Layers of Love

There are numerous ways to say ‘I love you’ in Greek.

The first time I learned about this was when I found myself sitting outside a café on an Autumn day so cold, that I was sure we’d be undisturbed as we talked. I made sure to arrive in a cocoon of jumpers and scarves, one of which I wore around my neck while the second one was hugging me from behind. I distracted myself from the occasional shiver that came with every breeze that brushed against my back by following his cigarette with my eyes as he tapped it lightly on the ashtray between us. He seemed to be less bothered by the cold, or perhaps his open jacket and bare neck were some sort of rebellion against the inevitable changing of the seasons. He would’ve been the kind of guy to do that.

I met him the same way you meet most people that end up making an impression on you: by accident. Only a couple of weeks earlier, I had hosted a small event in the backyard of a restaurant nearby together with the district committée belonging to a Norwegian solidarity organisation I volunteered for. Since it was my first year of being the leader for a project I deeply cared about, the self-critic in me didn’t accept anything else than perfection. Of course, as there are always more ways in which things can go wrong than right, we weren’t even close to the standards I had set for the evening. The number of people showing up wasn’t as high as expected, members of the committée hadn’t properly revised for their presentations and tried to hide their shame behind cue cards, and one of our main acts said she couldn’t perform due to an unexpected cold. In retrospect, the evening was far from being a disaster, but the second our singer cancelled last minute, only adding to the pile of errors we had already accumulated, I was convinced we were doomed.

The small venue we were holding the event at didn’t leave much room for running around like a hamster on a treadmill to help me contemplate what my next step would be to save our evening, so I felt forced to exit the restaurant to continue outside. My eyes didn’t gaze at much more than my own feet which were rapidly moving back and forth, so that as soon as I snapped back to reality, I decided to stare forward to prevent myself from fainting. The dizziness slowly faded away and my vision cleared up as my eyes were suddenly distracted by something that was moving with far more elegance than my feet were two minutes ago. And there was my light bulb moment. It’s a surprise that he caught my eye so easily, as his clothes consisting of brown and grey colour palettes almost made him invisible, the wall he stood against swallowing him. He was still swinging his guitar to the rhythm of his song, when I decided to approach him. But just before I took a step further, I paused for a second as I didn’t want to bring him back from the place his closed eyes had taken him to quite yet. I had to wait until the song was over. Eventually his black curls stopped dancing on top of his head, so I took the sign I had been waiting for and asked the stranger in front of me for a favour.

I felt like a little kid looking up to her father to ask if they could have ice cream for dinner when I explained to him why I needed him to perform at our little event. It’s not that it sounded like the most ridiculous idea in the world. I mean, who wouldn’t want ice cream for dinner? It’s just that it seemed unlikely that a stranger would help us out without gaining anything back, since we didn’t have much more to offer other than some biscuits and a tiny audience full of poor students stuck in a backyard. I was barely halfway through pitching the idea to him when he started packing his things away and put the guitar across his back. “So where are we going?” He said in a beautiful accent I wasn’t able to pinpoint its origins of. Perplexed about how easy it was to convince him to join us, my facial expressions were enough to ask him if he was serious, and without feeling the need to reply with words himself, he nodded towards the direction I had come from and turned around. We sealed the agreement with a smile and I led him to the place where our story began.

When we arrived in our little backyard oasis with all its string lights and tables full of steaming coffee cups, I hadn’t even asked him about his name yet. I was trying not to mention in my introduction of our special surprise guest that I pretty much just picked someone off the street to fill in for the initial act, so my announcement was nothing else but an encouragement for everyone to sit down, grab whatever was left of our limited catering service, and to not question a single thing. We listened to our eclectic musician who didn’t speak a word Norwegian, and soon found out he didn’t need to. Two minutes into his song, it all felt less like a gig and more like a lecture about love and life, particularly when he started to perform some spoken word in-between his songs without it feeling out of place. The melodies he played on the guitar made up for what he couldn’t explain with his broken but beautiful English, and we soon realised there was no need for him to speak in any other way for us to understand it. He talked in short breaths and with a voice that was low enough to force everyone to come a little closer, but not too close to invade his personal space. There was still room to breathe and to perform a little dance with his guitar with every verse he sang, and occasionally he would look up to the people in front of him to make sure they’re really paying attention. Suddenly, the backyard which was placed in the middle of the city centre was completely quiet, and the only voice that existed was his own.

As you can imagine, the night ended on a high note; although probably the quietest high note I’ve ever heard. I could make up some romantic way of how we ended up keeping in touch, but I’m afraid there’s nothing poetic about adding each other on Facebook, as special as that felt at the time. It wasn’t until some weeks later that he took initiative to talk to me again by wishing me a happy birthday. I didn’t think much of it and simply followed protocol by responding with a thank you and a smiley and left it there. Some time later we met again online, and showed gratitude for having met under our circumstances. He thanked me for inviting him to our event, and I assured him that I was grateful for his favour. That’s all it was. There was never any romantic tension between us, but then again, there’s endless ways to love, appreciate and admire someone. The combination of my curiosity, but also, let’s face it, my 16 year old naivety, led me to agree to go for coffee with him to get to know each other better, as he put it. In a different story, this would probably result in some sort of grooming case, but this is not one of them, I promise.

He finished his cigarette and adjusted his seat, his neck still exposed to the crisp Autumn cold which was already bringing with it hints of the next season. Perhaps he felt the need to make up for missing his bus and keeping me waiting, because he immediately took the burden of starting a conversation off me by commenting on the book I was just about to put back into my bag. Even my immature brain realised that it was never really about the book, but the attempt was still more than appreciated. We quickly dived into philosophising about literature, life, and as every hopeless romantic or armchair philosopher would do, the limitations of expressing our complex palette of emotions with words only. We agreed that our language gives us shortcuts to explaining a feeling that would otherwise take hours to describe accurately, consequently boiling them down to adjectives that we believe we can all relate to. But the issue with that limitation is that no one will ever be able to really understand how we feel. If you tell them you’re angry, they might relate to the anger they felt in a similar situation, but no words will be able to make someone feel and understand the unique and complex experience of your own. To use a more positive example, how can three words ever be enough to make a loved one understand how much you really feel for them? There are so many different kinds of love, with different intentions and desires and strengths, how could anyone possibly guess what yours consists of?

In Greek, he told me, there are numerous ways to say ‘I love you’. But even as a native speaker, he himself has found it impossible not to use other tools to help him out. Whenever his words failed and felt inadequate, he would let his music speak, he told me. Because in order to understand how someone thinks or feels, you don’t just listen to his words, but also the melody of his speech. You pay attention to what words he chooses to emphasize, when he decides to look at you, and how his body agrees, or disagrees, with every sentence his machine of flesh and bones produces. The reason why he decided to let his music speak was because he felt like it gave him the power to speak the unspoken. To shine light on emotions hidden in the shadow, and give them a voice strong enough to be heard in an audience that can’t stop talking. There’s only so many ways you can say ‘I love you’ in Greek, and even though music will never be enough to fully communicate how you feel, at least it covers a layer of love in your body that would otherwise remain untouched.

The last time I learned about all the numerous ways of saying ‘I love you’ in Greek, I struggled to look you in the eyes. It was easier to focus on the reflection in the window beside us, serving as a filter to your radiance that I still only could handle through narrowed eyes. It showed a softer version of the features you carried with you, features I was in the midst of falling in love with. Not that I knew. How was I supposed to know that my shivering hands wanted to touch your skin, and that my heartbeat might have tried to tell me about it in morse code? I speak four languages but none of them could translate what I really felt, and neither would they have been adequate tools to let you know about it. So I sat there in silence and listened attentively, nodding after every sentence to cover up the fact that I kept losing myself in your eyes and didn’t register half of the ‘I love yous’ you told me about. My body rejected the intensity with which you tried to teach me about the second language that you spoke, and the first language that you felt. I guess it was a protection mechanism against me believing it’s real, that this was all really happening, because the disappointment of it being an illusion would’ve been too painful. Now that it’s been a year, I know that what I was feeling was right that night after all. And if I’m not deluded enough to be wrong about this, I can safely say that I’ve finally stopped listening to the numerous ‘I love you’s’, and started feeling them instead.

Originally published at www.madrebelblog.com on October 6, 2018.