The cold burned her heart

29 Dec, Artemida

''Amara's friends do not match mine. Down in Kyros's house, we sat around a table, so they'd show me memories from when they went to high school. 

Out of the 10 friends in the photos, 8 sat around that table. The other two were somewhere in France, married. I don't talk to my high school friends anymore. Most of them left Stockholm at 18, and we lost track of each other. All my friends are from the University or from bars in Finland. 

But these 8 managed to keep in touch for such a long time. I often hear Amara talking on the phone in Greek, and I often heard their names. I wonder why I never called my high school friends.

Amara and Mellissa know each other since they were babies. Their families used to work together when they picked grapes. I can't help thinking about the scorching sun tanning Amara's perfect skin in between the rick lives of the vine. 

Kyros met Amara in high school. They used to spend afternoons at his house, his mother used to make them fried potatoes with cow cheese, and they would watch movies and bitch about life for hours. 

Back in high school, Kyros looked mostly the same, minus the beard. He wore his long hair in a pony tail, but now he had learned to braid it. I wanted to tell him to leave braids to the Vikings, but I remembered I had 3 strings of blonde hair in my head and I swallowed my words.

Kyros used to have a boat and take all of them on little adevntures. They caught a sea gull once and kept it for 2 years in one of the girls' chicken shed.

All these stupid memories from when they were 16 years old made me ask the inevitable -who fucked whom?

My friends would have been shy. My friends would laugh nervously and change the subject. But not them. The boys laughed so loudly and huskily, I wondered how much I need to smoke for my voice to get that low.

They actually told me who had who without any shame, as if they all already knew all the stories -which they did - and even gave me details I didn't ask for. Mellissa could bent her legs up to her chest and one of the guys -the only blond one -had tried three of the girls.

Kyros -the most interesting of them and the one I was expecting the most shocking stories from -told a boring story about doing  a girl in the boat, on the beach. He never told a name. I'll never get the look on Amara's face out of my head. She was looking up to him, with her head tilted, a habit that I haven't seen in her for maybe a year of two. That was the way she looked at the crowded street from my apartment in Helsinki, from the 11th floor. With admiration, melting in the beauty of it.

Of course, Kyros had wine, and one of the finest, and boiled it and mixed it with sugar.

The wine helped me feel better in the middle of these warm, young, hardworking people I  didn't fit with. Somewhere between sunset and midnight, I remember having a very intense chat with Mellissa. She was not interested in talks about life and death and gods, nor in Maths, or Physics, as Amara was. But when I was drunk I didn't really care too much about Thermodynamics or God. Mellissa was amazed about my job, in a way that Amara never was, because truth be told Amara didn't give a damn about my money.  I could have been a multimillionaire  for all she cared and she would have seen me the same. She wanted me, she wanted my strange ideas about God, she wanted my never ending talks about the absence of justice in the world and how I saw Physiscs as a language that we could speak to any being in the universe and they'd understand.

But Mellissa was entertained, she was amazed about how I was the CEO of a pretty big company at such a young age, and didn't even bat an eye -or didn't care -that it was all built by my father and I was simply carrying his work forward.

And as I was ranting about the astonishing workplace I have built in Helsinki to coordinate my great business in Stockholm, I saw Amara underneath the Christmas tree with Kyros, admiring him playing some greek carol on an acoustic guitar. She always told me she loved guitars, and I never even thought of learning to play guitar for her.