A NEW SEASON ARRIVED. Once it was there it seemed like a shift that occurred in one single day even though the change had been happening for a long while. It was windy all day, the water was cold, the sky white, the cats were hiding. A cold rain was falling, dirty water and flowers came coursing down the streets and the city stairs, things dried along the walls and blew away, dust entered the foyer, the brown shells of bougainvillea that had dried and blown into the alleys.

We brought the garden chairs inside. We ate our breakfast in the kitchen. We stayed indoors all day because there was nothing else to do. Helena got restless, she was chilly, her fingers turned white. Helena with the ferry timetable: we can’t stay here, I’m going crazy. Helena wanted to start working again. I heard myself plead: it might get warmer again, soon. If the wind dies down. The weather was strange, it wasn’t fall but not summer either, the house never got warm. Helena with the weather report: it is going to get warmer again actually, but it would take too long. She was impatient. She was done.

She booked ferry tickets for the three of us and wanted to spend a few days with a friend in Athens; it was understood that this was where I would leave them, go back home, make the last leg of the trip alone. Olga would go with her, I would not. Olga would go with her, not with me.

I didn’t know what I was returning to. The thought of going home was absurd; I didn’t want to go. I wanted to stop time. I wanted to start over again, experience everything exactly the way it had been, again and again. I hated it when time ended. I hated the pace I never seemed able to slot my life into. I had been too desperate, stayed too long; I had let my chance to leave them on my own terms slip away. They would leave me. They belonged to each other. It was natural, it was something I had known all along.

But it was only when the end was given its date and shape that the vastness of my loneliness opened up, the emptiness of the future expanding infinite, enormous, and all my fantasies, my vague hopes for an intimacy that would be permanent, life-changing, left me.