Friends and acquaintances who have read Where We Live have asked me questions from time to time about the life of the characters after the book, and mostly about the life of the protagonist, Antonis Spetsiotis. The most common of them is related to his decision to leave for Luxembourg and whether he finally carried it out, but there are also more complex ones, for example, did he find happiness in life (or was looking for it), did he return to law. , whether he got married, where the pandemic caught him and whether he was vaccinated. I think the vaccine probably did it, but then it becomes difficult – because I have no reason to think about what the hero does if I’m not going to write about him.

It is true, however, that some of the notes I have made in the years since the completion of the book are written from a point of view close to that of Spetsiotis. As a result, I sometimes wondered: does it make sense to release another book with Antonis as a hero? I wonder if he still went to Luxembourg? The answer was and remains negative. However, when, on the occasion of the forthcoming screening of the film by Sotiris Gorica, I was asked to publish in Kathimerini a text about what Antonis had been doing in the past years (or something like that), the challenge immediately thrilled me. Based on notes from the last three years, I decided to create ten snapshots of my own story and present them as the closest I could come to an answer.

Nadia is leaving for Germany and has a legitimate reason for passing through Athens, so we arranged to meet on the way to the airport. I sent a text message for the supermarket and I’m waiting for her near this big Sklavenit with a huge parking lot, which also reminds me of an airport. She arrives in an old Opel, gets out and looks at the sky with thick gray clouds, as if it seems absurd that she will soon be above them. “How many years;” he says as he approaches. “A lot of”. What’s going on, Anthony? He speaks. “What happened; What happened;”.

The small polling place is quiet, even when the voters are lining up, even if there are ten people in the room and they have brought their children with them. There are times when it leans towards overwhelming, but mostly it’s boring. A guy with an “I say no” sticker taped to his shirt comes into the room from time to time and then leaves again. The process goes smoothly, and in the end we eat the steaks brought by the village headman. He also found me a secretary himself, a municipal employee who shows no interest in formalities, constantly makes mistakes on the list, and when I tell him that he can vote himself if he wants, he shrugs his shoulders. “You know something;” he tells me a while later. “In this world, you can’t fix anything without breaking something else. That’s why I don’t want my wife to be psychoanalyzed.”

“Naidis, man, what have you been through,” he says, pointing to an article about Axl Rose performing in the nineties on his mobile phone. A 90s kaltila orgasm in a video that shouldn’t be in any Greek home, the article writes, as Panos casts sly glances from the screen to me. “Look at that hair,” he says. When he thinks I’ve read it, he puts the device aside and takes a sip of wine. “What am I telling you, you experienced these things. How old were you then?” I will count and tell him. “Baby,” he replies. But then again, you’ve been through it. Madness, Ciao Ant1, pasocara. “Mmmm,” I say, and drink the wine, which is watery and smells like food. “However, some scenes were extremely unacceptable then, at times you see them and say: sexism, dude, oops,” says Lena, who still does not seem to have watched. “Indeed,” I reply, “but even today…” “I mean, okay somewhere with the Boomers, we said.” “He’s not Boomer, kid, hey, what do you call him. It’s Gen-X,” Irene puts in, and I nod, okay, that’s not necessary. — Yes, I know… I’m just saying… We have another drink, and then the waiter comes. Wine costs 1.50 euros, change rings on a tin table, next to a mobile phone with Axl Rose and Claudia Schiffer.

People ask me if he went to Luxembourg, if he found happiness in life, if he returned to law, if he was vaccinated. I think the vaccine probably did it…

The traffic light is red and Stelios looks at his watch as Eleni says, “And you burdened me with a bunch of useless principles. That’s why I will never forgive her. Why would I make it so moral, where would it serve me? It’s like when we were little and he put us in those sweaters, isn’t it the same Stelios, remember?” Stelios nods, but looks down the road. “We need to get out of the traffic,” he says. I stick to the front car, basically to show that I’m doing my best. “He put these sweaters on us, and it was twenty degrees outside and it was humid, it was outside, you know … He did the same thing with me …”. “Let’s go,” Stelios says, “green,” but a motorcycle squeezes in next to us, coming along and stopping first at the traffic light, which is red again. Opposite, at the end of the road, you can already see the cemetery paddock. “They look like these stupid sweaters,” says Eleni. I catch Stelios, who silently says the words: “Oh, mother.” “They didn’t protect us from anything,” Eleni continues.

At that time, she was going through a period of her espionage, and one night she dug up Sotiris’ diary and read it in full. Naturally, he found many references to her, although nothing particularly negative and no secret. However, he spoke of her fondly, and the diary was written as if Sotiris knew that one day someone would read it. But again, dawn found her crying, clutching a notebook in her hands. The same day in my office, he told me everything. When, given that the diary turned out to be a monument of marital fidelity, I asked her what was bothering her, she replied: “There is always something hurtful when someone talks about you without your participation. There’s always a grain of betrayal.”

Later, I stand in front of a dilapidated house and look at the weathered wall. Someone wrote: Psychotherapy or hair transplant?

“Trust me,” he tells me, “it was all there from the start. If you could go back in time and look at yourself one afternoon when you were two years old, you would recognize yourself.” Two in the morning, tomorrow we have to work, but we still sit in this bar so that the night passes unnoticed, and she does not notice us. – Shall we go somewhere else? Fanis says. The group next to him pays, and the more sober one tries to divide by six. I look in the smoky mirror behind the bar and think about how many times I have changed my life path, or plane tickets, or even my opinion about something.

“I call them Gen-X,” says Irene, “they are the coolest guys. In infancy, hey, they don’t care…” Panos adds that besides Gen-X and Millennials, there are also Xennials who are somewhere in between, and they’re not quite in their prime. “It’s a lot closer to us,” he says, “You, Pano, are a millennial, aren’t you?” Lena asks him. “Since you’re from ’97, you must be after.” “What’s next?” “After millennials.” “Who’s next for millennials?” “I don’t know, didn’t we say Xennial?” — No, it’s before. Was it generation X before? Lena says, and everyone looks confused for a moment. — What are you anyway? Irene asks me after a while. “Generation X or Xennial?”. “I’m not sure,” I tell her. “But I know my ascendant.

“Good thing we have Zoom too,” I told her, “consider finding us with phones only.” “But the phone was better,” he replied. “At least it was just for us. Now I feel like I’ve become another one of those things you do on your computer.”

After all this, spring came, and I remembered something that I’m not sure if I saw or imagined: a guy is sitting alone on the beach and looking at the sea, and a policeman is approaching him ten meters away. He is about to speak to him, but the guy breaks his reverie, turns his head and sees the cop too, and for a moment they don’t know what to say. I don’t know why I’m thinking about this painting, but I would like it to hang on the wall of the living room and look at it – not to analyze, not to somehow formulate its meanings, something else. Just looked at her until she didn’t mean anything.