{"Title":"In a matter of seconds","Description":{"Value":"

It was December of 2012. I'd left Hania to go to my family in Monemvasia, for the Christmas holidays. A month and a half earlier, I'd broken up with a great love, the first big love of my life, and because of the breakup I had started smoking , that's when I started with cigarettes.

It was late the night of December 28th. It's about three o'clock at night. I'm at home, listening to music, and I'm smoking beside the fireplace so that the smoke will go up the chimney, so that my mom, who smokes, won't smell it and figure out that I smoke. And my sister opens the door. When she opens the door and sees me basically having climbed into the fireplace to smoke, sees me listening to music with a glass of wine beside me, she says: "Want to go for a ride by the sea?" and she jingles the car keys. And I say to her: "Let's go!"

We get in the car and set out. My sister wasn't speeding. She was doing about thirty. I started rolling a cigarette so that I'd be ready to light it once I reached the beach, because I was a real chain-smoker then, I had these romantic entanglements and I needed it. It had just started to drizzle, right at the place where we had to cross a small bridge.

And at the moment that I have my head down and iIm rolling a cigarette, I feel a movement in my body. I lift up my head and see the car swerving left and right. All of this in a nanosecond. Just as I'm taking it in, the car swerves right, up against the rotten railings, railings from the 1820s. And in that instant, in a nanosecond, I freeze. I lost my voice, I can't speak. A horrible knot in my stomach, an "Ahhhh!" The only thing I managed to articulate was: "Dora!", which was my sister's name, and my sister said: "Afrodite!!!"

We break through the railings, darkness everywhere. We are in the air, I know that beneath us is a bridge at least five meters high, and I say "We're dead!" We died. That was it, it was all in a second, in just one second I had time to think that in the next second, I was going to die. No, goddamn it, I won't get to become an actor! And I thought one last thing -- that we were going to crash. I close my eyes, I freeze, stiff, frozen, and I think we are going to crash now.

The car crashed against something, then crashed again and I have a memory gap during this interval of the crash, because I also hit my head…

The car had fallen head first, and then rolled onto the passenger side, where I was sitting. And it was standing up on its side, it was supported on the ground from the passenger’s side. I said, I am not dead! But I started to smell smoke and I thought this is it, we will burn up like rats, in here, without any way out, without anything, we will catch fire, we will burn, I don’t believe it! We managed to survive the crash, and we will burn up, this can’t be happening! And I said: “Dora, we will burn, Dora, we are burning!” without seeing the fire, only the smell. And she told me: “The airbags blew!” and it was the gas from the airbags that smelled.

We were saved because we were wearing seatbelts, otherwise with the crash, with the car falling head first, we would have been destroyed, we would have been thrown out. And Dora was hanging in the air, she was held by the belt. And I put out my left hand to support her, because the weight was making her fall. I was holding my sister, who was having a panic attack, as the driver, feeling that she was responsible for what had happened. But she wasn’t, because the steering wheel had been acting up on the slippery road. And in this panic attack she was having she was crying, wailing, gasping, and she was saying, not whether or not we were okay...but: “What will I tell dad, I totaled the car!” Other things. And I was telling her: “Dora, these are just scraps of metal, we don’t care!” And Dora was thinking about these meaningless things.

I started singing. I sang to her, while I held her, “leave your hand, your little hand!” And Dora doesn’t remember that I sang this to her then, but she was crying and I was signing “leave your hand, your little hand...”

And at the time I had kept my composure, precisely because my sister had lost it. I was trying to figure out where my handbag was. I was looking for my bag in the dark through all the glass and I felt liquid on my hands, which was blood, where I had cut myself. I found my cell phone and I called my mother around three-thirty at night. She picked up, and I told her very calmly and in a very soft and sweet voice: “Mother, I want to tell you something and I want you to stay calm. At this very moment I am talking, Dora and I are upside down inside the car, on that bridge driving to the Ampelakia beach. Wake Dimitris up” - my stepfather Dimitris - “and come get me.”

My mother didn’t hear me right, and when I told her a second time, my mother screamed, and woke my younger brother up. She screamed, she realized which beach it was, the “Ampelakia” beach. We had started out for Ampelakia and nearly wound up in the cemetery. We hung up and she came with my stepfather.

As they were coming with my stepfather, I realized that the car was still running. How do we turn off the engine? Will we blow up? Won't we blow up? And we had to make the decision. We made the decision together to turn the key. We turned the key, the engine turned off, we didn't blow up, we did not blow up and we said: we got through this.

And I came out first, through her window. I helped my sister come out second, I stepped on the rocks, I found this embankment, we got up to the main road. My mother came and got us.

I was in excruciating pain, because with the crash, with the collision, and with the belt I had hurt my stomach and my head badly. And I was in such tremendous pain that I couldn’t breathe. But I didn't tell my sister, because she was having a panic attack. And Dora was in a lot of pain too, Dora had hit her chest on the wheel, and she was saying: “It hurts, it hurts, it hurts! I totaled the car! Aphrodite, how are you? How are you, Aphrodite? Are you okay? It’s my fault!” I told her: “I am fine, just fine!” and all this time, I couldn't breathe. And I was thinking: good, we made it through the crash, we made it and didn’t burn up, we survived and didn’t blow up, and now I have internal bleeding, without a doubt! So, I started counting backwards.

Once we reached the hospital I let out a terrible moan, my sister turned around, lost it and I said: “I have a terrible pain in my stomach, I can’t breathe, for some time now!” They took me in first, and we started having X-rays, ultrasounds, blood, and we waited in the emergency room.

Of course this was the hospital of Molai, a district hospital, the machines were old, no accuracy. They looked for my files in the hospital, they searched for “Sovolou Aphrodite”, and they found my grandmother’s who had cholesterol, triglycerides and a thousand other such things. And from the blood tests they saw that my hematocrit was low, which is low anyway, and they said: “Okay, her hematocrit is dropping, she has internal bleeding somewhere and with the machines here we can't find it, she has to go to Sparta and have a CT scan.”

I got into the ambulance to go to Sparta. And because I knew I would die, I said OK, I will now reveal everything to my mother. I turned around and told her: “Mom, I smoke!” In the meanwhile, I had sent a message to my love interest, to say goodbye with all the drama queen stuff I was going through then, knowing that he wasn't my great love, but that’s what I had, so that’s who I was saying goodbye to.

We reached Sparta, they did a CT scan and they told me: “All clear.” And after we took a deep breath, that we had escaped very certain deaths, my father came and said: “Girls, a saint was watching over you. And do you know why? Because today is the day of the Innocents.” These innocent infants, thirty? Forty? Three hundred? “Come on father, we had a narrow escape, what Innocents are you going on about?” And up to now, 2020, I let him believe that we were saved because of the Innocents. Every 29th, he goes to church, on the 29th of December, my father. And he has ordered an icon of these Innocents.

I was having a permanent nervous breakdown, because it had come out as post-traumatic stress, which I tried to get over for at least a year, with the help of a psychiatrist. And I kept thinking that it just takes one instant, and you are nothing. And dreams, people, expectations, desires and everything, everything, turns to zero. In suspension. Before being realized. They remain in suspension.

We don't realize what a big thing it is to actually be alive. We consider it a given and it is not. Because it can simply rain. And because the tires may simply slide, and that is not a given. Since then, I gave myself a promise: You will not back down in anything that you like, because I don't want you to go to death with issues, like that night. To sing your favorite song and think “Oh no, I will not become an actor.”

And three years ago, I got into the National Theater drama school, I came to Athens, and it has been going great. And I am so happy that I ultimately went through all the potential stages of death and today I am here in school and I am waiting to go see the film we made with the guys, in the cinema course.

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