Since the divorce, my emotions have been nearly unbearable. They contradict one another, collide, intensify in one moment, and dissolve or cancel each other out in the next. Sometimes I pause and listen to the inner noise—like a geyser, feelings perform their constant, inexhaustible plop, plop.

But most of the time, it isn’t like that.

I decided to travel south. I was searching for a feeling I once read about in Seven Fears by Selvedin Avdić. When the protagonist wakes from a nine-month coma—after being abandoned by his wife—he turns on the radio, hears a woman’s voice, and something inside him softens:

That presenter’s voice awakened a calm in me I hadn’t felt in a long time—an old-fashioned peace, a sense of safety that smells of childhood. It had been a long time since such a feeling had visited me. I stretched out and tried to breathe it in, feel it in my nose, in my lungs, hold on to it, remember it.

I thought of that passage a few days later as I stood by the bedroom window in the apartment where I once grew up. Snow had been falling for days without stop. It was exactly forty years since I left this place, and yet almost everything was the same. The furniture stood where it always had; only the colors had faded. On the walls hung the same kitschy tapestries, the same cheap reproductions, the photograph of my round, gap-toothed head on my first day of school. The only additions were countless photographs of my children. The entire apartment felt like a mausoleum for their absence in my mother’s life.

One of the windowpanes was still cracked, unchanged since the eighties. I had slammed the door during an argument with my mother, and the crack had remained—a trace of my anger that no one had wanted to repair. Almost like an act of revenge.

Through the window, my entire childhood world came into view at once: the hospital where I was born to the right; the hill where I went sledding in winter, picked cyclamens in late summer, and snowdrops in spring. Straight ahead stood the preschool, the cinema where we watched every Bruce Lee film and every tear-soaked Indian soap opera. All of it was there, held behind the crack in the glass. Snow was falling from every direction.