Hi friends,
I’m writing to you from somewhere in central Bulgaria, where the Thracian plain folds and crumples, like an accordion, into the peaks of the Rhodope Mountains. I ostensibly came for the wedding of one of my dearest friends, who grew up in the States but is Bulgarian by birth. She chose to get married in Saints Constantine and Helena, a little resort town on the Black Sea where the sun rises directly over the water and a bronze statue of Poseidon stands in the shallows on the beach, waves breaking at his feet.
The wedding was an elaborate multi-day affair. There was a traditional Orthodox ceremony in a gilded, onion-domed cathedral that was all in Bulgarian—not spoken, but chanted by the priest and the church choir. Traditional throat singers and women who walked barefoot across burning coals were brought in as entertainment for the guests. Homemade rakia flowed in abundance, and we danced with so much zeal that I kicked off my shoes and didn’t even notice I’d ground a splinter from a broken wine glass into the sole of my foot.
All that alone was worth the trip, but the festivities ended days ago. The other guests have all left or are still sunbathing on the Black Sea, yet here I am, hundreds of miles from Saints Constantine and Helena.
That’s because the wedding isn’t the only reason I came. I came because, melodramatic and overplayed as it sounds, I’m constantly searching for morsels of evidence that there is more to life than what I’ve already seen and know—or maybe not something more, but at least something else.