(from the series Chasing Sakura)
Every time we go away together, I wonder if my husband is plotting to kill me. For us, holidays usually involve exploring a place to the point of exhaustion while sampling the local snacks. The first time we went hiking was on Scafell Pike with my pal Sara. As my then-boyfriend didn’t have any suitable footwear, I lent him my boots. This left me with a pair of hi-tops, which I figured would be fine (I’d done no research on Scafell Pike whatsoever, apart from finding a cute Airbnb nearby). To everyone’s surprise, I bounded…
(from the series Chasing Sakura)
Due to the back-and-forth nature of our trip, we had two days in Tokyo before we were to leave it. We’d be back in the weeks to come but we craved a taste. All those images fed through film and TV: the clamour of night-time arcades; dress-up karaoke booths; clusters of skyscrapers; neon lights pinging off cabs and rivers. How do you begin to absorb a city of Tokyo’s scale in mere hours?
From the safety of a window in Shibuya train station we watched the infamous scramble crossing below. All at once, the lights…
(From the series Chasing Sakura)
For someone who won’t even break a novel’s spine, I’ve always fostered a love of the out-of-place. As a child I was riveted by that hurricane uprooting Dorothy’s house and dropping it in the Land of Oz; transporting it from a world of black and white to one of so much colour it toppled over into gaudy. In my teen years, feeling like a total misfit among other teens who also felt like misfits, I became fascinated by Colonialism. …
Polis Loizou // writer and performance storyteller from Cyprus. Second novel ‘The Way It Breaks’ coming June 2021.