Sunrise on Spetses

& Other Stories dress
Zara Home bikini (similar)
Celine sunglasses
Modu Atelier earrings (c/o) (similar)
Location: Spetses Old Port – Spetses, Greece

It’s not a secret that I love the world best in the early morning, when it feels like it belongs to me alone. Sunrise is my favourite time of day. And every sunrise is a bit different. The start of a new day is always best, and brightest, in the summer months. And they shine particularly beautifully in warm places, where the brightness of the early sun is close to blinding, a precursor to the rays that will beat down throughout the day, making the mid-afternoon almost unbearable even if you love the heat.

I fell for Greek sunrises quickly and easily. On our first visit to Athens in 2017, we stayed in a penthouse apartment with views for miles around. When the sun first peaked over the mountains each morning, the way it illuminated the concrete buildings stunned me. When we went back two years later, I fell in love with the sunrise views from Anafiotika, which were decidedly different but no less lovely. The thing about an Athenian sunrise, though, is that it’s always obscured by the mountains. A sunrise on Spetses is an entirely different thing – and an incredible one, on the right day, which is most days on Spetses.

“For a sunrise or a sunset, you’re either coming or you just left
But you’re always on the way
Towards a sunrise or a sunset, a scribble or a sonnet
They are really just the same.”
– Bright Eyes

Long before I was a morning person, I was the kind of person who read music reviews in magazines to find new bands to listen to. I discovered Bright Eyes in Nylon. While in retrospect I often wonder what it was exactly about Conor Oberst’s melancholy caterwauling that appealed to my early twenties self, there was something in his work that felt familiar to me. I suppose it was because he was sad, and I so often was, too. When he sang the questions that he asked himself, they were questions I wished I could find my own answers to.

I listened to his recordings on repeat. In university, I could recite the words to the album Fevers and Mirrors in my sleep. I still know most of them from memory, though it’s been years since I’ve played the record. I own it, along with about five of his others, on vinyl. It took me months, but I tracked them down at a local record store. Ian bought them for me as a very thoughtful surprise shortly thereafter. These days, they all sit together on a shelf in our living room, collecting dust, unplayed and neglected. It wouldn’t occur to me to want to listen to them. My tastes have changed.

But still, snippets of the lyrics to songs from those old albums come back to me at surprising times, playing in my head seemingly just to fill the silence. It’s the ones about sunrises and sunsets that I remember most frequently. They rarely match the tone of the moment. I’m happiest at sunrise – I relish mornings, new beginnings, the chance to start again. But maybe they’re a reminder, in a way, that no matter how many times I start over, no matter the fact that the sun rises every morning on a new day that serves as another chance to get things right, the sun will never completely set on my past… or its somber soundtrack.

I hear Bright Eyes’ Sunrise, Sunset when I look at these snapshots. It was in my head the morning we took them, too. The title is taken from a song in Fiddler on the Roof, but the musical version is a reflection on aging, while the song I know so well is a youthful lament. Neither one exactly captures the essence of this moment, or this time in my life, where I am somewhere in between young and old, between a past that is moving further away and a future that’s still unfolding. I don’t suppose it matters. Sometimes a song is just a combination of words and music that sound pretty together. And most often, a sunrise is just the start of another day. But more and more now, I try to be intentional about making sure those days ones that I’ll remember as unequivocally happy.