Dawn was breaking when the Jadrolinija ferry docked in the port of Supetar. The air was thick with salt, hard to breathe. The scent of fresh bread drifted across the port. I stood, unawake, in the morning bustle. Passengers dragged their bags along the pier; fishermen hauled up nets heavy with the night’s catch, shouting and laughing. A woman stacked newspapers at a kiosk. The gulls’ screams tore through the air. The port moved with its usual morning rhythm.

When I saw her, I waved and started toward her. She was leaning against the wheeled suitcase I’d bought her years ago. Her restless movements and drifting gaze made her seem like an orphan lost in a big city. I approached a little too cheerfully. We hugged lightly, our cheeks brushed. She never kissed.

I took her suitcase and we walked to the café by the port. It was already crowded, inside and out, with people and smoke. After exchanging a few polite sentences and her inevitable retelling of the trip, things slipped quickly into their familiar rhythm. Her words began to accelerate, sentences stacking without pause, digressions branching, names and events multiplying endlessly. Within minutes, I no longer needed to ask questions or even listen; I knew the entire script by heart. The sound of her voice blended with the clatter of coffee cups and cutlery, children’s chatter, and the buzzing of flies and bees.

I gazed at the sea; blue, still, indifferent.

When had my life become a hollow of absences? The absence of love, the growing absences of the children, the absence of touch, even the absence of any imagined future. Work had become my sole point of fragile stability, the only part of life that still held.

Listening to Long Dark Night this morning, while driving to the dock, brought one scene to the surface with unbearable clarity: the four of us in the car, on a warm June evening somewhere in southern Germany, after a long day of driving, the children half-asleep in the back seat. Benjamin would put on B-Sides and Rarities III, knowing it held my favourite songs, take a sip of Pelinkovac from his flask, and I, with my hands on the wheel, felt completely at peace. That scene of my family on the road to the south, with Everything Must Converge in the CD player, the red sky over Bavaria remains the measure of everything that makes sense to me. One tear fell down my cheek.

A child stumbled over her suitcase and pulled me out of my thoughts. Two women, mother and daughter, sitting at a table after a year apart. One speaking without pause, taking up all the air between them. Every story was stillborn, names and events without meaning, without any real link to the two of us, or to the sea stretching out before us. I doubted she had even noticed.

I often wondered how my introverted father, the man with a book in one hand and the inevitable cigarette in the other, endured these avalanches of words for almost five decades. He always reminded me of Hemingway. I no longer remember whether that was because he often read him, or I later constructed the memory around pictures of him. My memories are tangled, and I no longer trust them. He died a month after my daughter was born, he never met her. The only month the three of us shared this world was a month when none of us could walk, and all three of us wore diapers. That detail has always seemed too precise to be coincidence. I was bleeding after childbirth, he was dying, and my daughter was just learning to breathe.

I tried to trace back this inability to respect others. A scene returned, one I had spent my life avoiding. I must have been six, maybe seven. I still slept in her bed; there was no other space in our one-room apartment. Dawn was breaking, just as it is now. I heard his voice, low, charged:

– Madam, come over here so I can warm you.

It was their code. There was no tenderness between them. She got up and moved slowly beneath his blanket, facing me. I began to cry, a cry that turned into a scream. Something wounded, abandoned, poured out of me. They went on as if I were asleep, as if I didn’t exist. Her body moved. On her face, usually stiff and blank, there was a flicker of something I had never seen before: an almost inhuman trace of pleasure. I have no memory of how long it lasted.

A child ran past us again, pulling me back to the table. By now, morning had fully broken, and the café hummed with conversations, the clinking of spoons against cups, bursts of laughter. My mother kept talking and I became painfully aware that this was just another in our long chain of failed reunions.

That July night, decades later, when I lunged at Benjamin — trying to force his mouth open, to make him speak, to do anything but ignore me and turn me once again into a screaming, nonexistent mass — I knew it was the old wound reopened. After that, nothing between us was ever whole again.

The sea lay before us, motionless and endless; neither my inner wreckage nor my ruined marriage existed for it.

But neither did I.