2025 FRAMING — NYC, 2002
Who's Cassie? Akiko asks.
I knew this was coming. You can't tell a story about leaving without talking about what you left. Or who.
Let me just tell you the whole thing, I say.
Cheating, lying, deceiving, are they faults inflicted upon someone else, or do the deceivers primarily cheat themselves? If the latter is true, what does one cheat himself of?
It was late August and the dense humid climate of the Louisiana bayou had a smell that penetrated everything. Stepping into the dorms on the first day of University must be a day most people who have been there should be able to remember with some sort of vibrancy. I was overly excited and I unloaded the car quickly only to intensify my perspiration, as the sweat trickled down my temples I noticed this girl looking at me.
The boxes in my hand were slipping, and I was eager to be done unloading so I quickly smiled and proceeded to my room.
Her piercing blue eyes stayed in the back of my mind all day, as if I had burned an image of a bright light in my retina, who was she, and why could I not get her out my mind? My departure from Europe had taken its toll on my relationship with Atalanti, it seemed somewhat futile to continue a relationship across the ocean again, plus the vigor of our flame had calmed over the past few months. The rational path was to move on and explore the new possibilities of the American landscape. Maybe this girl was the one.
Several weeks went by and I had not seen this blue-eyed creature, I could not get her out of my head.
On a Friday evening, my newly formed group of friends and myself head off campus to go to a party. The group got larger as we strolled through the grounds, before I knew it there were at least thirty of us parading through the spooky streets of the Garden District. The colonial mansions entangled in the droopy Spanish moss dangling off the weeping willows, and surrounded by the scattered stoned graveyards. The soft and marshy terrain forced the locals to bury their dead above ground, and as to prevent the occult lootings they built large stone coffins that created a scary maze.
New Orleans Garden District at night
Our group chattered in the dimly lit cracked streets, as a nebula of voices senselessly gibber jabbered hovered above us mirroring our enthusiasm and introductory nakedness. The light from one of the street lamps shone through the foliage of the tall trees, and fragments of our clan were illuminated in grayish blue. She was amongst us! I saw her face, as it passed through the beam and then swiftly merged with the shadows of the background. My blood froze and I realized that the opportunity was staring at me in the face.
Our group was approaching our destination, so I quickly needed to isolate her from the rest of the flock. I swooped in and introduced myself, overwhelming her with my bold entrance. Before we knew it we were sitting on the stoop of deserted house, the column holding the tin roof up had been half eaten by termites, patches of tin dangled waiting to fall. I talked most of the time, I bombarded her with anecdotal innuendos and exotically Greek cliche proverbs. Before long I was talking to her about Atalanti, and the story on the beach, this contradicts the first rule of dating: never talk to a girl you want to get to know better about your ex-girlfriend. It was odd, I was aware of the tactless choice of topic, but for some reason it was the only thing that could come out for me, and it did so effortlessly. She was enchanted, as was I. Those piercing blue eyes, we kissed, and the journey began.
We ended being together for three and a half years, through most of my university life she was my muse. Her west coast attitude liberated me from the dreariness of my analytic mind. I shared with her all I knew, my mind would run off and my mouth would follow. We wrote when we were not close to each other usually by regular mail, there was something special about reading another persons handwriting, smelling the paper in some desperate hope that we could get a whiff of the other's scent. The slowness of the letters speed made their anticipation a climactic ordeal, which popped once the letters were ripped open at their destination. Mixed emotions flooded us as we gazed at the paper reminiscing what we had just read. There was something modern about this way of communication, it had some sort of mystique very different to the flashy characteristics of email.
Three and a half years together - she was my muse
THE FREIGHTER TO LAGOS
School ended in May and I was going to travel on a freighter ship to Nigeria, thirty-five days working as an apprentice officer. Long days of intense physical labor kept my mind distracted from the heartache of separation, as line that separated the two shades of blue on the horizon surrounded me. I sought calmness in its meditative minimalism.
Disembarkation in Lagos is probably one of the strongest culture shocks one can experience nowadays. The mutated cancerous failure of the western urban paradigm stared desperately at me as we entered the port, through the empty window eyes of its abandoned skyscrapers, multinational corporations pulled out when the price of oil dropped in the late eighties. The ship had been waiting for 3 days to unload, having been at sea for 35 days these 72 hours went by dreadfully slowly.
Lagos port - 12 million people
I sat on deck staring at the few lights of the city in the distance; we had pulled out over fifty miles in order to avoid the pirates. The whole situation was like a bad joke, and no one seemed to mind but me, all I could think of was looking at something other than rusted steel and the colliding fields of blue. I puffed on a cigarette and hung over the side of the deck.
The chief officer stepped next to me, he was one of three other Greeks on board. "Don't worry," he said, "we'll be on land tomorrow, and I'll take you to the best bar in town." He had a grin on his face and I could tell that this was going to be a fun night.
"So what's going to happen tomorrow?" I asked him.
"Well, the local pilots will come on board in the morning and take over the ship's command, after they have collected their necessary baksheesh—whiskey, cigarettes, chickens, pretty much anything we had left on board—they are going to steer the ship into the port. It will take about three hours to get docked from the time the pilots board the ship."
"Three hours!?" I gasped in despair; I knew the pilots got on the ship less than a mile from the port, why does it take three hours to get to port?
Mixalis chuckled and didn't reply immediately. "If you're lucky you will get to see a scuba man also," he uttered softly.
"Scuba man? What's that?"
"You'll see, just wait and see."
The next morning, the entire crew was watching the Nigerian pilots navigate the ship through the mouth of the river into the port. Mixalis was on the other side, I could see him leaning over the rail looking out to land. A dense aroma I could not really describe saturated everything, and as the ship curved around the bank of the river, a cloud of dust emerged behind the dense vegetation. A pandemonium of people scattered like ants for as far as the eye could see into the city, while the large white cement docks waited to hug our boat.
Mixalis shouted my name and signaled me to go over to him. I moved through the rest of the crew and joined him.
"Look, look, there is a scuba man!" and pointed at something in the water. I leaned over to get a clearer view, but still couldn't see what he was pointing to. "Where?" I asked. "Right there" and my stare rolled off his arm and there and behold, was a man. Puzzled I looked at Mixalis and asked him "what is he doing?"
"He's not doing anything. He's dead."
The word 'dead' echoed in my head, and I only just then realized where I was about to disembark.
The madness that exists on the densely populated areas of this earth is probably one of the toughest things to wrap one's mind around. In a city of 12 million registered inhabitants, knowing that each of those has a life which has meaning and which they live day in day out, with all the miseries that plague a developing nation.
I can only say that my stay in Lagos can't be put into words, the guilt I felt as a westerner was overbearing, it crippled me, silenced me, and as overwhelming pity and sadness dominated my stay, I could not ignore but notice that most people were smiling. Who was I to pity them? The more I wondered about this the more I realized that the pity that I felt stemmed from my own dissatisfaction with my life, my inability to appreciate the opportunity that had been given to me, just by being born in Europe.
REUNION IN GREECE
Shattered and in desperate need of love I flew to Greece, hoping that my family would show some sort of compassion for the reality check I had just had—they didn't. The only person who could save me in this disillusioned moment was Cassie, and she would be there in a few weeks.
The summer air in Greece defines almost all my memories, the dry heat that relaxes both body and soul. The newly built airport was the pride and joy of Athens. I impatiently waited in the waiting room outside the luggage area, it had been the longest we had not seen each other since we had met, the grand total of 7 weeks.
The sliding doors opened and she walked through with a backpack on her back, she was looking straight ahead and didn't notice me immediately. As we made eye contact time slowed down, jumping in the air with her pack still on we collided and embraced.
The drive home was sweet and soft spoken, I had been telling her about Greece since we had met and now she was here. The early evening breeze had cooled the sun-beaten concrete of the capital; she was really tired so as soon as we got home, I took her to the guest room and settled her in. We lay down on our backs on the bed, we didn't speak, we lay there fully clothed with one of our hands on each other's chest. We almost fell asleep, we limbered in that zone where you can't really tell if you are awake or not. Fully relaxed I felt our bodies fuse where they touched.
Once again the exact same thing that had happened with Atalanti on her first day in Greece happened with Cassie, only this time neither of us were high.
If one could make a graph representing the curvature of one's relationship with someone else, I felt that each person had a programmed version of that curve inside of them which repeated itself when they were in love, no matter who the other person was. If the two were meant to be the curves would overlap and their combination would give birth to a new curve which ideally would harmoniously fluctuate producing the music of two lives intermingling. The tune was same every time, it just got richer as one got older.
That magical Greek summer
The summer was magical, and the more we fine-tuned our song, the more entangled our lives became. She had kept a notebook while I was on the ship; it was full of the turmoil she had experienced during our separation, in Seattle. The book unleashed hooks that dug into me as deep as anything ever has, it was visual proof of our bond.
Naive as we were, we let go and danced together through college complementing each other's grace through our effortless coexistence. I shared everything I knew with her, late at night I would go on for hours before we went to sleep analyzing and philosophizing till usually I ended up talking to myself. She returned to Greece two more times, we traveled to all my favorite places and discovered several new ones on her own initiative.
She balanced us, brought presence to my endless mental loops. We played together like children, going on bizarre adventures and late-night escapades on the art studio's roof. Our codependence was fierce—neither of us got much from our families, so we became everything to each other.
SOPHOMORE YEAR — THE READING
It was during sophomore year that my mind began to crack open in ways I hadn't anticipated.
I'd enrolled in a Buddhism class almost by accident—needed the credits, thought it would be easy. Hans was a German graduate student doing his PhD at Tulane, teaching the course as part of his research. He had this way of speaking—measured, deliberate, almost robotic in his stillness—that made you lean forward to catch every word. The course was called Eastern Philosophy and the Mind and it was nothing like the engineering classes that dominated my schedule.
Hans teaching Eastern Philosophy
He introduced us to concepts I'd never encountered in my Greek Orthodox upbringing or my rationalist education: the noosphere, collective consciousness, the idea that individual minds are nodes in a larger network. That consciousness isn't confined to individual skulls but exists as a field, a layer wrapping the planet like an atmosphere.
Teilhard de Chardin called it the noosphere—the sphere of human thought that emerged when our ancestors first developed language and began sharing ideas. Layer upon layer of human consciousness, accumulating over millennia, creating something larger than any individual mind.
Hans drew a diagram on the board: Lithosphere—the rock layer of Earth. Biosphere—the living layer. And noosphere—the thinking layer. Each one emerges from the previous. Each one more complex.
I sat there in the back of that classroom, and something clicked.
The internet.
The fucking internet was the noosphere becoming visible. All those thoughts, all those ideas, all those connections that had previously existed invisibly—in conversations, in letters, in books scattered across libraries—were suddenly manifesting as a tangible network. We were watching the noosphere wake up.
THE I-CHING CONNECTION
The real breakthrough came when I discovered the I-Ching.
I'd been researching divination systems—tarot, astrology, all the irrational methods humans have used throughout history to access knowledge that couldn't be obtained through logic alone. Professor Chen had mentioned the I-Ching in class, called it one of the oldest texts in human civilization. Over 3,000 years old.
I bought a translation and tried to understand how it worked. You throw coins or yarrow sticks, generate a random pattern, and that pattern corresponds to one of 64 hexagrams. Each hexagram has a poem, a teaching, an insight. You ask a question, perform the ritual, and the I-Ching gives you an answer.
To my rational Western mind, this seemed like nonsense. How could random coin flips produce meaningful guidance?
But then I read about the theory behind it. The Chinese philosophers who created the I-Ching believed that nothing is truly random. That when you ask a question with genuine intention, you're sending a ripple through the fabric of reality. And the universe responds.
And that's when it hit me.
One night, I was lying in bed next to Cassie, unable to sleep, mind racing. I sat up suddenly.
"Holy shit."
She groaned. "What now?"
"The internet. The I-Ching. They're the same thing."
"Nikos—"
"No, seriously, listen. The I-Ching is an ancient technology for accessing the collective unconscious. You have a question. You perform a ritual—throw the coins, focus your intention. And the system gives you an answer pulled from 3,000 years of accumulated wisdom. Sixty-four hexagrams. Sixty-four possible states. It's a code. A language for interfacing with something larger than yourself."
She was awake now, looking at me. "Okay..."
"And the internet—same structure. You have a question. You perform a ritual—open a browser, type a search, click links. The system connects you to knowledge accumulated by millions of minds. It's divination through technology."
Late night philosophizing - Cassie trying to sleep
THE GAIA HYPOTHESIS
I tried to explain this to Cassie one night, using the bacteria metaphor.
"The bacteria in your stomach don't know they're in a stomach," I said. "They're just doing their thing—digesting food, reproducing, competing for resources. From their perspective, they're autonomous individuals in a complex environment. They don't have the vantage point to see that they're all part of a larger system. That they're all working together to keep you alive."
"Okay..."
"But what if they did? What if the bacteria suddenly developed a way to communicate with each other? To share information across the entire digestive system? They'd start to realize: Oh. We're not separate. We're all part of something bigger. And that bigger thing depends on us working together."
"So we're the bacteria and Earth is the stomach."
"Exactly! Except we're bacteria that just invented the internet. We're waking up to the fact that we're all connected. That we're all part of Gaia. And the more we communicate, the more we share information, the stronger the planetary consciousness becomes."
JUNIOR YEAR — THE DISTANCE
Junior year rolled around and we had been dating for two years, our passion remained intense but never reached the climax of the first summer. Cassie wanted to spend the year in Europe. Enchanted by the Mediterranean way of life, she chose Madrid as her destination; this presented a tough challenge to a 21-year-old couple. Long distance relationships was my specialty so I was not too concerned, but we agreed nonetheless that if we felt like having fun we should indulge and be honest sparing each other the haunting details.
It was tough at first, and my incapability to fathom the adjustments Cassie was going through, made her initial months doubly hard. The structure of our arrangement was fool proof, it was a win-win situation, if we fooled around, we fooled around, at the end of the day we would be together again. It didn't really matter if we cheated on each other or not, it isn't cheating if the rules allow one to cheat; or is that true?
Distance and time made our relationship fade into abstraction. Phone calls and emails poorly replaced the richness of our earlier paper trails. Life bends in incomprehensible ways of which only an arrogant mind can assume it can control its contortions.
Immaturity and arrogance made it easy for me to slip on this path I was sure was secure, four months later I fooled around with another girl. It wasn't easy to tell Cassie, but I did, casually thinking that because it was part of our agreement it wouldn't hurt either. This started to unravel a sacred knot we had been tying for so long, and the most painful thing was, that I was oblivious to it occurring.
THE SUMMER IN NEW YORK
The year was finally over and we would get to see each other again, she wasn't too eager to go back home to Seattle so we arranged to spend the summer in NY. We would be staying in my parents flat, sharing it with my younger sister. It was a small two bedroom in midtown a dreadfully boring place for kids; the only redemption was the park at walking distance. I was going to be really busy that summer working and taking classes, the millennium had rolled around and the superficially hyped festivity made our stay even more hectic.
My roommate for 2 years and best friend Zack, wanted to take a film class that summer, it only made sense that he stay with us also. My parents didn't think so, they made a big fuss and I fought hard to get them to let him to stay, I won. The four of us shared the small flat, and tension built up, my busy schedule further widened our gap. The humid sticky city clung to us with its grime, and as rats we scampered through the subway feeling dirty and jaded. I was glad the summer was ending.
2025 FRAMING — NYC, 2002
Akiko stops typing. Looks at me.
"That's it? That's how it ended?"
"That's how it started ending," I say. "The actual end came later. After September 11. After I left for Mexico."
"Did she write to you? While you were traveling?"
I nod. "She did. I kept the letters."
"Can I read them?"
I pause. Twenty years later, and it still stings.
"Yeah," I say. "I'll show you. They're scattered through the manuscript. Between chapters. Like she was following me the whole journey, even though we were done."