As I mooched through the Athens tourist trap gift shops like a foreign stray, not differentiating myself much from the stray cats in the area, I felt hungry, lonely, and displaced. Finding food in a foreign city is an anxiety inducing sport for me. I usually fill the need for food with iced coffees, always locating the nearest Starbucks upon arrival, but once the caffeine & sugar crash sends me dizzy, I usually have to find solids. Travelling alone makes this more of a stressful event, I don’t want to sit in a restaurant by myself, but equally I can’t just live off fast food alone. I get some souvlaki. It’s delicious, hits the spot, and I didn’t feel too anxious ordering and eating.

I pick up a handful of different Greek god figurines. They were cheap, pretty, and I thought they’ll look cute in my apartment. Maybe tacky, but who cares. It’s been 5 days since I’ve had any real human contact. No one has spoken to me, or called me, in almost a week, and the sense of loneliness is both daunting and familiar. I start to feel jaded. Every city I travel to starts to feel the same. It’s just me, again, in a different surrounding. No one to share it with, no one to even talk to about it after. It’s just me. I start to question life as I walk through the ancient ruins of Agora. How pointless it all is. Life. Civilisations and monuments, gods and temples, all reduced to rubble with a €4 entry fee to walk around and take useless selfies. I stand in the ruins of an entrance to an old theatre. Huge towering columns adorned with gods & monsters. I take pictures I’ll never look at again, and move out of the way of the woman behind me, so she can take pictures she’ll never look at again. I sat down to sketch. I wasn’t sure why I was sketching or what for, but I did so anyway. What would my place have been in Ancient Greece? Probably more purposeful than my place now. I imagine I would’ve been a vital cog in a system that needed hands and brains to grow. And where am I now? Contributing very derivative work, alongside many many other ‘artists’ doing the same. I’m not a cog, I’m decoration. Human decoration. Civilisation doesn’t need anymore waste. Human waste, wasteful art & opinions, waste of space. The Greek gods gave us so many individual explanations and examples. Then they were all reduced down to one. One to rule us all. Easier. Brain condensing. Keep it simple, for the minions. I’m rambling. Thoughts chasing thoughts down paths in my mind.

I’m ready to go home now. To maybe find purpose in a simpler setting. Let gods be gods, and let humans walk & feel the ground beneath them. Recently I lost my ground. I’m floating. Not a god, not a human. Im in a nowhere land, just existing, a dormant life. I try to find purpose, and birth joy from creation, but then I fear I’m driven not by art, but by the yearning to be remembered after death, like these towering marble columns still standing above the dirt and rubble. Why? I ask myself. For when I die, so will my ego. Why is my ego fearing my death more than I? It’s like my body will turn to dirt, but my ego will stand like gods & monsters. Well, a monster it certainly is. A monster that needs to be fed. Well maybe I’m running out of food. Maybe I can’t feed it any longer. I don’t want to hunt for anymore options of how to feed it, so maybe it’s time to simply let it die. Let my life be a circle of stones in the ground that tourists will unknowingly walk over for millennia to come.