postcards from sifnos

written in a journal, on a rock, by the sea

1. i don’t usually spread the images to the full width of the page, but this photo is pretty and deserves to be seen in all its full-width-ness 2. this post is too long for email (classic), so pls feel free to open in a browser !

For the last few days, I have accomplished the unthinkable: I have allowed myself to be bored. In turn, my boredom has led me to this pen, this blank, unlined notebook (a Christmas gift from my partner’s mom, who correctly guessed that I prefer unlined journals), and whatever words may or may not spill across these pages. I am currently in Greece, on an island called Sifnos, a lesser known island — but nonetheless an island — most known for its cuisine and its pottery, two components that make life worth living, because fewer delights compare to a home cooked meal served in a handmade ceramic dish.

So I am currently in Greece, in Sifnos, on a rock, sitting cross legged on a brown and white striped towel, with salty hair dripping down my back and sun-kissed skin (well, as sun-kissed as my vampirian-esque complexion allows), as the prettiest water I have ever swam in sparkles in the light. Nielsan (my partner) is reading a book to my left, two friends are buried behind books of their own to my right, and an endless oceanic abyss with the faintest silhouette of an island stretches as far as my squinted eyes will reach, as if I could blink and it might not even be there after all.

For the last few days, I have been on holiday, and for the last few days, I have felt true boredom for the first time in what feels like years. I have been waking up without an alarm, getting ready without feeling rushed, sitting on a rock by the ocean much like I am right now, letting the tide rise and fall, the sun rise and set, the only items in our agenda to swim and to sunbathe...

…Which is funny, because I am someone who typically likes to be doing things. Or rather, someone who has to be doing things. Someone who likes to be busy. Or perhaps, someone who likes to keep themselves busy? Every morning, I make a daily checklist of things to do, often filled with tasks benign as “buying tofu after work” or “posting a reel,” and I feel equally as restless when my tasks are checked as I do when they are left unchecked and pushed to tomorrow’s agenda — anxiety seeping its way into any attempt at controlling it. It is strange, how I have been counting down the days until this very moment, sitting on an otherworldly rock with an otherworldly view next to the person I adore most, yet the devil of doubt floats above my shoulder, “You’re missing out,” it says. On what, exactly, remains unknown.

I am sure this is unique to people like me, who spend a lot of time, perhaps too much time, creating and consuming online, who should probably read more books and prioritize touching grass (or sitting on rocks by the sea), this feeling of FOMO while away from home, from work, from routine, from worlds online and in real life. From waking up and half-asleepidly making a checklist and then going to work and catching up with friends on the weekends and daydreaming about the Sifnian sea in the small pockets of time in between. This feeling that if I hide myself for too long, I’ll forget and be forgotten. It’s ironic — how living life, swimming in the Mediterranean, laying under the sun — these moments of tranquility, inadvertently causing me to feel like I’m falling behind. It’s not, though, and deep down, I know that. But knowing something doesn’t make it any easier to accept. There is power in slowing down, in letting your mind wander, in leaving your phone in the Airbnb and bringing nothing but a film camera, a bottle of sunscreen, an unlined journal, a black pen, a striped towel, and a pair of sunglasses down to the big rock by the blue sea. I sit among the worriers, my fellow comrades constantly obsessing over every little thing — worrying that the near-empty can of coke will leave a stain in my tote bag, worrying that we might run out of sunscreen, worrying that if I go for a swim right now, that I’ll lose the flow of writing I appear to have found myself in. But for every cry of worry in my brain, there is the reminder that there will always be another train.

a drawing i made, inspired by the style of jordanklancaster!

If you miss the train, another one will come. Another statement we know to be true, yet we fail to accept when we run to the platform seconds after the train has departed. We watch the train disappear into the tunnel, and we let out a sigh, perhaps a swear word under our breath, forgetting that a coca cola stain on a tote bag can be washed. A new bottle of sunscreen can be bought. A piece can be picked up where it was left off. Another train will come.

Each day is slipping into the next, not in a gloomy, monotonous way, but in the kind of way where I am losing track of time and space, savoring every sip of a freddo cappuccino (iced latte) from the cafe downstairs and exchanging laughs and kind words with the shop owners, a couple, and their little son who probably does not remember that I bought a handmade magnet from him two Julys ago, an orange teddy bear made of clay and paint which remains stuck to our fridge, and then going for swims at the special spot by the white church with the blue roof and afterwards climbing the man-made steps, wet towels and even wetter hair, rewarding ourselves with the air-conditioned apartment when the sun is shining a little too brightly to allow us to do anything else, but that’s okay because once the sun decides it is time for it to set, we will cook and eat dinners on the balcony, a warm breeze will blow the lace-trimmed curtains against the windowsill, the hymns of children and parents playing and laughing and singing will echo throughout the corridors until midnight, the grecian cats will travel in packs from rooftop to rooftop, the perfect story for a picture book, the sea is finally left undisturbed, the same sea I will greet tomorrow morning for another swim, resting and repeating our makeshift routine, until suddenly it is my second to last day on this island. I think that is when you know a break has been a nice one, when you only remember the first and last days because you were too busy drinking coffee and giggling and swimming and living out all of the little details in between.

I just finished writing postcards to Paisley, Mollie, Hunter, Auntie Dyne, Mom and Dad, and Nielsan’s parents. For some reason, my 15 year old self decided that I would refuse to use any kind of pen that is not an Inkjoy Gel Pen, and unfortunately this kind of pen is the kind that smears on postcards and finds itself stuck to the side of your right palm once you finish using it, so after my hands were covered in dots and smears I held each postcard in the air, letting the salty breeze attach the messages to the postcards once and for all. The tide is getting higher; the crashing waves resemble translucent fireworks, flying above my head and then back into each other. I read for the first time in months, a book about friendship and grief which feels oddly enough perfectly timed with my life right now, and I am writing whatever this ends up becoming. “Boredom is the best thing for inspiration,” Nielsan said two days ago, after we mutually declared that we had been feeling bored.

On the last day of February of this year, my great grandma passed away. At this point, I have become numb to the phrase “my grandma passed away” and part of me still refuses to believe that the statement is true, that someone can just disappear from the world like that, with an unfinished book and half-eaten madeleines on their nightstand and oh-so much love left to give. I refuse to believe she is gone, despite having flown from England to California for four days to attend the memorial service where I quite literally held her urn in between my two hands, and anyways, my point in all of this is the yellow roses.

When I was little, one of the many houses I lived in had a row of rose bushes in the backyard (it also had a lemon tree and a flower box of pansies and the dangling branches of a persimmon tree; the titas (Filipino for ‘aunties’) would pick persimmons by the plastic-bagful, claiming that they were ours, even if the trunk of the tree did, in fact, belong to our neighbors) — the roses were pastel pink and yellow and orange — and whenever my grandma would visit, we would pick the roses together. She would carefully trim a stem from the bush, and together we would wrap the rose into a wet paper towel secured with an exoskeleton of aluminum foil, shielding our nimble hands from any thorns. From that point forward, flowers became our “thing.” So, on the first day of March, when London spring was just a few showers away from its debut, wisterias preparing to bloom and glimpses of pink peeking out from under green tree branches, I decided to find my grandma in every yellow rose I saw. And over the course of spring I saw a lot of them, to the point where I eventually stopped seeking them out.

Last month, I was in an Uber, and the driver had asked about my recent-ish trip to California, because when an English Uber driver hears you have an American accent, each conversation quickly goes from discussing the weather to discussing your split life between California and England, one that you do not quite know how to fully comprehend yourself. Each year only further complicates your understanding of your own life, because each year you are more rooted within London than you are within California, and it is another hard truth to accept, that perhaps this is your life now, because how are you meant to start all over again if one day you move back to America like you say you will? You have a partner here, a cat here, a pension here, a life here! This time though, I didn’t mind the reminder that I Do Not Know What I’m Doing induced by London traffic and two people with two different accents. The driver was nice. “Your family must have been so happy to see you,” he said. “They were. I actually went home for my grandma’s funeral, so it was really nice to be with them.” (I am nothing if not honest to people, even if I have just met then 15 minutes beforehand.) The driver said a prayer for my Grandma, one I cannot fully recall, and as he was speaking I looked outside the window, and there she was: a yellow rose bush.

A week ago, we arrived in Athens, restless and melting into a puddle of our own sweat, and after attempting to feel as human as one can feel after a 3 o’clock in the morning National Express Ride followed by three hours at Luton Airport, followed by a three hour Ryan Air flight and a two hour metro ride sans-seats, we set ourselves on a mission to find dinner, which I suppose was also technically breakfast and lunch. We said we’d “go into wherever we stumble upon” but when you are trying to be a wanderlust travelling couple in 98 degree heat running on mere hours of sleep, the method of finding nourishment jumps from “let’s see where the wind takes us” to “there is no wind, let’s just pull up Google Maps” within milliseconds. A combination of poor reception abroad and weather-induced impatience led us to one place which felt far too fancy for someone wearing boxers and a tank top, a second place which sold specifically ice cream and waffles which I mentally bookmarked for dessert, and a third which we could not get a full read on because it looked closed, until suddenly, we were being guided inside by its owner, his only customers who dare eat dinner at half past 5 o’clock p.m. We sat down on purple and green velvet chairs in the center of the empty restaurant, he switched on the AC for us, a cover band rendition of Christina Perri’s “Jar of Hearts” sang into my ears, and I looked to my right. On the wall was a framed drawing of a yellow rose. “Yellow Roses,” it read: “enthusiasm and friendship. A single rose can be my garden… a single friend my world.”

I took a photo and sent it to my mom, because when you are 27 you will find any excuse to text a parent and when you lose a loved one you will look for them in anything and everything. My mom texted: Awww is grandma with you 🥹 she always loved it when you travel.

I wish I could still write my grandma letters and postcards. I did not know this until around the time she was gone, but she always held onto my letters and my cards, even the ones where I was too young to remember writing them to her. She probably did not know this, but I held onto some of her letters, too. Whenever we would call, she would ask how I liked my new apartment, even though by February I had lived there for nearly a year. I figured it was her poor memory, but when my mom was packing up her belongings in the days after her passing, she found a card in her handbag, one with two pink birds stamped on the front with the phrase “love u” where I had written about my new apartment on the inside. “It has pretty stained glass windows, you would like it.” Then I understood why she always asked about my apartment every time we spoke. She finally saw the stained glass windows on our last Facetime call, in our final moment together. We cremated her with that card.

…And suddenly, I am aggressively typing into my Notes App because my pen ran out of ink as tears stream down my cheeks. I guess this is why they say it comes in waves.

In the book I am reading, one of the characters — a nervous 14 year old boy named Ted — says that if he could have a super power, he would want the ability to freeze time. When I was little, I wished I could teleport so I could be everywhere at once, but I now realize that maybe I, too, wished I could freeze time. I wish I could freeze this moment, where I am writing in my journal as Nielsan reads his book with his legs dangling over the glistening sea, and I wish I could freeze the time when I was six years old and picking yellow and pink and orange roses with my Grandma, and I wish I could freeze all the moments where I was laughing so hard with my friends that my stomach started to hurt — because those are the best kinds of laughs — I wish I could freeze all of the times like these. The times where I am too lost in the moment to even begin to think about holding onto it, the times between the first and last day of a vacation.

The passage of time is simultaneously life’s greatest curse and blessing. It makes sense that my favorite films are Before Sunrise, My Old Ass, and Past Lives. There is just something so freeing, yet so unbelievably heart-wrenching about knowing that a moment is finite, that time is something uncontrollable. The very fact that there is an end to our existence is what makes it so beautiful, I think. The waves are inching closer to my towel and my belongings, but we refuse to move. I am still writing and Nielsan is still reading and even if we get wet at least we can let the sun dry us off. As I watch the waves splash I remember that there will always be another train, but there will not always be another yellow rose picked with a grandma, a hug with a loved one, a belly laugh with best friends, an afternoon spent on a rock in Greece with a partner.

Last night, on the way home from dining for nearly three hours, we walked past an older man telling someone else, a stranger, I think, between tears, “This is our first trip together in 40 years. And it might be our last…. so.. you know…. it’s now or never.” I wondered if he was with his kids, or perhaps a lover, and if they had visited this same island 40 years ago.

Sometimes we convince ourselves that we are in a rush. A rush to keep up with the latest discourse, the latest trend trend, a rush to make sure you didn’t miss anything, to be in the “know,” a rush to write a new Substack piece, or share another video, even though it feels like not long ago when you published and posted something, a rush to get to where you think you need to be, a rush to get that one thing that’s going to make all the other problems go away — a rush to move to a new city, or meet a partner, or find a new job, because surely that will be the missing piece that solves everything else — a rush to catch the train. Or maybe it is just me.

It is 4:24 PM and I have been sitting by the ocean for a few hours. I am wearing sunglasses so the vibrancy of mother nature is now tinted with a translucent orange, but thank goodness they are prescription sunglasses so at the very least, it is a high-definition tinted orange. Around the corner of the cove, tucked between the cliff and the pebbled beach, is the restaurant we had our three hour dinner at last night — Cantina — and everything about it was perfect. Yes, the food, but also, everything else. We watched the chefs dance in the kitchen to their playlist which we were quick to find and save on Spotify (apparently 117 others have done the same) — at one point, one of the chefs grabbed the lamp hanging on the ceiling and shined the spotlight through the open doors onto us and we giggled and danced around with them — and the waiters gave us two desserts solely because “you guys are so nice” and we were supposed to have a shared table but when our fellow table sharers realised they, too, had booked a shared table they decided they didn’t want one anymore and we ended up having a table of five to ourselves, which overlooked the sun setting, the neighbors eating their dinner on the shore, the table sharers that could have been, and a father rocking his baby to sleep. “If I were a baby, this is exactly where I would want to be cradled,” I said. We drank chilled orange and red wine and ate the most delicious seafood and watched the chefs dance and the families laugh. We made up stories about the people at the other tables — guessing the dynamic between three friends and presuming whether the couple was here for a honeymoon, or perhaps an engagement — to me, the best kind of meals are rarely ever a product of the meal itself, but the life surrounding the meal. Nearly three years ago, Maddie and Daniella were in London and we went to Ottolenghi. When we arrived, it was busy as ever, the kind of busy where you feel like you are yelling to speak to someone else, and by the time we finished our conversation we turned around and the restaurant was empty; it was half an hour past midnight. The staff looked at us with smiles, we apologized, “Oh my gosh, we didn’t know it was so late!” and our server said, “We love seeing conversations go on like that, we didn’t want to interrupt. It really is our pleasure,” and from that point forward I decided that a meal is a quality meal when I am so deeply entrenched in a conversation that I forget I am eating a meal to begin with. Like going on a holiday and only remembering the first and last day.

Nielsan is now foraging for skippable stones and I am intently staring at a bright green bug that will hopefully decide that I am nice and that it should not pinch me. Eventually, we will have dinner, and maybe I will even buy an ice cream cone despite my tummy still hurting from the ice cream we had last night, but it’ll pass, like it always does.

And just like that, I am back by the sea, on The Rock, unlined notebook in hand, armed with a pen full of ink that I bought from the cafe with the nice owners. It is light blue and says “Greece” and depicts several cartoon donkeys carrying several different objects — watermelons, flowers, blankets — and just like that, it is our last full day on this magical island. The girls and boys to my right are about to leave, I wonder if there is a romance sparking between them because they had entered as two sets of two but now exist as a group of four, and once again Nielsan and I are left with a place in the world that has always existed in our minds as “ours” and ours alone.

Earlier, we went to the cafe and did not need to order, because our friends already knew what we wanted: two freddo cappuccinos, one with almond milk, both with sugar. (And, a light blue pen with cartoon donkeys on its exterior.) They handed us our coffees with a small, soft cookie aptly placed on each lid. “Thank you guys, enjoy,” they said, with a smile.

We decided to break our balcony-breakfast routine by climbing the steps to the top of the village, to a bench which overlooks the blue church and the even bluer sea. A gray blur scurried past our shoes, almost too fast for us to process that it was indeed a small cat, and as we sat down and started sipping our coffees, three more balls of fur appeared in front of us: a black and white spotted cat and her two kittens, one with gray stripes and the other black, both adorned with button noses and delicate bodies small enough to fit in a teacup. I wanted to cry, first, at the sight of weeks-old, adorable kittens reminding me of my own cat back home, second, at the thought of them being hungry and also at their mom’s scraggly fur, and third, at the reminder that time doesn’t stop for anyone. One day, the teeny tiny kittens will grow into cats, and maybe, eventually, they will have babies of their own, baking biscuits into their chest and nuzzling their cheeks against one another, on a stone-carved step with a view of the blue-capped church. It feels like an inconceivable thought, to look at a baby, and see it as anything more than a baby, until suddenly it is a girl, and then a wife, and then a mother, and then a grandmother, and then a great-grandmother, holding a tiny, delicate pink parcel of a newborn girl, a newborn girl who would come to love picking flowers and eating lemon loaf cakes and wearing button up cardigans, just as her great grandma did. And like most things happen — slowly, then all at once — the rose-loving, lemon loaf-eating girl would find herself holding her great grandma in between her shaky fingers and sweaty palms, decades of love and postcards and letters and flowers and “Love you, miss you, see you soons” in a wooden box following a memorial service. And then she’d fly back to England the next day and find a yellow rose bush hiding around every corner, and then a few months later she’d find herself welling up at the sight of kittens while sitting on a bench on her last day in Sifnos.

To be honest, I still do not know what this is that I am writing, but I do not necessarily think it has to be anything at all. Semantics are semantics are semantics. I am admiring how crystal clear the water is, I am watching the rainbows that form when the waves spray off the side of the cliffs, I am feeling the sun on my skin and the feeling of contentment in the air. I am not in a rush, I am enjoying right now, today before it becomes another memory I’ll want to relive. Like a photo of a blue and white church on the front of a postcard, with two tiny figures at the bottom of the rocks, just above the sea – a boy and a girl – laying on striped towels with soft smiles painted across their faces. The same church painted on the magnet our cafe friends gave us this morning as a parting gift, the same church I will find myself daydreaming about until I get to return to it again.

from my journal (srry the dogs r out)

---

⋆. 𐙚₊˚⊹ ᡣ𐭩 a note from tum ⋆𐙚₊˚⊹ ᡣ𐭩

me rn

helloooo! i went on holiday for 10(ish) days (if you follow me on instagram you probably saw my 1928982 stories of the ocean and the greek cats) and i decided to start writing in a blank journal — analog style — and alas, it turned into a substack piece. i went in with the intention of writing about the power of being bored and letting your mind wander, which is something that can be so difficult to do when you (me) are constantly stimulated with music and media and notifications in our ears, but the silence ultimately unraveled into writing about grief, and then i kept on writing, and of course it turned into yet another 4,000+ word ramble. if you read this far, as always, thank you, i appreciate you!