drowning in greece

I don't really know where to begin.  I spent this past year reviewing the approximate four months of my travels.  There is no way I can simplify or break it down for myself as well as anyone else.  How do you explain exactly how a country permeates all of your senses?  How do you convey the magnitude?  The majesty of each experience and each situation?  It even sounds pretentious as I think of it.  But it is not about looking cultured.  It is not about saying you've seen something better or more amazing.  Or chastising your friends for not giving up their lives to follow in your wanderlusting footsteps.  It's about the blood and the sweat and the tears that were wrenched from your body by your own hands.  Those moments when you bleed and can almost enjoy it's salty metallic flavor because it reminds you that you're alive.  When that sweat is dripping continuously into your contacts, stinging and drying the plastic so that they suction to your corneas.  And the scalding tears that burn trails into your skin because you feel like you've lost.  I want to share this beauty.  This rugged, dirt-caked, dehydrated, life-altering experience that way my four-month journey through Europe.  The only place to really start is at the beginning and how I came to make such an insanely brilliant decision.

I first saw Josh during my lunch break at Barnes & Noble.  I'd been working as a lead bookseller full-time post college, thoroughly convinced my forty hour weeks of crawling underneath tables, reorganizing the same stack of books every hour, and enthusiastic book-wormy nature would some day propel me into management.  Nothing I saw of him that first day could have prepared me for the next six months.  All I could gather was the way he seemed to be cleverly bullshitting my manager Charles from the way they were nodding at one another and all the serious eye contact.  I quickly dismissed all of this, assuming this new employee was just a seasonal or some trainee for another store.  It wasn't much later that I noticed his particularly bald head behind the cafe counter. 

Maybe it was the baldness, or the slow saunter, or the way his black Gap shirt seemed to mold to his broad shoulders, either way, I made a point of introducing myself.  I remember a friendly connection upon shaking his hand and making eye contact with this stranger.  After that we became fast friends, spending break time together and sharing similar interests in authors.  He even spent his lunch break one evening changing my tire.  Still, our work flirtations were just that.  I was dating someone and would call him during my breaks since our time spent together was minimal due to his teaching job and my odd hours.  Despite my treating Josh as a casual acquaintance I soon realized I wanted to spend time with him outside of work.

Josh finally decided one day that we'd go out for sushi, since I'd never partaken in the Japanese favorite.  From that afternoon, a date I'd convinced myself was not a date, something clicked and we began this flirtatious dance of "I know you like me, but I won't say a word about it".  A rather high-schoolish way to embark upon a courtship, but still so deliciously tantalizing.  Meanwhile, my relationship with Mr. Teacher was slowly coming apart.  His first year teaching allowed him next to no free time with me except for certain Sunday hours and anything scheduled a week in advance.  It was a level of married commitment I simply wasn't ready for after only a month of serious dating.  Immediately, I began to draw up plans for how to break it off.