I.
Some moments I can still see, even without glancing at a picture for years. I suppose some things never get buried beneath stacks of other memories. Some things— like the time you tried to ride a skateboard but you couldn’t, so you fell but you got back up, and that’s the part you remember—get filed away for some future use, but collect dust in their pale manila folders.

II.
I can still recall the exact color of the waves of the Ionian Sea. Close your eyes. Imagine the bluest blue you can even dream up, then multiply that times one thousand. Blue was no longer a color, it was a lullaby, slow and rhythmatic. It was the feeling of softness that blurs edges and irons creases in your mind as you reach the fringes of sleep. Hill-like mountains rose softly at the horizon, ivy-green and cloaked in wisps of silvery mist. Sunset, gradual yet inevitable, seeps like an intricately smeared oil painting, blood-orange melting against soft shell pink, folds of delicate lavender pressed against pale clouds glistening with a pearly sheen.

III.
The Trevi fountain blazed yellow against the onyx-blackness, light pooling from its many crevices in puddles. It was an abstract illustration of conflicts; glossy shadows, soft as spun silk, bleeding through the gold. No camera can capture it accurately.
It’s one of those things you just have to see.

IV.
It was pouring icy silver sheets when we reached Olympia, mud splashing our clothes and rain drenching our hair. But I didn’t mind; fire sang in my veins. I gazed, wide-eyed, at the heavy, gray stones that an ancient people had painstakingly carved and transported for some obscure reason, to this unexciting place with its uneventful gray-green leafy shade. Perhaps it was to celebrate a little race that was going on among the men, that they would have no idea would still take place thousands of years from when it started, when even their skeletons would be lost to dust.

V.
In warm, crumbling Pompeii, I stared at the grotesque positions of those who died among the lava and ash and smoke and could almost see them running to escape the inevitable, to shield children and friends from death’s icy breath. I wondered desperately what they spent their last seconds thinking.

VI.
At the infamous Parthenon, the heat seemed to shimmer in the air, drenching my skin, pouring from that sun unveiled from lacey clouds. The Parthenon’s ancientness hummed down to my very bones. It was half-destroyed, but still it survived, its thick marble columns still supporting its huge head after all the years it has stood here, stoically against thousands of thunderstorms and floods and muddy days and sultry days and vicious winds. Watching Athens dance beneath my feet, I wondered what the lost builders would think if they could see their beloved city today.

VII.
I heard once that Michelangelo blinded himself painting the Sistine Chapel. I imagine the oil paint slipping into those tired eyes swimming with color, gradually but inexorably blurring those same colors that defined his life into blackness. I think of Beethoven, with music woven into every fiber of his soul, how halfway through his life, it melted through his slender, pianist fingers into pure, unaltered silence.

VIII.
The thing about New York City and LA and all those other large American cities is that it’s never truly quiet. You can always hear dogs barking, or people jabbering, or cars beeping, or alarms screaming, or the squeal of protest of tires on cement, or that distant music that never seems to stop, even at night.
Europe is nothing like that.
Silence is a tangible thing; you can grasp it from the air and copy it neatly between bars of a Treble Clef and hear it clearly like a tune to sing you to sleep.
During the day, while silence is not unobtainable, Athens and Rome are loud and unorganized and frenzied but I think they prefer it that way. As a person who understands only English and limited Spanish, other languages—especially Italian—sound like singing even when people are just speaking. Sometimes you just have to close your eyes and listen to the melody.

IX.
The ghosts that linger between tall trees and among jagged cliffs, above gray skies and turbulent seas whistle psalms of chaos, their fire-eyes alight with times of gladiators, of monsters, of tales spun as fine as a silvery spider web, of dictators, of lust, of magic.

X.
On the ferry gliding across the sea, the sound of the waves humming softly to rhythm of the stars masks everything else and you listen, because that is all you can do.

XI.
The sound of the rain whispering against the ancient gray rocks in Olympia or the tombs of old philosophers, long decayed, or the splashes of color forming something beautiful on canvas created by long-dead painters in the Vatican, sang with antiquity and forever-lost knowledge.
Only they’re not dead, really. Because you die twice. Once when your heart stops beating and the second the last time your name is spoken.