Double Greek Black Coffee

Mandelbrot himself once summarized fractals as: “Beautiful, damn hard, increasingly useful. That’s fractals.” He later expanded the definition: “A fractal is a shape made of parts similar to the whole in some way.”

​

Fractals stand at the meeting point of mathematics (Mandelbrot) and art (fractal art, Julia art). At the intersection of the anarchy of art and the order of science. Of the predictable and the outlier. Of the simple and the complex.

Fractals are just like life. They can be simple or ornate, short or long. They come, without doubt, in endless variety. And yet, in one essential way, they are all the same: you get lost in them; you are dazzled by them. You may languish or despond within them, feel tortured by their whirls—until, at some moment, you realize you have returned to the initial shapes. To the first moments. Of them. Of you.

​

And then you smile, at how short distances truly are.

​

DOUBLE BLACK GREEK COFFEE is a short story—a true fractal, transposed only into time and space. A story about the grand illusion: that something can be lost, when in fact it is merely waiting to appear again at the very next turn of time.

​

I feel grateful to all its actors. To Anne. To George. To Charis. To all of them. To those I still see today, and to the others—those lost in the fractal, without ever being truly lost.