Somewhere in the 80s: The Cassette Recorder/ To Κασετοφωνάκι
“Unhappiness passes with time but misery is incurable,” my grandma told me more than once. In her opinion, some people can never be happy. Much later in life, I came to agree with her. I wrote the following stories inside different hospitals. Struggling with the present I found refuge in the past. Amongst my childhood memories, something there kept me going.
I was a weird kid predestined to transform into an awkward adult. My clothes were a dozen sizes bigger falling loose across my bony shoulders and with unkempt hair and every ADHD trait imaginable. I spent most of my time reading, talking, and drawing. I was collecting various oddities, and my clothes were spattered with food and paint. Pretty much nothing has changed except that I mostly wear black to mask the stains.
Unlike the colorful perception of the 80s that many of us hold, my 80s were mostly black and white. I grew up in the gray, monstrous-wondrous city of Athens. As we watched the Smurfs on the bulky black and white TV we had until the early 90s my sister and I imagined them to be fluorescent green. We were actually surprised when they turned out to be blue. Most magazines, newspapers, and even children’s books and comics were printed in black ink on cheap yellowish-gray paper. My grandparents’ homes were full of monochrome photographs of our parents’ childhoods.
As kids, we collected every scrap of colored paper as a luxury item, trying to escape the grey reality of Athens — a city made out of concrete blocks. A tiny horse here, a rainbow there, monsters and glow in the dark planets. The fragments of their patterns got connected in my imagination forming my first stories. That was before I learned how to read and write, so I started recording them on cassettes. Pressing the record and play buttons simultaneously became my first writing medium.
Besides my imaginary tales, the vivid personalities of family members and friends were omnipresent in those dusty cassette tapes my sister discovered nearly three decades later.In one of the recordings, I expressed concern about how all the people in my stories would react when they heard them. Especially the grown-ups who were scarcely presented in the most favorable light. “A solution must be found in the future,” I proclaimed before pressing the STOP button.
The “solution” became my fictitious tales. When I first started writing as an adult I combined two or even three people into one character. I even disguised family members as animals and created fables about them, a habit that persisted into my mid-thirties. But somehow most of those stories didn’t ring true. I was trapped in my own fiction. Laying on my bed watching the IV fluid slowly dripping into my veins I decided that, sometimes, “honesty is the highest form of flattery”. Most people who pass through our lives are neither saints nor monsters, but they all have stories to tell. And I’m still listening- and constantly interrupting- much like my four-year-old self.
