The Island After August
August has a particular way of taking over Mykonos.
September doesn’t arrive with quite the same announcement.
The sea is still warm. Tables are still outside. Boats still leave for Delos in the morning and Chora still fills towards evening. Most of what makes a Mykonos summer a summer is still here.
There are simply fewer people trying to do it all at once.
For anyone who knows the island well, this isn’t the end of summer. It’s another part of it.
September mornings
September mornings can make August feel unnecessarily complicated.
You can wake up and decide the day according to the wind. Swim before lunch. Stay longer than planned. Change beaches because somebody tells you the water is better somewhere else.
There is more room for plans to change and, occasionally, not happen at all.
A morning swim becomes lunch nearby. Lunch becomes another swim. The thing you thought you might do at four quietly disappears from the day.
Nobody seems particularly concerned.
August can make Mykonos feel larger than it is. There is always somewhere else to go, someone arriving, a reservation to make, a road everyone appears to have chosen at exactly the same time.
By September, its actual scale returns.
Chora is still Chora. The bakeries open in the morning. Boats move between the islands. In Ano Mera, lunch can stretch well into the afternoon.
The ordinary life of Mykonos never disappears during high summer. It is simply easier to see when there is less happening in front of it.
Drive inland. Stop because you are curious. Go to Delos and come back tired enough to do very little afterwards. Have coffee where you had coffee yesterday.
The second visit to somewhere is often when it starts becoming yours.
September is good for eating outside.
Lunch can still begin late. Dinner can begin later. A few plates arrive, then something else because nobody is quite finished.
There is no particular reason to leave.
One more coffee.
Another plate in the middle.
The bill, eventually.
September doesn’t ask much to change at Kalesma either.
Delos is there across the water. The pool catches the morning sun. Towards evening, the light begins to change around Aloni.
But after a few days, it isn’t necessarily these things you notice.
You know which table you prefer at breakfast. Which way to walk back to your room. Where the sun reaches the terrace in the afternoon.
Someone remembers how you take your coffee.
You leave for the beach without deciding when you’ll come back. Lunch runs late. An afternoon passes without becoming anything in particular.
Repetition begins to feel less like repetition.
These are small things. They also happen to require the one thing an itinerary can’t organise for you.
Time.
By September, there is less pressure to account for every hour.
One more morning doesn’t have to contain anything remarkable. Neither does another swim, another lunch or an evening watching the sun disappear beyond Delos.
You go back to the beach you liked yesterday.
You order the same coffee.
And then someone asks when you’re leaving.
September has a way of making the answer feel negotiable.