Christos Stefanidou

It was a summer evening, the kind where the air is thick with the scent of thyme and salt, and the cicadas sing until your thoughts dissolve into the landscape. I live in Crete, Greece, and had been walking along the cliffs near Loutro, following a narrow path that I had known since childhood. Below, the Libyan Sea stretched dark and endless, the waves whispering against the rocks.

I don’t know what made me stop. I wasn’t tired. Perhaps it was the light—there was something unusual about it. The horizon shimmered as if the world were breathing, expanding and contracting in slow, deliberate motion. I remember standing there for a long time, watching, until I noticed something in the water. A figure.

At first, I thought it was a swimmer, but no one could be that far out at that hour. Then I thought it was a trick of the light. But as I watched, the figure did not disappear. It moved, slowly, as though carried by an unseen current, but it did not struggle. And then it turned toward me.

I could not make out its face. It was neither a man nor a woman, neither young nor old. It was simply there, watching. I wanted to call out, but I could not. A strange calm settled over me, as if I had stepped outside of time. I do not know how long I stood there before the figure faded, dissolving into the sea like mist. The moment it vanished, the world returned to itself. The light lost its strange quality, the cicadas grew louder, and I became aware of my own breath again.

I was twenty when that happened. I am eighty-five now, and I still think about it. Not every day, but almost. I have never spoken of it, not even to my wife when she was alive. What could I say? That I saw something neither real nor unreal? That I felt, for a brief moment, as if I had touched the edge of another world?

Now, as death stands closer than ever, I wonder if I will see the figure again. If it was waiting for me then, or if it waits for me now. And if, when the time comes, I will finally understand what it was trying to show me.