Blue Horizons

Today is my last day in Greece.

It's a painful sentence for me to write (or think about). Every summer, it's the same story. Get excited about going home to Greece for the summer, and get literal nightmares as the days grow nearer and nearer to the time where I am to go back to the UK to continue my studies. I've heard of people who get 'work dreams' where they find themselves in an unpleasant situation at an old or current job. There are also school dreams where you have a nightmare over being back to school. Those are real, of course. But have you ever heard of Airport Dreams?

That's what I get. And it happens everytime, usually around September when I'm about to go back. I stand anxiously by the airport security gates and I'm sad over leaving. But I go on and cross those gates anyway. Then I wake up under the Greek summer sky and I feel glad that it was just nightmare, even though I know that in a few days it'll be reality.

This blog post is no dream. I won't wake up to feel glad. Tomorrow, I'll cross the borders for real, and I'll fly over to the UK. Honestly, I don't really want to. I've been to the UK for eleven long years. It's not a bad country but I'm tired of being away from home. Crete is an island filled with my childhood memories. Being away is simply too painful. The UK isn't a bad country, but it's a different country. Everything about it is different. Even the air.

When I was a kid, my Mom split our family apart and took me to the UK when I was just twelve. At that age, I made a massive education system switch, and I'm still grasping the severity of it. In 2013, I was twelve, and I started English high school... without knowing English. The best part? English high school concludes when you're 16. That means that I had just three years to learn English, get accustomed to the education system, and pass GCSE exams.

I couldn't manage something like that of course. That's just impossible. It took years and years to catch up. It doesn't matter how because that's not important anymore. What's important is how I worked hard and succeeded. I was successful enough to qualify for a university degree in Computer Science, which I'll start working towards this year. That's where I am now, even if it's not really where I want to be.

But you can't always do what you want. That isn't how the world works. If I allowed myself to do what I wanted, I'd cancel my tickets tomorrow and call my days in the UK officially over. But that would mean flushing down all my hard work down the toilet. All the credits and diplomas I got in the UK mean nothing to the Greek education system. I won't be able to do a degree in a university here. I'd have to start from scratch, and that means another big education system switch. There's only so many of those I can take.

My goal is to get that UK university degree and use it to find work in Greece. That's of course valid, and it's what I must do. It means another four years in the UK, which is a darn long time. But I've got to make my heart into stone and do it.

Yesterday, I spent the day just aimlessly wandering the shoreline of Crete. I just followed the sand and went from shore to shore, from beach to beach with just my feet. All places I'd visit as a kid with my parents. Just the mere salty air, and the whoosh of the waves caused an overwhelming sense of sadness inside of me. If it weren't for all the other people around me, I'd probably cry. I already was but I held it back so nobody could tell.

I even made it to a port where a friend and I used to fish in back in elementary school.


This place is enchanted with so many memories. My friend and I would go to a nearby fishing shop and we'd buy a matchbox-sized pack of worms. Then we'd tie the worms to simple thread and fish whatever we could out the sea. Then we'd hide the pack behind those rocks and we'd use it for days on end.

My little voyage yesterday was rich with flashbacks of those days. It was a wonderful time where I could embrace all my emotions. I'm sure I'll do it next year when I once again return to this place.

I know where I'm supposed to be right now and Greece isn't it. At the same time, life is too short to spend it in a place you don't want to be in. I thought about that a lot. Life and the world itself has existed for millions of years. But all of us only get about eighty to ninety years to be in it. That's minuscule. At the grand scale of things, it's like a flash. We only exist for a fleeting but bright moment. And that moment is a gift. My life is a gift too. I'm lucky to be here, and as a human of all things. I could have been a cockroach or a worm. Then I wouldn't be smart enough to write stories. And that would really, really suck.

That is to say, I've got to go back as soon as possible. I know the UK is a place of ample opportunity and money (at least compared to Greece) but what good is all of that if you're unhappy? I never cared for large sums of money or glorious careers. I just want to be happy. And the UK doesn't bring me happiness. Being in a village in the middle of nowhere, however, makes me feel happy. It's home and it's as simple as that.

It's a long blog post but I wanted to collect my thoughts like this. I don't know if anyone read all the way through, but thank if you did. I'll be okay, lol. I'm always really emotional in my last day. I'll go tomorrow like I always have done in the last eleven years and then next summer, I'll return. Until then, I'll just wait.

​

I've always loved animation. I don't know why, but I favoured it over live-action based movies since basically forever. My earliest memory of it is in the very early 2000s, when my Dad had a TV box that included a channel named "Jetix", which broadcasted animated shows. I don't know much about the logistics, but it is an American channel, and it did exist in Greece where I grew up. In fact, many of the shows were officially translated to Greek. Not sure what's going on there but I'm glad they made it work.

Anyway. I have sweet memories from watching Sonic X and MegaMan Battle Network on that channel, which I was absolutely obsessed with. I didn't know it at the time but these were Japanese-produced shows that fit in the "Anime" category. Maybe me growing up with these shows caused me to develop a fondness for the Japanese animation style. I'm not sure, but I stuck with it.

Seriously. I never bothered much with live-action. I'd always run home from school to watch things like Pokemon and other similar shows. People always talked about "real" movies but I never had the faintest interest. I'd watch these kinds of shows even in my early to mid teens. Then I discovered more Anime but with more mature themes and target audiences. That's also when I started to learn what "Anime" really is.

I watched a lot. Some really dark shows like Made in Abyss and Steins;Gate, some character-driven like Toradora, and also plot-driven like Code Geass. There were some hybrids of course, like Psycho Pass, which drove the story with both characters and plot. Both elements were greatly involved.

There's too much to list but that's the idea. I loved these shows and they did a lot for me. This is going to sound weird but they really inspired me to live a better life. At the time, my English wasn't good at all, and as a Greek in the UK, I tried to navigate the education system while I knew very little about how it worked and what I was supposed to do. My teachers didn't help much so I just pressed forward by myself in a faint hope that something good would happen. I acted the best I could and I worked as hard as I could even if I had no idea where I would end up. And my driving force was Anime. I found some of the characters (mainly from character-driven stories) very inspirational, so I did my best to imitate them.

We're all writers here, right? We all know that many stories who put characters into their focus have a structure in place to shape an "arc" in order to develop them. I guess, subconsciously, I tried to mirror that in my own life. And that's of course impossible. Life isn't scripted like that. But hey, the thought and the drive is what really mattered. The fact that I kept trying over and over even when things looked bad. That earned me a few high-grade diplomas, and some genuinely impressed teachers who thought that I couldn't make it. I stood out in many classes and this drive was a big reason.

I don't watch as much now that I'm in my early 20s. After an English class in 2019, I discovered writing and reading, so I've been focusing on those instead, which brings us up-to-date.

In truth, much of Anime, especially the modern kind, is filled with garbage. The "why" is too complicated and a topic of its own, so just take my word for it.

I watched a lot as I said, too many to remember. Some have stayed with me to this day, and I remember them regularly. One such show is Clannad, and it's single-handedly the most inspiring of all. Why? Because it's a show about growing up and facing the difficulties of life. And I was growing up too, so I could relate to it greatly. Hell, the main character closely matched my personality. A lost high schooler who didn't know what he was doing with his life, and who wasn't any good at studies. Like me.

Clannad is a very emotionally-intense story. It deserves its own post so I won't be exploring that much here. What matters is how I watched the MC be put through the paces of life, and how he came through in the end, despite how hard things were. He went from a disinterested high schooler to a responsible, working adult. And that was immensely impactful.



Watching the female protagonist struggle to go through the school gates? Been there, done that. The above screenshot is from the opening to the story. I particularly like how the school is located on top of a long hill. It's a metaphor for life, and the story initially refers to it as the "long, long hill", foreshadowing the dramatic events that are about to partake.

Anime has story-telling styles that aren't found in our parts of the world, and that's because Japan is a society very different than ours. They face different challenges than us and you can tell from their stories. And yet, Clannad focuses on the universal concept of growing up. Everyone can relate to that no matter the culture, and that's why Clannad is so critically acclaimed across the world.

It's a story that'll probably stay with me until the very end. I've known it since 2017 and I still remember it vividly. And that's what Anime is to me, really. A driving force and a beautiful memory consolidated from many important shows like Clannad. It continues to influence both me as a person and as a writer.



Stories are important. They can embroil the author's experience, and the impact of that effect can have immensely positive impact to the readers. They can come to show us perspectives and angles we haven't seen before. That's what really helped me at the end of the day.

My writing goal is to write a really good and impactful character-driven story. I don't know if I'll be able to do it. It's a long, long hill. And I'm still climbing it. But some day, I might just get to the top.