Writer's Notes.

I've been writing again, and here's something different.  Vignettes and notes from the long piece I'm finishing this week.  Sometimes, the fiction we write can leave marks.  Deep marks.  

While in Greece I've been working on the day job and getting back to my roots and me.  Enjoy the notes and windows into the next phase.

Next time I'll pull out the notes on dating again.  Joy.  Now there's an absolute joy, so much that at one point I forgot how to speak English at the luscious advances of an American in Greece.  (Note the dripping sarcasm).  

Greece has my heart in many ways, even with a stress and workload--this year--of epic proportions.  I am obsessed with life here, I keep coming back, and it feels like home time and time again.  Since that first voyage in 2013, when my best friend had to drag me back on the ferry to Turkey, to now when I wander Athens.  I stroll along these streets with such ease, knowing this city like a glove these days, and get braver with making conversations in broken Greek.  The life of design emerges . . . 

*** 

While looking for a location name, she pulled up his address on Google Maps.  The taco shop was a couple blocks away, and she needed to verify its real name and not the nickname they gave it on loosely laden evenings by the fire.  Stopping for a second, she saw a different car in the drive.  Zooming in, wondering if this was it, she saw the water fountain he'd put in last spring.  

Casting a glance at the screen, he was to the left in a grainy image of himself, without a doubt, in the sunlit yard by the fire pit. The second dog, which he'd acquired last spring, was in the front corner. The yard ornaments still sprinkled the side and back views. She sat there with the wind knocked out of her.  

The house he called their home, the one she thought would hold the two of them, that she'd spent nights and days in, wrapped up with him, dancing in the kitchen and making plans for the life she wanted.  She could still see them talking about spaces and moving to a more prominent place, her sidebar about painting the porch roof to look like constellations, the order she had on eternal hold from an artist friend for a piece celebrating the two of them and where they met, the dreams of a life undone leaked from her compacted boxes of memory and hope.  She'd let him slide into her inboxes more than once; he'd promised to love her.  

She wasn't prepared for the reckoning of feeling undone for a love long dead.  He sits there as if life has stayed static.  Or maybe it had moved on.  She wasn't sure.  Is he waiting for her to join him? Is he pondering the loss of her? Is he relieved that she's gone? Does he even remember the life they'd planned and what was in store? She was left vulnerable, grappling with these questions and the weight of their past.