i will carry you and your light
It is the last night Evan and I are in Athens, and we are desperately looking for a restaurant that no longer exists. Greece at the tail end of summer, when locals close business for a break after the tourist season. Evan created a spreadsheet where he organized and presented a tentative itinerary for his leg of the trip. I had been in Athens for two weeks when he and our friend Markie arrive. The fires on Mt. Parnitha rattled me and my creative work, and I am grateful to have company again. Evan’s spreadsheet lists a few restaurants, including the possibly fictitious Dear Manouka,. The last night we’re in town we want to do something special, and so we go to the place where Google says it is and that it’s open.
It is not open, apparently still closed for holiday break. We call the number on Google, which is confusingly linked to another restaurant that is clearly not where we are. But Evan can’t accept this, and is upset in a way that unfortunately makes me laugh really hard. The restaurant says it’s open on Google! Yes, but… it clearly isn’t, and there are a million excellent places to eat in this city. But it’s our last night here and it has to be magical in the exact way I imagined it! Haha, I know dude! But I think we will still have a magical time if we go back to that other place we really like.
I finally manage to cajole him in going back to a place we’ve been to and enjoyed. Evan spends dinner theorizing why the harried person on the phone would say the restaurant was open when it wasn’t. He is notoriously a huge prankster among our friends, but doesn’t care for being on the receiving end of a joke, even if it’s just a weird little mistake that we happened to cross paths with. He wants to be the architect of his tribulations, or feel like he’s being led into to some unexpected, course-shifting life experience. In this way, we are different travelers. I prefer a slower pace, going to the same places a few times, letting the people who spend time there reveal their particularities to me. I don’t like cramming things into every moment, I want to walk in step with the people around me and observe how they live. I want to try to understand them.
Evan suggests we take a day trip back to Hydra, a place we’d visited during our separate study abroad experiences in college. It has served as a naval base and as destination for expatriated artists in the 1950s and 60s, among whom included a young Leonard Cohen. We find his memorial bench and play “So Long, Marianne” and watch the boats drift in the harbor. While spending sunset at the beach, Markie and I clamber up onto a rock platform to sun ourselves like mermaids. There aren’t really beaches on Hydra, just stairs to the sea where the water is shallow enough to swim around in. We wave at Evan, who has floated away from the rocks and is enjoying the water, when the tide rushes up suddenly and sucks us off of the rock and down into the sea. It startles me so much that, in a panic, I grab at the jagged platform edge with my arm and hold on. When I open my eyes underwater, I realize it isn’t that deep and that I can let go. I swim up next to Markie and make for the ladder by the tiny dock. When I climb out of the water, I realize the rock cut my arm. Not too badly, but it is bleeding a little and so I go into a nearby cafe to ask for some band-aids. Later, when Evan gets out of the water, he says he saw us get sucked under. “I thought maybe I was the only person on this trip now,” he jokes.
I can’t help but feel like the sea was trying to warn me. “Hey! Your friend is dying and you have no clue,” it seemed to say. “Enjoy this moment before things get worse,” or, “It’s not an ulcer and Evan should go to the doctor right now.” In my journal from that time, I mention that the “ulcer” is really bothering Evan. It is chilling to read. I had no reason to think that what was ailing him was anything other than what he was told it was. But I still remember the force with which the ocean grabbed us, as if to shake us awake into something.
Markie leaves to begin her journey back home, and so Evan and I have a few days in Athens, just the two of us. We haven’t spent time alone since I’d last visited him before he left New York for LA. What if we each plan a surprise day for the other? I feel certain this idea was Evan’s, but perhaps it was some unseen force moving our chess pieces toward something I would cherish later.
He leads me to a bakery and then a neighborhood neither of us had been to before: Kypseli. It’s cute, queer, bursting with ceramic shops and bookstores. In the evening, we get Thai food and watch Fargo in an outdoor cinema, then go for martinis after. We could take a cab home but we always choose to walk two miles back to the apartment.
On my day, we go to the National Museum of Contemporary Art, see an exhibition about love in the age of the Internet. We go to the port and snoop around art galleries. We have dinner and then see a terrible, terrible adaptation of Aristophanes’ The Wasps (the director added an justification rap she performed at the end of it in a ballgown after Athenian critics panned it… it was that bad). We stand in line at a popular local food truck for an hour only to eat the grossest hot dog we’ve ever encountered. We drink soda from the corner store to wash the taste from our memories.
The goodness of these days could power a city. Somewhere in the recesses of my mind, it’s there, and it’s dusk. The rain comes down like it did that September and we watch the water creep up the tires of the motorcycles outside a tap room. We slosh our way to the Metro, marveling at how scary the world we love is. We fall asleep listening to the neighbor’s television through the floor.
When Luz from Y La Bamba comes to town, I go to Pilsen where they are DJing with Quin at Punch House. We spent a long day rehearsing for two shows they are in town for and the bar is mercifully chill. Somehow, we start talking about the unconscious realm, and I tell them about Evan, that he died two weeks before.
I think about the places where he consciously exists in my memory, but I hadn’t consider the places where he unconsciously exists. When will he reveal himself again? I wouldn’t call this an afterlife of sorts, but perhaps it is another way he continues to exist. I wonder, looking at his brother Sean’s handwriting in a letter. I wonder, holding a shirt I remember him purchasing on Hydra. I wonder, reading a book he recommended to me two years ago. What parts struck him most? What did his memory hold on to?
Dear Manouka, did eventually return from holiday break, but not for long. It permanently closed sometime in early 2024. I look it up and find this out when I am visiting Evan during an earlier part of his treatment. “Ha!” he says, “we can’t go, but neither can anyone else.”
Evan, I know you can’t read now (and if you somehow could! you would certainly not be reading my sad bastard newsletter lol), but if I say this maybe the energy of this sentiment will find its way into the realm where your soul now resides. I love you and you were so incredible. Thank you for being my director, committee liaison, roommate, sounding board, colleague, travel companion, wingman, co-star, shoulder to cry on, queer mentor, pain in my ass, number one fan, inspiration, and my dear, dear friend. I wish I was still in the Athens airport saying goodbye to you. I wish I was still on the lawn of Barnsdale Art Park saying goodbye to you. I wish we were still in the sun, each going our separate ways, so that when we reunited we would each bring something new to show the other. But it is tragically not so. I have walked in step with you to try and understand who you are, what you meant. I must, and I will, carry you, your light.
