I woke up in the morning and went down to breakfast; Alan joined me soon after, looking pale.
“Dude, I shouldn’t have had the whiskey last night. I threw up last night,” he said. “On the floor in my dorm.”
I laughed – he was only twenty three. I’d been there enough times in my life.
“Oh that’s terrible,” I said, grinning. “Does everyone in your room hate you now?”
“I dunno man, I think I got away with it. I cleaned it up really well and scrubbed the tiles and everything. But then I went back to bed and threw up again two hours later.”
“On the floor again?”
“Yeah dude. I spent the whole night just cleaning and throwing up.”
“Why didn’t you just go and sleep in the bathroom?”
“Ohhh,” he said, as though I’d given him some trade secret. “That’s smart. I should have done that.”
I frowned, laughing again.
We went out after breakfast, Alan feeling markedly more rough than I, and crossed the city to find the Archeological Museum. We’d discussed it the previous evening, eating gyros in the lobby at 2am. I’d waxed lyrical about how much I love Greek armour:
“Ancient Greek armour is, hands down, the most aesthetically pleasing armour of any nation in history.”
Emilia and Alan were unsure of this, but to my surprise and delight, the security guard – a middle-aged Greek guy who looked a bit like George Clooney if he’d never gotten wealthy – interrupted us.
“He’s right,” he said, pushing his plate of chips towards me to share.
*****
I liked exploring the city with Alan. He was a clever guy – very much so, he’d been in college for something like five years and was qualified up to the eyeballs and knew a lot about economics and stocks and whatnot – but he was enjoyably, endearingly fresh-faced. He’d never travelled before, had never worked a full time job. The more we talked, and the more I saw him ponder reasonably normal things I said as if they’d been some sage insight – don’t throw up on the bedroom floor – and I found myself feeling like a worldly uncle.
It was nice, actually – still reeling from a post-30 identity crisis (who am I, if not a young person?) – I found I quite enjoyed playing the role of someone a little calmer, a little more restrained. Part of me misses being all starry-eyed and wild, but there’s also a lot of joy to be found in progressing to a more mature iteration. The old debauched impulses are still in there of course, but I’ve got a handle on them now – they only emerge when I decide they’re welcome. I’m not ruled by them.
The museum was wholesome fun. We spent a lot of time looking at trinkets and ornaments, pointing out the occasional phallus to one another. I marvelled to see brush strokes on one particular vase I found – names written in spidery, inconsistent handwriting eerily similar to my own, 2,500 years ago. The mind boggles anew. Even the most narcissistic ceramicist (try saying that after a few wines) couldn’t have expected any vase they made to last more than a few years, right? It’s not as if they’d have finished the job and sat back, breathless, as a ray of light pierced the clouds to illuminate this great eternal artefact – far from it, it would have been just a normal day at work. They made an object, just like they did every day, expect this one – entirely unknown to them – would last forever. Imagine knowing that the email you sent last Tuesday would still exist 4,000 years in the future – would be on display in a museum.
To: Colin
From: Dan
Yes my G
Where did you put the stapler I can’t find it
PS wyd for lunch, i’m horny for BURGERS you bastard!
Workplace correspondence
London, England
21st century
USB stick (Steel and plastic)
This interaction was found on a USB stick in the rubble of London following The Great Collapse in 2093AD. It appears to show an interaction between two colleagues, though the meaning of their discourse has been lost to time.
*****
We spent two hours in the museum, after which I began to grow restless and hungry. Near the end we entered an Egyptian wing, but we didn’t hang around long because Alan, in his hungover state, almost threw up at the sight of the mummies’ gnarled toe bones poking out of their bandages.
To finish, we went to gaze upon the Antikythera mechanism. It’s the oldest analogue computer in the world, operated by a hand crank and used to calculate astronomical positions and predict eclipses. It was built – get this – 2,200 years ago. There’s not much to see today – it’s a twisted hunk of blue-brown metal with half-melted cogs clinging to it – but the plaque beside it showed a gleaming golden contraption akin to the innards of a grandfather clock. We stood quietly and looked at it. I didn’t have any profound thoughts; the notion that someone over two millennia ago could create something like that was too big of an idea to comprehend.
We crossed the city after, to the enormous Panathenaic Stadium. It’s the original Olympic stadium, 2,300 years old, the only stadium on earth made of solid marble. After falling into disrepair it was excavated in the 1800s for the revival of the Olympic Games, and is still in use today. I’d looked it up before the trip, thinking it’d be cool to run a 5k around the track; I’d packed running shoes especially.
For the next hour, we wrung every last drop of fun out of it. Clambering over the steep marble steps, we listened to an audio guide telling us the history of the place, and sat a while to think. We went into the athlete’s tunnel, which according to the audio guide used to lead to a sort of holy grotto where nude magical women danced about surrounded by hallucinogenic vapours.
“The Greeks knew how to have a good time man,” I sighed to Alan. “Outside all day, wine and sunlight and exercise and music and casual nudity. What a culture.”
Alan bought a commemorative coin from a vending machine in the magical sex grotto. I felt left out looking at his shiny coin, so I bought one too – it’s gold and cold to touch, and it has a charming little imprint of the stadium on it. We walked back down the tunnel, and I told Alan to imagine we were ancient athletes about to emerge to 50,000 spectators and rapturous applause. Unfortunately, as we reached the exit of the tunnel and the stadium yawned before us, a horde of squabbling schoolchildren in yellow hats swarmed around the corner and jostled us all over the place, dampening the illusion somewhat.
I decided that coming back the next morning for my 5k would feel silly if I’d already explored it once (so much else to see) so I decided to run a single symbolic lap, just to say I’d done it – that I’d run in the footsteps of the original Olympic athletes. I wasn’t really dressed for it – heavy shoes, jeans, jacket and rucksack – so rather than embodying the lithe, glowingly-healthy, elegant, glorious runners of old… well, I just felt a bit ungainly.
“There,” I said after, rather embarrassingly out of breath after a 400-metre jog. “Now I can say I’ve done it.”
“Look at you, thirty-two-year-old man waddling around a Greek stadium,” said Alan. “Still got it.”
They had a winners podium at the far end of the track; we headed over and took photos while I silently despaired at Alan’s use of the word ‘waddling’.
*****
In the evening, it was the same thing again: sunset on the hostel rooftop, new faces, pleasant chatter. I met a girl from Italy, a guy from Azerbaijan, a guy from Portugal and a guy from Leeds. I usually don’t like meeting people from where I’m from – you sort of come on holiday to escape them, don’t you – but he was actually very charming. His name was Tom, and he was 30, and he’d spent the last five years living in Australia. Then he’d moved back and spent six months living with his father, in Hull. He’d been speaking breezily for his new friends – but something in how he said this last part gave him away; I knew that tone all too well.
“Hard moving back, isn’t it?” I asked, smiling.
“So fucking grey,” said Tom. “Drives me nuts.”
“And nobody can understand why you’re so angsty.”
“Man, exactly! People don’t know what they’re missing.”
Something lit up inside me – a quiet comfort at having found someone who understood. I have lots of friends in London, but there’s a certain camaraderie to be found in another person who’s experienced the free-spirited vigour of living abroad – discovering all those new lifestyles and rhythms – before crash landing back at home. It stays with you, even many years later, an itch you can’t quite scratch: the feeling that there’s more out there, and every moment you stay still, you’re missing it. Of course, if you leave again, you’re missing out on other aspects of life too – the stability, the security, the depth. You wind up feeling stretched in both directions, straddling a chasm that’s incomprehensible to anyone who’s never tried it. The indecision aches, quietly, all the time – but it’s alleviated tremendously in the realisation that you’re not crazy – that you’re not the only one.
“Where do you live now?” asked Ramil, the Azerbaijani guy.
“I’m working remotely at the moment,” said Tom. “I’m learning to code, and I realised I can do that from anywhere, so I’m just moving around Greece slowly, deciding what comes next.”
“So you’re homeless?” said Ramil, flatly.
We burst out laughing.
“I mean, I wouldn’t put it like that,” said Tom, aghast.