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first stop, I settled (again) in a seat to myself, spreading out maps and books and making copious notes as our Greek tour guide, Kristina, lectured. “Delphi is situated on the steep, craggy slope of Mount Parnassus. It was the navel of the world for ancient Greeks, and a pilgrimage site for thousands of years.”
    Apparently people had flocked here to consult the Delphic Oracle, a priestess of Apollo who answered everyone’s most pressing questions while in a trance, or, as Kristina noted, while probably intoxicated on “fumes.”
    “Like sniffing glue?” one of the Fun Girls said.
    Kristina actually nodded.
    Despite the source of the oracle’s prescience, she was apparently good at what she did. It was she who told Oedipus he would murder his father and marry his mother, and we all know how that turned out. I decided I would’ve lined up with the rest of the world to hear what she had to say about my future: Will anyone ever love me again? Will I ever get over my withdrawn and tentative way of being in the world? What am I supposed to do with a bachelor’s degree in history? Better yet, what am I supposed to do with my life? I didn’t have a clue.
    We piled out of the bus and followed the Sacred Way that snaked up to the temple of Apollo. It was March; cold, thick vapor drooped over our heads. The entire side of the mountain was strewn with white ruins. I moved among them feeling a little spellbound. Halfway up, it began to snow. The flakes floated through the cypresses out toward the watery blue line of the mountains. I turned 360 degrees trying to take it in, and I could feel something inside of me start to open like a tiny flower. I think that’s when I stopped thinking so much about my poor, cracked heart and succumbed to the magic of Greece.
    I’d been studying its history, culture, art, architecture, and myths for weeks in classrooms, but now that I was here, those subjects felt alive and vividly present. They brought into sharp focus all the life I had not lived, all the places in the world I had not yet seen, how large it all was. Being here made me feel alive and vividly present, too. There were things, it seemed, that could only happen to me in Greece.
    We scrunched down in our jackets as Kristina pointed out where the words KNOW THYSELF were carved prominently into Apollo’s temple, and suddenly I had a “palm-slap to the forehead” moment. The inscription must’ve been the more ulterior meaning of the oracle: to find the answers inside oneself. What if the oracle was a metaphor for a source of knowing within?
    As I treaded toward the amphitheater with the group, wondering whether I possessed my own source of self-knowledge, I had a thought which seemed to have originated from just such a place: I forfeited way too much of myself as a girlfriend.
    I don’t know how I knew it to be true—and in fact, to be vital—but I did. Maybe it was because I was far from home, far from my ordinary circumstances, and more or less alone for the first time in my life, feeling like I was on an awkward first date with myself. I’d known who I was with my ex-boyfriend. I’d invested years in the girlfriend role, in the ways of accommodation, being what I thought he wanted me to be, moon to his Jupiter, quietly organizing my psychological orbits around him. But in Greece, I existed in a kind of solitude, and in this quietness I realized I’d lost my self.
    In the Amalia Hotel in Delphi, I woke several times during the night, and the truth of this knowing was still there in the darkness. And there was longing there, too. For myself.
    The next day, we wandered along a gravel path to a small, circular ruin known as the Tholos. Built as a temple to Athena, its shape was mysterious to archaeologists, who were still guessing what it had been used for. All forty of us reverted to whispers as we moved among its remnants.
    One of the papers I’d chosen to write to fulfill the study requirements for the tour was about