DIAMONDS IN THE TRENCHES

26 | summers in greece

SAME CITIES WERE DIFFERENT for different people, that no one could deny. From aspiring artists daydreaming about California but despising it once they moved there to college students begrudgingly heading out to big cities but ending up having the time of their lives.

Athens was a contradiction, an embodiment of all opposites gathered into one place. A city of lavish restaurants and homeless people sleeping on benches outside; a city of lights where if you looked up at the sky at midnight, you would not spot a single star; a city of ancient beauty among a cacophony of demolished buildings. At the end of the day, Athens did not really differ from all the other big cities I had visited.

I did not mind the traffic and the bustled streets, the loud voices and the extreme heat. Why would I? It was not like I would stay here forever anyway.

"We both knew that summers in Greece were hot. But, oh well, they're even hotter than us," Jasmine said as we were waiting for a taxi.

I could not agree more. Amidst the tall buildings and the ocean of people, I felt like my limbs were melting, like the sun was just a breath away from our faces. "That's true, but I wouldn't say hotter than us. Why praise them that much?"

We laughed and we missed the taxi. We ran to the other side of the road, hoping we would be luckier this time. We were not. We settled for the bus. It was a mess. We had lunch at a local Goody's Burger House and then settled into our hotel rooms. Through it all, it was good.

On the long flight across oceans and continents, Jasmine had told me about her first interaction with the company, back when she had just finished college and her mother—a political reporter—had lost her job. Jasmine insisted that working for Clairvoyant would earn them the money they needed to get through. Her mother had tried multiple times to change her mind, insisting that working for Pioneers was not the smartest decision, but it had been fruitless. Jasmine thought that she could use the extra money to build her career and help her mother as she tried to rebuild her own.

"In hindsight, that's when everything started going south," she had confessed, shaking her head as if she could not believe what had rendered her so naive to join Pioneers in the first place. Jasmine had been sitting by the window. It had really been a sight. The endless blue of the sky and her.

"Why do you say that?"

She looked away. "I couldn't see it back then but everything in the way we lived was just . . . wrong."

"In what way?"

"My mother was purely obsessed with her job, and I used to hate that. I hated that she wouldn't return home for days and then when she finally would, she acted like nothing was wrong and she was still a part of my life; like she had a say in it even though she was never in it in the first place. When I was in high school, my father found another woman and even though that was not the smartest choice he could have made, my mother made it seem like it was all his fault. So we moved to Toronto, me to study and her to get away from Kingston. By doing that, we started spending more time together and I liked that, I felt like we had finally made peace. The thing was that she would talk to me for hours about needing to have the perfect social, personal and academic life, all at the same time; about needing to avoid feeling sad or down at all costs because if I did, then I would stay that way forever and end up alone. Up until my early twenties, I hadn't had a boyfriend, and she used to bring that up as if it made me less of a woman. I guess, I felt pressured. I think it was part of the reason I stayed with Arastoo until it was too late, part of the reason I didn't leave right when I started noticing all the red flags. Anyway, it was right and it was wrong."