"Not where. When. I am leaving the country. September. My aunt in Montreal. She has a diner. I will serve eggs and coffee to strangers who will never know my father's name."
Roula looked at my scarred hand once and traced the line with her finger. "You are trying to break something that is already broken," she said. "That is not bravery. That is just noise." The night of July 28th, we climbed to the rooftop of her building. The city lay below us, a sprawl of white boxes and television antennas, the distant pulse of traffic like a dying heart. She brought a bottle of retsina wine and two glasses smudged with her mother's fingerprints.
"Do you believe in ghosts?" she asked.
I first saw her at dusk, sitting on a low wall, smoking a cigarette she didn't seem to enjoy. The sun was a red coin sinking behind Mount Hymettus. She didn't look at me when I approached. She just said, "You are the American."
I tried to kiss her. She turned her cheek, but her hand found mine and held it. Hard. For a long time. Roula 1995
"Yes."
She was wrong. I was never the ghost. She was—is—a girl made of smoke and figs and locked doors, still standing on that balcony in July 1995, still half-turned away from the lens, waiting for a boy who never learned to say the right thing. "Not where
I wanted to say something beautiful, something that would pin her to this moment, to this rooftop, to me. Instead, I said, "That's far."
"Where?"
On my last night, we sat on her balcony. The jasmine had bloomed—white stars against black iron. She gave me a small brass key on a leather cord. "What's this?" I asked.
The photograph is warped at the edges, a casualty of humidity and haste. It shows a girl with dark eyes and a white dress, standing on a balcony in Athens. Behind her, the Acropolis is a blur of gold and dust. The date is scratched on the back in faded ink: July 1995 . Her name was Roula. September