Monday

It is the third Monday in September, the first warm day after a terribly hot summer. We signed the divorce papers today — a divorce that could qualify for the longest one in the world. It was over in minutes.

When it was done, we hugged, cried, and said we’d always love each other. Or maybe it was only me who said it. Human beings are contradictory creatures; complicated and often hard even on themselves. It would be too banal now to quote Meša Selimović and say that people always long for what they don’t have, and so they lose what they do.

Being divorced should, at least in theory, mean being free. Instead, I weigh more than ever in my life. I feel lonely like a dog. I work as if I’m paid by the hour. In general, I’m quite unhappy. I’ve given up alcohol too — the only occasional escape from the triviality of this life. I was Štefica Cvek in the Jaws of Life — without Bata Živojinović to at least say:

“Now I’m going to fuck you.”

Tuesday.

Rain.

I’m sitting on the train that has just pulled out of the station; the metal screeching and the sudden jolts shook me out of my thoughts. I wanted to write them down quickly, opened my backpack, took out my notebook — when the door slid open and a man walked in. Tall, and despite the worn-out clothes and unruly hair, quite handsome. Mid-forties, perhaps.

He sat down directly across from me, though the carriage was completely empty. He wore large headphones. He looked at me with a sad, distant gaze — the eyes of a bird trapped in a cage. I felt the discomfort rise in me and looked away.

The music leaking from his headphones shifted into a woman’s voice. Muffled, but clear enough to catch the words:

Your thoughts, your vocabulary, they intoxicate me… I’m enchanted by you like a child before a shop window full of toys. I love you. I want you. I want you now. Next to me. I want you inside me.

His face didn’t change, though it sounded as if she were speaking directly to him. I began nervously rummaging through my bag, searching for my own headphones to seal my ears. Had he noticed my agitation? I felt my nipples harden.

– Do you want me to fuck you? he asked.

I turned toward the window, saw the sky split open, and heard angels singing their farewell song to humankind.

Wednesday
You said: “Don’t see things in black and white — look in colour, and only the beautiful things will return to you.”

The dedication to searching brings a flash of truth now and then. Though you know wandering isn’t an option. You understand your own need to descend into the dark. You’ve been in it for a long time. The exit door is ajar, yet you cannot pass to the other side. Reality feels unreal. This tunnel is terrifyingly dark.

Thursday

I watch people pass by. Reality is unbearably dull and monotonous. People buzz around like flies. They laugh stupidly, and every conversation that reaches me feels painfully trivial. Their stomachs must have been full of chewed animal corpses.

My first love, you see, was named Filip Latinović — the illegitimate son of a tobacconist and a passing circus performer, a failure and a charlatan. He never loved me. He loved a blonde beauty from town. When he got drunk, he recited The Drunken Boat to me and tried to fuck me. I loved him immensely, but I didn’t want to be fucked without love. Because of him, at sixteen, I read Don Juan three times, while other girls my age were out enjoying the possibilities of being sixteen. The suffering of unreturned love made me grow up too early. Being unwanted at sixteen — by the one you love — leaves a deep and ugly scar and does considerable damage to one’s confidence. That is how my romantic life began: as the life of an unloved person.

Years would pass without us meeting, but each time we crossed paths again, the love surged through me with the same force.

I stop writing and open the book in front of me.

Your wings are growing. At one point I had to step away from your narration, from the truths that had become mine.

I imagine my own wings might grow back soon, when the phone rings.

My mother. She asks if I have time.

“I do,” I say, though I don’t feel like talking.

“Imagine,” she begins, “I met a man who just received the news that his father — whom he never met — has died. He says the missing is just as strong as if they had spent their whole lives together.”

It sounded entirely possible to me. I, on the other hand, miss my mother while I am talking to her.

She continues speaking. With guarded airspace, long inhalations that never release, and an intonation so monotonous that my entire body feels the tension of listening, her words — uniformly accelerated — shoot out of her like objects launched into orbit. Impossible to interrupt, impossible to ask questions she doesn’t need. Her stories take enormous detours, full of countless names and events, stretching across more than seventy years.

I never know what to do with them. They are hard to follow, and I am not interested. I try to take them as documents of a time and a society, though they have no depth — only repetition of events. Some stories — from her own life — I try to listen to, thinking that after she is gone, no one will be able to tell them.

She knows nothing about me except what is obvious and what everyone knows. She has never asked. I feel she is afraid of the answers. Or simply uninterested. Or maybe she lacks the emotional capacity.

Every conversation is the same, and our relationship has never significantly changed. It is missing something essential. It is full of clichés; she talks either about herself or others — people I neither know nor care about. And she doesn’t care that I don’t care. She has no ability to sense reactions during those long monologues; I could be doing something entirely different while she unwraps her stories like layers of cellophane on a tightly wrapped parcel.

Sometimes — like now — my head begins to hurt. Most often I feel completely numb and empty, both during and long after our conversations. My rare attempts to steer the story toward something I might participate in always end with her digressing into more people, more events, more strangers.

Or, as this time, into a fight as heavy as our lives.

In these fights things always go too far, to the brink of breaking. Nothing is ever resolved. We simply unload all the accumulated disappointment and resentment we have carried through life.

“I think I’m exhausted from work, I feel like I’m running out of strength,” I say half-seriously, trying to bring the conversation to something where I might feel something human. I hear the soldier in her freeze for a moment, regroup, then launch into a salvo of clichés: don’t complicate life, endure, suffer, push through. What alternatives are there? Are there any?

I recognise that small-town passivity that tolerates nothing but the status quo — it has always given me the sensation of being inside a coffin, suffocating, dying.

“I can’t communicate with you at all,” I say. “You’ve been talking for an hour about people I don’t know, and you can’t listen to me for ten minutes.”

As always in these moments, she turns into a defensive wall. I can see her face draining of blood, transforming into a pale, expressionless mass. Then the same story — already heard so many times — about her hard childhood, her old age, her closeness to death, my inability to take her as a victim, fills the airspace.

I hang up, knowing she won’t forgive me.

I take a sip of water and continue writing.

***

I love the depths of others, but I fear my own. As if mine alone were too frightening. So I stay at the surface with myself. Out of fear. But things on the surface are unbearably dull and predictable.

***

Maybe I don’t know what I’m talking about.

Friday

An Iranian film about pure love between two elderly people. Red sky, cool air, an African celebration in the cinema.

A brief sensation of inner peace.

Saturday

Two long-ago purchased tickets for a Nick Cave concert in Copenhagen. We were supposed to go together. It had been my birthday gift to him for his fiftieth. Again on the train. Again alone. The day is sunny.

I string together sentences without meaning. Tears run. The sky is completely blue.

(I’ve already written that it’s sunny.)

Tunnel. There are terrible floods in Bosnia.

The first time I saw Nick Cave live was in Berlin, with him. I was pregnant, and therefore completely sober. That was 2003.

I no longer listen to Cave actively. Somewhere, after more than three decades together, we drifted apart. Whether his latest albums weren’t emotionally or aesthetically close enough to me, or whether I was oversaturated — it doesn’t matter. Sometimes I would return to the old albums, but even that became rare. They were already woven into me; there was no need to listen.

But during my first listen of Long Dark Night, one scene moved through me like a wave of icy sweat: the four of us in the car, in the warm red June dusk that always caught us somewhere in southern Germany after a full day of driving, our two tired, sleepy children in the back seat, you putting on B-Sides and Rarities III, knowing my favourite songs were on it, taking a sip of Pelinkovac from your flask, and me, with my hands on the wheel, feeling complete and perfect peace.

That scene — my family heading south, Everything Must Converge in the CD player, and the red sky over Bavaria — is probably what I will carry as the ultimate feeling of fulfilment.

Perhaps even happiness.

Sunday

Shuffle all the sentences, turn over all the letters. Start from the beginning.