This has nothing to do with the history of the kiss, but the university has kindly allowed me to post this piece of writing.

———ME

I was one in the hot summer of ‘76.

One is much too young for memories so I imagine it all through family photo albums. It looks really nice - a picture of naked boys running through dry grass, a swarm of seven-spotted ladybirds, my iron pram on a bridge. There's my mother, in profile, looking out of the frame like an Egyptian queen. What is she smiling at? Who is she smiling at? Fuck her.

My mother is easily distracted so there aren’t any pictures of her looking to camera. Though my father is often behind the lens so that might have something to do with it. She chases her desires with an open mouth, my mother, but she often moves on before the climax so she is consistently unsatisfied, and that’s why what happened to me happened.

In the hot summer of ‘76.

It was midsummer night. My mother wanted to watch the new dawn - the death dawn I suppose we might call it - when the sun turns its back on us and begins the long walk to winter. Goodbye, Sunshine. Anyway, my mother crept out of my father’s bed in the middle of that short night, tucked me up in my iron pram and wheeled me into the courtyard. But then as we waited, she felt an urge to wash her body - she wanted to be clean for the moment - to be in her body for the moment - she is addicted to presence, my mother - so she went to bathe and as she was undressing, she became entranced by the split ends of her hairs and fell to cutting them off, strand by strand. 

The bath ran over.
I was left alone.
Fuck her.

Many times since, i’ve watched the morning sun in that courtyard. At the top of the western wall, a thin horizontal line of vivid white suddenly hits the grey stone. This line drives down the wall, til it is too bright to look at without sunglasses. The white then forces its way across the pavement, faster than you’d expect and on that day it must have jolted up onto the shiny metal handle of my pram - POW - before pouring over my little muslin blanket and finding my tiny wriggly hands and my exposed baby face. 

I cooked there for three hours.

When my mother returned, she saw what she had done and she screamed until dusk. 

I am now a young man, but I still I have to cover my face and my hands every time I go outside. Though in this city, it’s hard to tell what’s outside and what's inside. So i wear a mask and gloves almost permanently.

I have a favourite mask. In it, I look like a god. An Egyptian god, I like to think.

My mother hates my mask. She tells me not to be ashamed and to show my own face but its her shame that she feels - not mine. She says there is nothing monstrous in me but I know that to be a lie. She is in me. And she is monstrous.

My real father is not the man I call father. The man I call father never mentions my real father, who by all accounts was an animal. The man I call father went into a fury when my mother became pregnant with me and he started revenge screwing loads of other women. My mother is a witch - a pretty decent one - so she set a spell upon him to turn his semem to scorpions - and now if he takes a girl to bed, she suffers a vicious, terminal pain. Sadly this spell didn’t have quite the effect my mother was hoping for, because my father is less empathetic than she perhaps imagined him to be. 

———CIRCE

Witchcraft runs in the family - my mother’s sister is also a witch - you may know of her through the scandal of her turning men into pigs. Or as she would put it, revealing pigs within men. Some women have that gift. I often hear my stepfather speak of my aunt’s pig men with what I interpret as jealousy because I’m sure he’d like to be turned into a beast of some sort by her. I think he believes he has a beast within him that my mother can’t see and he wants this beast to be set free - but neither my mother nor my aunt have any interest in turning that particular key so he dreams over erotic murals in corridors and wanks into uninterested girls.

God how that man pities himself.

Some people pity my aunt. They judge her pig men harshly. But my aunt is not a woman to be pitied - even when her face is blue and yellow. She has explained to me that this is simply a hazard of her profession.

As I told you before, she is a witch. 
A scientist of the fury of men. 

She is driven by an insatiable curiousity that will probably destroy her one day. 

Maybe not. What the fuck do I know?

Her magic, which is truly terrifying, is an uncanny capacity for an extreme levels of passivity. This draws her specimens towards her. She gives them no limits and then she shows who they are and then they run for their lives.

She.

She is the only woman who ever let me near her, except for those we paid.

As a kid, I always longed to be put under my aunt’s spell, to become one of her beasts, but she would just laugh - Honey, you don’t need my magic. I vividly remember her refusing to enchant me. I begged her. I pulled at her hair. I screamed. I slapped her repeatedly as hard as I could across her face. She didn’t grab my wrists or try to calm me, or call for my parents or slap me back as my mother did. She just took the blows. It was only when my father ran in and pulled me off her that she walked away, jotting notes in her little black book, ignoring his pleas to stay.

I remember her black hair in my fists. I remember how it cut through into my skin. It was like wire. She is the only person who has ever made me bleed.

———MEDEA

I have a cousin too who is also witch.
She is exactly my age - we could be twins - she lived over the sea but then she ran away from home.
Imagine.

They say she began life in religious orders, and that she was truly exceptional but she threw it all away to experience sex with a Greek boy who turned out, in the end, not to be that interested in her.

She betrayed and then killed her own brother - they say she loved him very much - to save the Greek.
She betrayed her country to save the Greek. 
She abandoned her country and ran away with the Greek. 
But the Greek saw her kill her brother, betray her country and run away. So he didn’t trust her.

I would.

If I were him, I would have trusted her, because if I had a lover - imagine - if I had a lover, I would kill anyone to save them. Isn’t that the point? If you could save one person from the apocalypse, who would it be? You should be prepared to destroy everything for them. We are all destroyers after all and it’s good to give that some purpose.

I have no one to destroy things for and I believe this is what makes me a monster.

Some people call my cousin a monster, so in this we are alike.
But she has no home. 
Which makes her also my opposite - because all I have is home.

I’ve never left home.

I’m not even sure I’d know how.

———HOME

I have been told that my home is the centre of the civilised world. I know that it is visited by hundreds of thousands of tourists every year. The city was completely redeveloped about twenty years ago - it’s a masterpiece of town planning. It has not been built with accessibility needs in mind. On the contrary, it is built to confuse.

It is in fact so complicated, so hard to navigate, that we’ve had to devise a form of written signage, even for the locals - to help us find our way around our own city. It’s actually fucking ridiculous. Nowhere need be this complicated. And the irony is, of course, that the signage, like the city itself, is all designed by a foreigner.

This is the logic of empire.

The city used to be very different - before I was born. It was an organic patchwork of brothels and pharmacies and bars, honky tonky, but for opaque political reasons it was all bulldozed by my father’s generation and now we have this new way of life. We live in a single brilliantly conceived world, designed by a famous Greek architect.

Now a Cretan architect.

Our guy.

I also have him to blame for my own conception. I call him The Pimp of Crete. That makes his lip curl.

But back to his uberwerk…Our new way of life. A new way of life where no one knows exactly which way to go. The walls are so high we don’t know whether they reach ceiling or sky. The pools are so deep that you get vertigo when you cross them. You don’t know if you are trapped outside looking in, or inside looking out. Or whether you are trapped at all. Maybe that Greek architect just came here to fuck us up. A navigational terrorist. Wouldn’t put it past him, clever bastard.

And of course people go missing all the time.

If you are a foreigner in this city and you can’t read the signs, you will certainly get lost, which is when you need a guide. But there are no guides. And if you ask directions of a local, even if you are fluent, they will say nothing because that is the law.

So people go missing.

Yet they still come in their droves. I mean - it is amazing. This place is amazing. And the danger gives a frisson of fear that adds to the… thing of it. But I think that in the long run this wilful confusion will damage our reputation on the international stage. The Greek Architect will be remembered as a genius, but we, the people who hired him, will be remembered as monstrous. Future generations will look back on us and remember how we commissioned a maze of a world, where you can’t find the way out or the fucking way to the fucking smoking area. They won’t remember our scientific discoveries or our excellent plumbing or how much I loved my sister. They will remember those Greek kids who came here looking for work and new opportunities, who disappeared.

Last year, fourteen kids went missing.

You can’t diplomatise your way out of that.

Or maybe you can.

What the fuck do I know?

What the fuck do I know.