Just a babe in a black abyss
No reason for a place like this

I was born in 1973. And if I have a clear memory from my adolescence, it's not faces. Nor voices. It's grooves.
Black, thin, circular grooves on a vinyl record that arrived and never left.
Its name: Piece of Mind.
The band: Iron Maiden.
The year: 1983, with noise in my head and silence around me.
I wasn't a "child" in the traditional sense.
It was more of a question than a statement.
And the people around me just wanted answers.
Convenient. Clean. Simple.

But then, I heard the thunder of Where Eagles Dare for the first time.
The needle went down and it was as if the sky had torn apart.
Bruce Dickinson's voice entered my room as if carrying thousands of years of memory and fire.
I didn't understand what I was feeling, but I felt it.

The record played all the way through. Once, twice, ten times, a hundred times, a thousand times.
And each time, there was less sound and more light inside my chest.
But it was Revelations that stopped me.
Not like you stop to listen.
But just as you stop when your inner voice speaks to you and you cannot do otherwise.

«Θεέ της Γης και του Βωμού / Σκύψε και άκου την κραυγή μας»
That was not a prayer.
It was an explosion within my silence.
I closed my eyes and listened.
Not the music. Me.
In those words, in that dark melody, something broke.
Or rather: something clicked.
A fear. A reason. A hope that had not yet been put into words.

“She came to me with a serpent’s kiss
As the Eye of the Sun rose on her lips”
I said it quietly, without realizing who I was addressing.
But I felt that someone, something, was listening.

That vinyl record became my refuge.
Each groove held me when everything around me seemed shallow.
And Revelations...
Revelations became a mirror.

I started listening to it every night.
And each time I discovered a new side of myself, not always beautiful. Often dark. Uncomfortable.
But true.
It was as if I was sitting across from my most honest self and saying to him:
"Speak. I promise you, my friend, that this time, I will listen to you."

I listened to this album so much, so deeply, so often, that I wore it out.
Literally.
The needle began to skip. The sound cut out. The scratches covered the words.
And when Revelations broke in the middle of the verse
“The time has come to close your eyes
And still the wind and rain”
I felt as if I had lost someone close to me.

I couldn't take it anymore.
I went and got it back.
Same cover. Same smell.
But not the same copy.
The first one was part of my body. This one was just a replacement.
And yet, when he played cleanly again... I cried.
Silently, like a secret return.

Iron Maiden is not a band for me.
It is a symbol of survival.
This album didn't entertain me. It saved me.
Not with his answers, but with his courage to make me live with the questions.

And if today, so many decades later, someone asks me:
"When was the first time you realized that music is not sound, but a gateway?"
I will tell him:
When the needle touched "Revelations" and I heard myself for the first time.

Art is not what you see or hear.
It is what awakens within you.
And it stays.
Like this album.
Like that moment.
Just like me back then.