Just like swimming...

I grew up surrounded by books. Homer's epics and Greek mythology shaped my young Hellenic mind and awakened my imagination. I knew there was a special bond between me and fiction as far back as memory can take me. Having a mother who worked in education, especially in Greek history, classics, and literature, didn't hurt either. Although it would be easy to blame her for my early obsession with literature, it wouldn't paint the right image, formed by all the hours my younger self spent away from her hiding inside the pages of a novel.

Although the first things I wrote were probably school essays, poems, and stories, this account is about neither of them, simply because I was either too young to remember them, or they were too mundane to leave a lasting scar.

I believe children are the reason we make up stories. Not only to engage with their untamable imagination, but to forget our bleak and often uneventful lives and realities. Who better then to tell a fantasy story than a child?

The answer is two children. When I was 14 years old I wrote a fantasy novel with my 12 year old brother. If you ask him, he'll say that all he did was come up with a loose plot and draw some art concepts. Although nowadays my brother is far more academically advanced than I am, back then I was the reader of the family. He enjoyed playing fantasy video games and analyzing mythical characters' weapons, skills, and weaknesses, where I obsessed over prose and the unparalleled power language holds over us.

Writing our novel was as easy as swimming. In fact we would go for a swim and I'd write down ideas at the beach. When we'd go home we spent hours discussing plot points and character names, while also trying to bring elements of our own lives into the novel. The result: a book about two brothers who discover a port-way to a new world, hidden inside their grandma's basement.

Thinking back at it now stirs up many feelings, the strongest of them being warmth and nostalgia. I am now 27 and my grandma has been long gone. Her house is not as it was and the basement is non-existent. The novel is the only tangible proof that memories of her and our adventures are real, since we lost her soon after the novel was done. There are photographs of course, but they don't tell the whole story, not in the way a novel can, and not in the way a book can enclose a mountain of feelings, facts, memories, and teachings that its writer endured.

Which brings us to the second strongest feeling that stains my memory of the novel: shame. Shame because I haven't read the novel since we published it when I was 15. Shame because I never mentioned its existence to my school friends, afraid of being teased. Shame because I spent the last 12 years avoiding it, and by extension my sentiments and teachings of that time. A time when being courageous and creative was strongly encouraged by my parents, who were awfully proud of us for using our time and flame to create instead of destroy. The more time shapes and refines my mind, the more I understand that this shame does not deserve the attention I so freely offered her in the past. This realization only sunk in recently, which awakened a new feeling.

The last feeling is hope. Although I never stopped reading, I stopped writing. Aside from school and university projects, I completely gave up on writing. One could say that my passions for music and cooking shaped my adult life, became my professions, and therefore hindered my liberal arts dreams. Having that colorful book cover staring at me through the jammed roads of my bookshelf though, reminds me of what's possible. Every summer I swim at that same beach we wrote our novel. Each summer fills me with more and more hope. I think I'll keep swimming...