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'When the universe curls in on itself like an ingrown toenail, there will be no one around to care that you abandoned your life', I think, or 'overdraft fees are made up because money is made up'. I am at that point in my depression: the flippant arête along which I am tired of hunching and dragging myself inch by crumbling inch. I google the height of Tower Bridge, which sits sturdy—and, alas, all-too squat—across from my office. I avoid the tube. I stay out late at work drinks on Thursday, and Friday, and sometimes even Monday: I am one of the boys. I am workhardplayhard sung from boss to worker and back. I am exhausted. One morning I wake up, sweating vodka, drenched in guilt, and I book seven days in Athens with money that belongs to the bank. I think of the washing line in my childhood home, how I would measure it by eye—one ruler, two rulers, five, ten—and try to sketch its path from my bedroom window to the ground below. I would imagine myself swaddled by leaves and bracken instead of screams and sullenness and strain. I think about that cord, its metal innards surrounded in waxy yellow. I wonder if it will bear my weight. ~ The metro smells hot and loud. I grip walls with white fingers as a train that is not for me—not for me, don’t, stop it—shrieks by. I am woken through the night by winter thunderstorms and dreams. ~ In the morning I am empty, clean, and useless: a rind ready for the heap. I stare at the ceiling, tears in my ears, and think 'fuck it'. The roof is all plaster and creaking generators and dusty cacti splayed in dirty pots. There is a couple here. They’re elderly, businesslike, the sort of people who own eight fleeces and a bike rack between them. “First time?” the lady says. I nod, duck my gaze, stare instead at the city before us. The far hills form tall, pale brackets around us. To our left, a dark bloom of rock: the flat plinth upon which the Acropolis rests. “We fell in love with Greece thirty years ago,” says the man, “We’re here whenever we can be.” They love the scenery, the islands, the history. They love the people, the solidarity, the hope, the joy. I rub the outside of a plant pot. I love the way the dirt feels on the pad of my thumb. They tell me the best way to reach the Acropolis, up via Thissio, a brisk little walk through the woods. I nod, again, and dredge a smile. The trees here rise dark and thin like lacerations. I’ll love that, I decide. I see a cat skitter and lope over rooftops: I’ll love him too. I’ll love this marmalade sunrise, the flowers that are beginning to turn its way. Fog rolls forwards, pitching itself over buildings and under hills. I am watching Mount Olympus construct itself, and I love that, too. ~ 'ICARUS' scrawls across a pavement’s edge down by the gutter. A giant hand grasps walls and windowframes. People take what they can get for a canvas: you park in Psiri, you’re signing up for a paint job. The streets are empty, the shops closed, their shutters unfurled. Snakes ripple across a corrugated iron sheet as Medusa turns her head and stares at me, baleful. The whites of her eyes show all the way around. I think about the tens of thousands of years that we have spent on other votives: cave boars, scratched stones, memorials to an idea or an image or a rage long dead. I can love that, I think. I do love that. I came here scooped-out, a shell dumped by the sea upon the shore. I’d figured I might as well leap into the unknown before—well, consider it a practice run. This is a big stinking city filled with history and hardship and hope, just like home. All I’ve been doing is existing, just like home. Yet I am hollow enough, now, for this place’s claws to twitch across me, turn me gently, to open me up and claim me for itself.