Athens

“I can't tell you that part until I tell you something else.”

She waits.

“What would have happened if you hadn't gone?” she asks.

“If I did not get on that plane on the 13th,” I say, “the Greek military. After that, the family trajectory. Good schools, engineering degree, respectable career.”

“That doesn't sound so bad.”

“It wasn't bad. That was the problem.”

Sitting with Akiko, trying to tell the story of the journey, I realize I need to start further back.

Before Mexico. Before Cassie. Before any of it.

I need to start in Athens.

Because Athens is where I learned to feel like an outsider. Where I learned that being between worlds, never fully one thing or another, would define my whole life.

I was born in 1978.

In a hospital in Athens, Greece. Greek father, Greek mother, Greek passport. Greek name. Nikolaos, which Americans would mispronounce for the rest of my life. Nicholas? Nick? Nicky?

But I wasn't really Greek.

Or at least, I didn't feel Greek.

My parents had lived in America in the seventies. They came back to Athens when I was a baby, but they brought America with them. American ambition. American materialism. American belief that you could engineer your life like you engineer a building. That success was measurable. That pragmatism was a virtue.

So I grew up in Greece, but I was raised American.

In many ways, after coming to America, I was no longer Greek, but not American either. And when I go back to Greece I feel the same way.

And I spent my whole childhood feeling like I didn't quite fit.

I first felt different when I got the Game Boy.

My mom brought it back from a trip to New York. 1989. I was eleven. Nintendo Game Boy, gray plastic, green screen, Tetris cartridge.

I was the only kid in my class who had one.

I'd sit by the window in our apartment in Kifisia, a northern Athens suburb, trees and quiet streets, playing Tetris and Super Mario for hours. And I felt it even then: this little machine was from the future. A future that existed in America and Japan but hadn't fully arrived in Greece yet.

My friends and I would watch MTV for hours. Absorbing it. Imitating it. Trying to decode what coolness was, what being young meant in this new global culture that was suddenly accessible.

It changed us. Changed Greece. Changed everything.

What I could not see from the window was the size of the jump. Western Europe and America had been at this for fifty years. Greece did it in a decade. I did not have words for it at eleven. I found them later.

We jumped forward, and time started to accelerate. The present and the future coming closer and closer together.

And in order to move forward, do you need to forget as well? Is there a finite amount of memory in your hard drive, where if you want to put new things in you have to delete old things? There were countries that were not willing to do that. Especially countries where tradition was very important.

The timing was weird.

I grew up in the golden age of analog. Vinyl records, film cameras, physical maps. The technology of the material world at its peak.

But I came of age digital. CDs, email, the internet, cell phones. The technology of information beginning its explosion.

Tarquin, on the bus, called it being a First Waver. One foot in the analog past, one foot in the digital future. Born between 1975 and 1985, right at the hinge point.

And that hinge point, that feeling of living between two worlds, became my permanent condition.

People who are younger than me don't know how to fix their bikes. And people who are older than me don't know how to use the internet.

My parents' generation was obsessed with engineering.

For the privileged minority in Greece, engineering seemed to be in the title of most men’s degrees. Engineering and shipping were equally admirable, provoking valid steps toward the ultimate goal of earning an MBA. After WWI, the influx of refugees into Athens increased the need for more buildings, and a new landscape was destined, physical and abstract. The immediacy of need paired with the recent memories of discomfort launched a very pragmatic, materialistic, and ambitious Neo-Greek, the generation of my parents. An anarchy of civilized behavior bloomed in Athens. Sheltered by the overprotective generation of my grandparents, reckless and irresponsible behavior was fostered and tolerated, making it the standard of Greek life of the 50s. Deprived by the misfortune of the wars, our grandparents’ generation was the first to facilitate their children’s growth, disregarding simple rules of grace and common sense, ensuring themselves a home in the countryside, by their village to retire to.

My father was a mechanical engineer. He grew up in the golden age of the internal combustion engine.

He came from Greece, from a poor background, and arrived in post-war America fascinated by engines and cars. To him the car was an amazing piece of engineering. It was also the thing that transformed the world. It meant freedom. It gave him access, knowledge, insight. It took him places.

For my generation that object was the computer. The most sophisticated machine we had. It gave me what the car gave him. Freedom. Access to knowledge and information. Wider horizons.

He never saw it. He never thought I was particularly technical, never thought I understood or respected machines and engines. I had the same fascination he had, but for the object of my generation.

That's the irony, and the sad part of the story.

He worked very hard. He was good at it. Successful. Pragmatic. Rational. The kind of guy who could fix any broken machine but had no idea how to talk about feelings. Very kind, thoughtful and loving. He was just not around very often, and not good at saying what he felt.

My mom was different. More artistic. But she'd suppressed that side of herself to fit the role of wife and mother in a culture that valued pragmatism over poetry. She was a housewife with unfulfilled artistic ambitions, channeling her creativity into elaborate dinner parties and perfectly arranged flowers, always with a hint of what might have been.

What might have been had a sound in our apartment. It came late at night, father and mother, and I heard it as a fight between two halves of me.

There seem to be two distinct, almost opposite philosophies about the role that family members should play in each other’s lives. Perhaps this is related to being liberal or conservative, perhaps not, but in a nutshell, the Spartan view sees the family’s role as a mirror that reflects back all the things that we can’t see on our own. It’s through this harsh critique that we show our love for we want to help you survive and toughen you up for the real world, which is full of sycophants who will never tell you the hard truth about yourself. On the other side of the spectrum is the Karakatsaneiko philosophy of life, which sees the role of the family as a magnifying glass that only focuses on the virtues and delights of each other’s being. Family should overlook the imperfections, and should be the place where we feel safe and unguarded, and by cultivating our personalities in this safe space we become more resilient out in the world.

Two philosophies in one apartment. Years later I would say Apollonian and Dionysian and call it a pendulum, the thing every epoch swings on, and spend a book on it. Then I had a simpler version. There were two ways to love a kid, and I was torn between them. We loved each other. We just did not agree on what the world was.

And I was my parents' firstborn. Their hope. The one who was supposed to carry forward the family trajectory: good schools, engineering degree, respectable career.

But I was wrong from the start.

I was the kid who daydreamed in math class. Who asked questions no one wanted to answer:

Why do we have to learn this? What's the point of any of this? Why does everyone seem so unhappy if we're doing everything right?

My teachers didn't like me. My parents didn't know what to do with me. Even my friends, kids I'd known my whole life, started to seem alien. They cared about normal things: sports, grades, which girl was cute. And I cared about... I didn't even know what I cared about. Just that it was something else.

Something deeper.

Something real.

The only person in my family who seemed to understand was my grandmother.

My dad's mom. She was old-school Greek. Orthodox Christian, went to church every week, said her prayers, observed the fasts. She believed in saints and miracles and the power of faith.

My parents thought she was naive. Old-fashioned. They'd go through the motions, church on Easter and Christmas, but it was performative. Empty ritual.

But my grandmother actually believed.

And I remember, even as a kid, feeling like she had something my parents didn't. Some connection to meaning. To purpose. To something beyond the material grind of building and earning and achieving.

She'd give me these little icons, Saint Christopher, the Virgin Mary, and tell me stories. Not the sanitized Bible stories you get in Sunday school. The wild ones. Saints who spoke to animals. Miracles that defied physics. Mysteries that couldn't be explained.

My parents would roll their eyes. But I loved those stories.

Because they suggested that the world was bigger and stranger and more magical than the engineering textbooks admitted.

But there was one story she told me that I didn't fully understand until much later.

Her own story. From the Greek Civil War.

I was maybe ten or eleven when she first told me. We were sitting in her kitchen in Kifisia, and I'd asked her about the faded photographs on the wall. Black and white images of villages I didn't recognize. People who looked like they'd seen things.

She shrugged. “Because he remembered? Because he was grateful? Because for one second he saw us as people, not enemies? Does it matter? He looked our way. And because he looked our way at that exact moment, I lived. Met your grandfather. Had your father. And now here you are.”

I remember feeling confused. Wanting there to be a reason. A meaning.

“And if he hadn't looked?” I asked.

She smiled sadly. “Then you wouldn't exist. Your father wouldn't exist. None of this conversation would be happening. All because of which direction a young man's eyes turned that morning. Random.”

She reached across the table and touched my hand.

“This is what I want you to understand, Niko. We are all here because of a thousand random moments. Guards who looked the right way. Boats that missed the storm. Strangers who offered help. Tiny choices that cascaded into everything. You ask me why I believe in God? Because I watched people die and others live, and there was no reason. And yet here we are. Still alive. Still choosing. Still making new moments that will change everything for people not yet born.”

I didn't get it. Not then.

To a ten-year-old kid playing Game Boy in suburban Athens, the Greek Civil War was ancient history. Boring. Sad. But not relevant.

It would take more than a decade before I'd understand what she was really telling me.

That trauma echoes across generations.

That violence repeats in patterns we can barely see.

That survival is often random, but what we do with that survival is not.

And that sometimes the greatest gift is simply bearing witness, being present for the moments of chaos and horror, and carrying the memory forward so it means something.

My grandmother survived the execution line. And she carried that memory through the rest of her life, shaping how she saw the world, how she raised her children, how she told stories to her grandson.

She turned trauma into transmission. Horror into wisdom.

And when I was old enough to understand, she passed it to me.

Sitting here now, after everything that's happened, I realize my grandmother was right.

The world is bigger and stranger and more magical.

We just got really good at pretending it isn't.

Our existence is a miracle. And being able to acknowledge that, no matter how stressful it is, reminding ourselves of that miracle, and honoring it with the choices we make every single day is what makes your life holy. Spiritual, purposeful, meaningful.

And it's also more random and chaotic and indifferent than the saints' stories suggested.

Pattern and chaos. Order and randomness. Zero and one.

Both real. Both true. Both operating simultaneously.

The question isn't which one is correct. The question is: How do you live in the space between?

How do you find the pattern without denying the chaos? How do you make choices that matter when you know that sometimes it all comes down to which way a guard happens to be looking?

I didn't have an answer at ten. Or at twenty-three, when I left for Mexico.

I'm not sure I have one now.

But the whole journey, the whole search for flow and synchronicity and the wave, was an attempt to answer my grandmother's question.

I didn't want a comforting story that erased the terror of that square. I wanted to know if there was a way to sense pattern without lying to myself about how much is just luck.

Hard to find.

Or if they were there, they were so buried under layers of Greek propriety and materialistic ambition that I couldn't find them.

And I became obsessed with finding it. With experiencing something real. Something direct. Something that didn't require an interpreter or mediator or transaction.

As a young child I never read for pleasure. Of course I had my summer reading to do, but I never picked up a book on my own; it just never occurred to me. As I was reaching the toughest years of adolescence, and the hormones boiled with the desperate need to establish my own resonance, certain people appeared out of the blue. They could have been people I had known for a while or someone I had met on the street or in a café; they would suggest I read some book. Every time the situation arose the flavor of the intimate communication would be the same, as if an honest secret was being shared, self-aware of its transformative potential. I would automatically read the book suggested, sometimes in one sitting. Not only would I read the books quickly, but I would also retain most of the information, a lot of which I had an intuitive sense of even though I had never studied similar disciplines.

I am eternally grateful to these people who managed to get this information to me. Something deeper inside me knows that the messengers were on quests like mine, and that what we shared moved each of us along our own path, one receiving, one giving. It is as if cosmic opportunity knocks on your door and for a moment you are aware of its possibilities. Some of the authors and books were Carlos Castaneda, The Celestine Prophecy by James Redfield, The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho, and Terence McKenna.

And eventually, though I didn't know it then, I found the first clue that would lead me toward those experiences.

Music.

Specifically: electronic music.

I was sixteen when I first heard trance.

A friend played me a mixtape. Some DJ from Goa, India. Tracks with names I couldn't pronounce, rhythms that didn't follow any pattern I recognized.

And something in me responded. Immediately. Deeply.

This music felt like it was coming from the future. From some reality where the rules were different. Where consciousness wasn't confined to the prison of everyday thinking. Where something more was possible.

I started collecting tapes. Going to record stores in Athens that sold imports. Discovering this entire underground world of people who were making music for a different purpose. Not for radio or charts or mainstream success.

For trance. For transcendence. For the dance floor.

And that became my first tribe. The trance kids. The ones who didn't fit anywhere else either. Who felt the pull of something beyond the material world. Who used music and dance and sometimes drugs to access states of consciousness that school and church and family had failed to provide.

What happens on a dance floor, I worked out later, is not mystical at all if you look at it coldly enough. Take a human apart. Eighty percent water, a brain that runs on electricity, a skin to hold it in. Put a roomful of those in the dark with one beat and the skins stop mattering. One blob joins a bigger blob. At sixteen I only knew that I came out of those rooms with less of me, and did not miss it.

Akiko looks up from her typing.

“So you were always weird,” she says.

“Pretty much, yeah.”

“And you always knew you were weird.”

“I always knew I didn't fit. I didn't know what to do about it until much later.”

She nods. “That must have been lonely.”

“It was. It is.”

But sitting here now, after everything, I realize the loneliness was necessary.

Because if I'd fit perfectly into Greek society, I never would have left. Never would have gone to America for college. Never would have fallen in love with Cassie. Never would have had my heart broken. Never would have launched into the Odyssey that changed my life.

The outsider becomes the traveler.

The traveler becomes the seeker.

The seeker becomes the teacher.

But it starts with not fitting. With feeling like you're from some other world, some other timeline, some other reality.

Still searching. Still between worlds. Still trying to find the real beneath all the constructed.

And it all started in Athens, with a kid who didn't fit.

Thank God I didn't fit.

Because if I had, I'd still be there. Comfortable. Numb. Asleep.

And I'd never have woken up.