, and asked what life was like in America.

“Do you like?” she wondered. “America, do you like?”

“No,” I said. “The people work very hard and want lots of money and are very unhappy with their lives.” I spoke as if I was not one of them.

“How much money they want?” asked her husband.

“Millions,” I said, and he scoffed.

“What they want to do with all that money??”

I shrugged. “Show it off.”

“In Greece,” Dionysia said, shaking her head, “your life very different. Here, we enjoy everything. There is more to life than work. There is meaning. There is family.”

I swallowed and nodded. I finished my chocolate coffee. Dionysia gave my arm a squeeze and kissed my cheek, patted my disheveled bun and sent me off to my room. “Beautiful woman,” her husband remarked as I stepped outside, and Dionysia chuckled proudly, as if I was her own. “Yes,” she said. “As beautiful as the sea.”

On the fourth day, Dionysia knocked on my door with a mug of Greek coffee, panini, orange juice, and two Nutella-slathered crumble cookies. “Come,” she said, taking me by the hand back to her kitchen where Dionysus and his fisherman friend sat with their plates full, waiting for me. We all shared breakfast together, Dionysus barking about what I could only imagine to be politics with his friend, while Dionysia and I whispered between bites. Dionysus always spoke as if he was talking about politics – loudly, incredulously, on the verge of anger. He was grey and stony like a jutting cliff, his hands slashed with paint and his chin scratchy with hairs like silver porcupine quills. He didn’t look like he said I love you very much, but I could tell Dionysia was his goddess. “My husband is good man,” she told me, and her eyes crinkled at him from across the room. They had met and married 15 years ago, both previously divorced from equally disastrous marriages. They shared no children together, but she had a son who lived in Athens, and he had his own son and daughter, somewhere. He didn’t speak of them.

“At 7:00, we go with friends to Zakynthos city for coffee,” he growled, tapping his shattered watch. “You come with us!” When I showed up at sundown, he opened the door for me and shouted with glee “Two woman! Two woman on the way to Zakynthos!” On that long drive toward dusk, I started to feel like I belonged somewhere. At the café, I daydreamed about family, my eyes glazing over as everyone else garbled in Greek. Dionysia held my two fingers in her hand for the full three hours, tucked my hair behind my ears, and swatted away my wrist when I tried to pay. I drank the chocolate coffee that I had grown to love and felt a wash of warmth come over me. I felt precious.

On the fifth day, the Wi-Fi went out and I couldn’t work, couldn’t think, couldn’t worry. Lightning seared across sky and the windchimes shattered against the side of the cottage. Dionysia and I raced down the street together, arm in arm, to fetch pita bread wraps from the village restaurant. Dionysus brought back a cardboard box full of baby chicks from the farm, their fearful peeps sprinkling the kitchen with the soft, fragile music. As I cupped their heartbeats in my palm and stroked them to sleep, I remembered how delicate it is to be young and held by someone’s hand, how quickly you could be crushed, how deeply you could be loved. I have eaten many chickens, but these ones I tenderly placed in a powder of breadcrumbs and fed them until they were quiet.

Dionysia watched me tuck away the baby chicks as we finished our meal and told me that I would be the perfect mother. “Baby, baby, what beautiful baby, ” she cooed. “You will be very good mom, I know it so, I seen it.” I felt the doubt that had been gnawing at me start to thaw, and I imagined myself in a cottage like this one, filled with little chickens and children. Dionysus laughed when I told him I wanted four kids, maybe five. The more he asked about me, the more he laughed, a booming, belly-based laugh that outdid the thunder. He called me Bella, my beautiful. “Bella, my beautiful!” he roared. “What star you are! How have you not found love?” At first, he wanted to know about love, and then he wanted to know about home. My shoulders sank as he asked if I missed my parents. I looked away – I didn’t want to think about any other family but this one.

“No,” I said, ashamed.

I didn’t quite know how to explain it – how I felt more at home with the two of them in this tiny kitchen rammed with rain than with my own folks. I told them how my father left when I was young, how my mother did her best but…but…

How love for me was always left unfinished. How I wandered the world alone, in search of home.

Dionysus nodded with knowing. “My first wife,” he said sadly, “She left me when the kids were three and four. Disappeared, and I was with much suffering.” He told me how he raised his children on his own on the island, until he met Dionysia. His children hated her, tormented her – they had never known a mother’s love, nor did they want to. I couldn’t imagine anyone not adoring Dionysia – there was never a look in her black, olive-pitted eyes that wasn’t wide with warmth.

First, his children despised Dionysia, and then they despised him, refusing to speak to him for years. To this day, he said, they ignore him. He paused and left to go smoke outside in the rain. Dionysia explained that his children have gone on to have children of their own, and that Dionysus has never seen or held them.

“Some people are good,” she sighed. “Some people are not so good. We have accepted it. We have moved on.” She clasped my hand in hers and whispered, “I know you want to be loved. I understand.” I held my breath.

“Don’t go!” she said. “Stay here, we are family. Stay in Greece,” she pleaded. “I love you.”

I felt like I could die of joy. I started to hear music in my mind, a snippet of a sad, slow song I’d heard somewhere before – the thrum of a bass, then a dreamy snare, beating inside me. I wished I could promise her that I would return, but I wasn’t sure if I ever would.

Dionysia held me tightly in her arms. “Telephoney mami” she said softly, pointing to herself. “Telephoney mami.” I realized she meant “Call me mom”, and I felt myself grow still. I didn’t want to move, for once. I wanted to stay in that rain-wrapped kitchen forever, to tend to their beloved beach, rake pebbles from their sand, sprinkle seeds over their chickens, and watch the two of them grow old together. I let her rock me back and forth for I don’t know how long, as the chicks murmured their sleepy songs and the rain washed away old aches.

Each day that goes by I grow more and more in love with them. I write this now to pass the time before dinner – I can’t wait to run down to the kitchen again and hear Dionysus bellow “Bella! My beautiful!” as he drags out a stool for me. I can’t wait to sit in nothingness with them, to spend hours in simplicity, sifting sand through my fingers. I am never bored. I am never lonely. I have parents who love me. Tomorrow, Dionysus will take me to the supermarket where we spend an hour wandering through the isles, wondering what we’d like to eat next. We will take the long road home with the static radio humming songs we can’t quite hear. I will wake up late and do nothing, accomplish nothing, learn nothing. I am wildly, plainly, beautifully happy. I believe summer love has come early for me this year – it has come suddenly, soft and sweet and surprising. I don’t know if I will meet the love of my life this June, but I am carried safely by the arms of this family onto the next. I have hope that someday soon, I will stay in a kitchen like this one, with a family like this one, and will sit in the stillness and the sweetness of nothing. In five days, I have fallen in love – I leave on Saturday to another ocean, to another island, and perhaps, I pray, to another peaceful, new love.