A SEEMINGLY IMPENETRABLE BARRIER separates my house from the harbor: a series of looming white cliffs. They jut out of the water, craggy and foreboding, sparsely dotted with grass and wildflowers that dry and crackle beneath the blazing summer sun.

Emphasis on seemingly.

When I was little, these cliffs drove me insane. The water was a stone's throw away from my house, and yet to get to it, I had to walk all the way to the other side of the island, where there was a safer, less treacherous pass.

One day, when I was out exploring around them, trying to figure out how to destroy them, I discovered a rough path leading down to the harbor.

"ANTIGONE!" my mother shrieked at me.

She was watching from the shady olive tree by our house that she liked to lounge beneath. She dropped the knife she was cleaning and leapt to her feet.

I turned to her and gave her a wide-eyed expression of childlike innocence. I was maybe to her shoulders and had lost so many teeth I could barely speak. My hair was knotted and wild. I distinctly remember that my knees were bruised. It was just before I started at the agōgē, or maybe a little after. You know how memories are.

"Stay away from there." She ordered, picking up the knife. You don't know true fear until your mother is scolding you while holding a freshly-cleaned knife. "You'll fall and kill yourself."

"But I found a path—" I said, bouncing back and forth on my heels.

"Do you want me to have to bury my only child?"

I do not think those were her exact words. It was probably more along the lines of I don't want you to get hurt. The you'll fall and kill yourself line was probably more you'll fall and get a boo-boo. My mother's tough, but she's gentle. She never would have said something like that to me. But that's how dramatic my memory has made it out to be.

I hung my head. "No, mother."

"Good girl."

The second her back was turned I went bounding down the path. I couldn't help it. I was too curious to see where it led, if I really could make it to the harbor, if I could save myself all of those countless hours walking there. When my mother realized what I had done, she came running after me, screaming.

I do remember that that was the first time I heard her swear.

Nevertheless, I made it past those cliffs for the very first time that day. The path I found spat me right out onto the harbor. My mother immediately found me and dragged me back up the path by my ear, scolding me under her breath.

"You are to never go back down that way again, do you understand?"

"Yes, mother."

Despite her concerns, I clambered down the path every afternoon, clinging to the cliff face for balance. I liked playing at the harbor. There were so many boats to explore, and so many fishers with grand stories to tell me.

Out of all of us here on Apollonisi, they were the ones who had strayed the farthest from our island. None of them had ever actually been to the mainland, but they'd seen it from afar. They told me stories of glistening lights and a world that seemed to scream with noise.

There was one particular fisher that took a liking to me. She was a half-god herself, the daughter of Glaucos, one of the primordial water-gods we often call hálios gérōn, the singular Old Man of the Sea. She taught me how to sail and fish and we'd spend days out on the water together.

She's dead, now. Died suddenly in her sleep. She was thirty-seven.

Old for an Apollonisian.