Roula 1995 ❲Cross-Platform❳

"You walk like you are lost."

"Where?"

No. I came because my mother had started sleeping in the guest room. Because my father's silences were louder than any argument. Because I had punched a wall in Connecticut and broken my knuckles and felt nothing. Roula 1995

I found it in a shoebox last winter, buried beneath my father’s old ties and my mother’s baptismal candle. I didn’t remember taking it. I didn’t remember her. But the moment my fingers touched the glossy surface, a smell rose up—jasmine and diesel, sea salt and burning sage. That was the smell of her. Roula was nineteen that summer. I was seventeen, an American boy sent to live with my grandfather in Kifissia while my parents "sorted things out." The euphemism hung in the air like smoke. My Greek was clumsy, a butchering of verbs and misplaced accents. Roula spoke English with a soft, broken precision, as if each word were a borrowed jewel she was afraid to scratch. "You walk like you are lost