End of Season
Kos, Greece
There is a space between ending and beginning, a holding ground for ghosts, before the old gives way to the new; it is the transition from season to season, from one phase of life to the next. It is the death and rebirth cycle.
This was Kos, Greece, in the fall of 2015.
I arrived on Kos during a critical time in the refugee crisis; Greece was an entry point to Europe, representing a new life for many weary refugees traversing dangerous terrain from war-torn Syria.
This was not just curious exploration. This was personal. I spent almost three years of my childhood in Syria. Both my happiest and most disruptive moments occurred there. Though I was on an extended break from humanitarian aid work, I was too close in neighboring Turkey to not witness the influx of crisis and hope.
Here was an island with a surreal intersection between tourism and travesty. Holiday makers and hell escapers.
I boarded a virtually empty ferry in Bodrum, Turkey, just three miles from Kos, the irony not lost on me that many of the ticketless attempting to cross did so by the light of the moon, in seatless rafts, their passage much costlier than mine, while I gazed at the Aegean Sea in comfort.
Every day I jumped on my bicycle and spent hours cycling the island, speaking with shop owners, refugees and locals.
The conversations wavered between heartfelt and hopeful and divisive and angry, depending on the perspective. I listened and observed.
Several times in the morning and several times in the afternoon I cycled through the port, where most of the newly arrived refugees camped, as if the frequency of my trips would increase my understanding of the incomprehensible.
The port was transformed into a bustling waiting room for the next leg of the journey deeper into Europe, life vests and memories discarded across the pebble beach, remnants of lives that no longer were.
The rest of the island carried a void, uncertain of its transition from today to tomorrow, from summer to fall.
Aside from a sprinkling of end of season holiday makers sunbathing on the same stretches of beach that braced for the early morning arrival of rafts, the streets and country roads were relatively quiet.
I befriended contemplation and reflection in the spaces devoid of people. In the spaces that stood still, waiting for the next chapter to be written.
It was in these physical spaces of emptiness that I reflected on how we contain things, how the surface of life can reveal nothing and everything.
How the end of a season is symbolic of our collective fragility as we transition from one thing to the next, even when we do not know what the “next” is.
The vestiges of summer, as tourists flew home and Greeks closed shop and returned to Athens, felt bittersweet, like the end of childhood pushing against adolescence, refugees pushing forward, leaving behind their own ghosts.
This was the season the lifeless body of three-year-old Alan Kurdi washed ashore in Bodrum, Turkey, the beginning of a roar of outrage that claimed media attention and the hearts of many but did little to shift the reality. It was, in many ways, the beginning of a new era of politics, a year out before the U.S. election.
That summer and fall felt prophetic, a glimpse of what was to come.
And within my world, I kept cycling back to what is there and what is not there.
What remains after what was, before it becomes what is, again.