I'm sitting in a smoky bar in a city cover by a perpetual haze. My cigar is slowly burning away between my fingers as I stare at the last centimetres of Ouzo in my glass.
Some girl in a sparkling, low-cut, red dress is making love to the piano. She is flushed and I grimace as I see a bead of sweat run down her left breast.
The city's heat is intolerable.
Intolerable, but not without a profound sense of forlorn poetry. A longing, or more an echo of a time long gone. A time not like to return again.
I down what's left of my drink and get up, grabbing the table to steady myself. One of the serving girls comes up and purrs a question.
I don't hear her and my head spins as I push her aside and bull my way to the exit.
The air is hardly fresher in the streets, but the lack of smoke and piano helps clear my head.
I look at my watch and see my wrists are bare.
I grin and look up at the skies, some old instinct to try and measure time from the celestial bodies.
I grin again at the thought of celestial bodies and crush the stump of my cigar under my heel.
There is no time in the Mediterranean, only the slow cadence of the wind on the water and the shadows on the streets as the sun lazily crawls its way across the sky.
My gaze wanders to the horizon, if that's what you could call it in this wretched blotch of urban expanse.
The mountains try their best to hold back the civic cancer that is trying to strangle them, but they won't make it. This city is to ripe for that, its oozes will just spill over and run into the next valley and then the one after that.
Only the sea seems to have been able to stop, or at least stunt, its growth.
The first rays of dawn creep over the mountain side and I feel a tugging sensation, something pulling at my innermost being.
The East is calling, and I've no intention to resist.
It is past time I left this city.
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