Ilias & little Dasha

Then the messages really started. Then the secrets. Then the personal stories you only tell someone at two in the morning, when the whole city is asleep and only one window is still lit.

Then came the part no movie ever shows properly: the waiting.

A month and a half between Warsaw and Greece. Around forty-five nights, two phones, three languages, and one kind of English that only the two of them understand.

June 2026. A month and a half of counting days, and then, finally, the waiting had a face again. Little Dasha stepped into the Greek sun, and the girl from his phone screen turned out to be even more real than he remembered: warmer, blonder, and a lot louder when she laughed.

He showed her his sea, his sunsets and his favourite views. She looked at every one of them very politely, and then mostly at him.

Every photo from those days hides a feeling behind it, and in person every single one was ten times more beautiful. Here are a few of them, with the parts the camera missed.

Then June ended the way perfect things always end: much too fast. One last hug that lasted three songs, one last “text me when you land”, and the person who had been an arm’s length away was a glowing rectangle again.

Two more months of waiting. But this time was different. This time they knew exactly what they were waiting for.

So they moved into their phones. He lived one hour ahead of her, and she learned that when a Greek man says “I’m going to sleep”, it means at least one more hour of talking. Good-morning messages before coffee. Voice notes from the bus, half of them just her laughing. Selfies from the supermarket queue. Calls that started with “just five minutes” and ended when one of them fell asleep mid-sentence, while the other stayed on the line a little longer, just to hear them breathe.

Hours turned into days, days into weeks, and somehow the battery always died before the conversation did.

The holiday kept going, and so did they. Landscapes that didn’t look real. Water in colours that don’t have names yet. Food they’ll still be talking about when they’re eighty. And so much laughing that strangers turned around to see what was so funny.

One day they followed an old railway line along the coast. No trains run there anymore. It didn’t matter. They were already on their own track.

One month later Ilias got on a plane to Warsaw again. Not as a tourist this time. This time the trip went further: all the way to Belarus, with little Dasha’s family.

One Greek, one Russian-speaking family, and one language everybody understood perfectly: food. There were surprises nobody had planned, experiences nobody expected, and moments so funny that somebody always had to leave the table to breathe.

Ilias learned the important words in record time. His survival kit:

One more month, one more flight. October 2026 brought little Dasha back to Greece, but a different Greece this time: softer light, cooler evenings, a quieter sea.

This trip wasn’t about adventures. It was about the cozy things. Cooking pasta together in a small kitchen. Movie nights with a blanket and something sparkling. Flowers on the table, and then more flowers. Long, slow brunches. Silly faces. Even a trip to the supermarket felt like a date.