The Driving Force of Desire: Memories of a trip to Greece and the power of unattained dreams, by Megan Kruse for Psychology Today
A man named Yiannakis collected me from beneath the windmill three hours late and drove me through sheets of rain to a boarded-up hotel. The bottom two floors were flooded with stagnant, fetid water. With a careful scaling motion you could splash your way up the stairs to a room—my room—on the top floor. I sat down at the little hotel table; from the window I could see the neighboring property, a tiny goat farm. Ten or twelve goats hid from the rain beneath a pile of scrap wood, hooves stuck in the mud, bleating as it grew dark. I stood up and walked from one end of the room to another, then sat back down again.
The year before Greece I was searching for a dream life, pulling potential destinies like so many colored scarves from the grab bag of being nineteen. I took a year of personal leave from college, and spent the first six months on a working visa in Brighton, England, tamping down espresso shots at the Starbucks in the clocktower square. I split the rent on a tiny bedroom with a French Canadian woman; she took the mattress and I slept on the box spring. I had a chronic lung infection, and was deep in a ruinous affair with my married coworker; I was terribly unhappy, but in the way that would one day seem romantic, that one day I might even miss.
I constructed a vague plan to leave England and make my way to Greece, to the island of Paros. I secured a partial “fellowship” to an art school that had no accreditation or information: Show up when you want, Yiannakis said. I was a writer, I thought, and in my youth everything seemed to shine; it didn’t occur to me that no one gives fellowships to nineteen year olds without publications. I never researched Greece. I didn’t check the weather, or investigate the “school.” In my dreams, the Naxos Pride would leave me on a white sand shore in the blazing sun, and within days I’d be draped across a chaise longue, the most popular new member of the island poets’ salon. I’d wear a linen dress and bright red lipstick. I’d break a thousand hearts. I’d probably never come back.
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