Sanctuary

I live in a world where tall people fear themselves. 

A world where we don’t know who we are,

Until our moms remind us to breathe.

We are lost; 

We are pieces of a rudimental legacy, 

Our world - the Balkans. 

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When I was 15, my friend and I snuck into our neighbor’s backyard where he kept his old tractor parked. The vehicle was so huge that it took up the whole space, leaving only a little theatrical leeway for the ants to move through. 

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Breathing heavily, stumbling upon each other, my friend and I climbed our way up and finally reached the seat to stargaze. It was such a funny sight, and I later wondered if observers laughed at us as they were passing, thinking how bizarre it was to see two girls sitting on this red tractor with their fingers pointing at the stars. 

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I looked down at my feet and saw a dragonfly swirling its turquoise wings and eating an insect that looked identical to it. I glared at the dragonfly’s feast for a moment, disgusted, when I felt a warm liquid make its way down my calf. I heard my friend exclaim:

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“If I stand up and stretch my arm hard enough, I can reach the sky, Ana!” 

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I smiled and then realized my leg was covered in tractor oil, cursing our neighbor for keeping this ancient piece of crap as a reminder of our dysfunctional civility. 

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I told my friend that we should probably leave, pretending not to hear what she had said. I knew that the sky was reserved for different people. We had a lot of work to do on Earth first. 

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People who have traveled anywhere in Eastern Europe know that we were never jobless, and for that matter, we were never soulless. Every Slavic language has at least three distinct phrases describing what it means to have a soul. Ironically, I always thought that the more we talked about our souls, the less we were in touch with them. 

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Our elderly men owned and drove their tractors, buses, trucks and all sorts of other machines in the most urban parts of the city, and they were fast and furious. When they could no longer drive, the elderly men would put them in their backyards as reminders of their past usability, strength and sometimes even a symbolic reference to our indisputable relationship with God. Through harvest, progress, blood, sweat and tears, our men and women remembered socialism and nostalgically looked at the comradery that once existed.

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My grandfather owned a red Lada in the early 2000s, and she was the pride of our family. My mom and aunt were in an eternal battle over who got to drive her first, but by the time I got my driver’s license, things had changed. Ladas had become obsolete vintage pieces; they no longer represented durability but rather the inevitable washability of time’s touch. 

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I was no longer friends with those who dreamed of touching the sky, and we drifted further and further away from each other. There, my story began.

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It was Jan. 22, 2022, a ripe evening, when I walked past his window and almost jumped from fear. I am always in a hurry, my steps chasing after one another. So you can imagine how shocking looking through this window was, since it made me pause for a moment and glare at my reflection, something I rarely do. 

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I was walking that night to meet my girlfriends at one of the local pubs for some hot chocolate and idle talk. It was cold, and I still don’t know what made that window so special, but I stopped and counted my breaths, one after another. 

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There was a little succulent hiding in the shadows, which was the first thing that caught my attention. I saw a man eating popcorn and watching a soccer game. It appeared that the TV was much larger than the man, as if it was encompassing his whole character. 

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I stared intensely, trying to find something substantial that would help me justify intruding on this poor man and his soccer game. He was an older man, maybe a grandpa or a fatigued father, and I imagined he was indulging in food and relaxation after a long day at work. 

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I saw his coat in the corner of the room on one of the racks, thick black cotton stretched by the pockets, and I thought of my own grandfather, who wore the same clothes for years. It was almost a sin to go shopping and replace his polos. My grandpa was sort of a skeptic, a critic of the new textile order. I wondered if this old man was similar to my grandpa.

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Then I saw him, a young man, lurking from the opposite part of the room. His almond eyes cut through me, and it hit me: The window was so low I couldn’t see my whole self, only from the chest downward. 

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Is that all I am? A half-being? I thought for a brief second.

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That was the first time I was scared of my own height, and I understood why all tall people seemed to make themselves smaller, scrunching their backs and kneeling in pictures. It was also my first interaction with him — the one who was supposed to be my one but never will be.

I started to run as fast as I could away from that glass that depleted and split my body in half. I knew that his eyes were still fixated on me, but I ran nevertheless. Even then, I refused to believe in coincidences. I had a gut feeling we would meet again.

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He stopped me on a different street five months later at a community event to say hello, where he told me I looked bored. 

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“A pretty girl is never bored,” I lied. 

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I was sad, not bored. 

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I recognized his eyes immediately and wondered if he knew I was the girl who had stared through his window. I refused to say anything, afraid to ruin his first impression of me. I was full of emotions, but he had no right to them, so I hid them well. 

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You know that feeling when you meet someone and it feels like time has reconstructed itself to let you exist in as many forms as you like? 

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I became all things joyful and lovely — butterflies, strawberries, gin and tonics, mushrooms, music, philosophy, myself. I turned into happiness, sadness, everything and nothing. I wondered: How can one person liberate another this much? I understood what my friend was saying when we were 15; only through letting go of our bodily sensations, of structures and bonds, and sharing ourselves fully with someone else can we experience an abstraction beyond the perceptions of who we’re supposed to be.

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 Oh, how blind I must have been then to prefer the Earth over the blue skies! 

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We were sitting on the grass one night after the sprinklers had freshened it up, a couple of months after our encounter on the streets, and I kissed him on the cheek. He blushed, and I wanted to see him melt under my touch forever. I remembered my mother telling me how nothing in the world can measure up to the love of a Balkan woman. I wished to give this boy my love and my demons. And so, it happened that way. All the passion, the beauty, the good and the bad, I gave it away. 

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One day, after I got home from college in America, my mother insisted we all go to church. She always considered the church sacred, claiming that the universe will give you what you wish for if you are brave enough to ask for it. By that time, I had known him for a year and three days. 

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I held his hand as we walked out of the church, and when we got to the exit, I wanted to light a candle for my great-grandfather, who had passed away a couple of years earlier on his 105th birthday. It is my little personal tradition to always light a candle in his honor. 

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As I held his hand, lighting my candle in silence, the fire suddenly blazed. For a split second, I saw myself again, half-half, the same feeling pulsing through my veins as the day I dared to look through his window and meet his eyes for the first time. Why did life keep splitting me up? 

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A tear made its way down my cheek. I wondered if he’d noticed. He hadn’t. How do you even explain such a bizarre occurrence to your boyfriend?

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He and I lived in fulfillment, at least for some time. It was the type of love everyone knew we shared, filled with respect and intimacy, yet only communicable to us. It was hot and passionate, messy and liberating, yet confining. All the way through or nothing at all. I never knew how to describe it to my mother or brother, and they both yearned for a logical explanation. 

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“Sometimes you meet someone, you fall in love, and you just pray it will work out,” I would say. But until when?

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In April, we had the best time of our lives. He flew to Ohio, and we spent most of our time together in the grass, fighting bugs and caressing each other as we discussed political philosophy and current issues. What does a person need more than the coziness of blossoming trees and the comfortable reassurance of a loved one? He became my sanctuary in a twofold sense: protecting me from the world and myself. 

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In May, things began to change — our relationship, just as my reflection, split in half. Conversations turned into fights. Fights turned into bitterness. I took the shape of a Rubik's Cube: impossible to figure out in the hands of an unskilled person. 

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“Love might be complicated, but we are responsible for the complications,” I would remind myself, but nothing could beat the feelings of dissatisfaction. I craved him — what we were — long before we ended. 

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Sometimes, I used to close my eyes and return to that alley when I first became two people in one body. 

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Is that what adulthood does to all of us? Makes us forget who we are, who we wanted to be? Makes us hate our bodies and look for ourselves in others? Is everyone afraid of their height? 

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I know I am.

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Finally, with this thought, I split into pieces. I understood why that dragonfly had been eating its counterpart in the dead of night.

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I realized we all eat our partners sometimes; we hurt those we love most, unable to face ourselves, to accept the good and bad in us — the essential parts that make us human. 

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It’s a paradox: The people we choose to love and cherish are the reflection of our souls, an extension of our beliefs and values. Yet when they act or perform in ways that reflect ourselves, we get scared. 

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Knowing yourself is a curse. It is the most difficult of all relationships. 

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When I had to let him go, it was one of the hardest things I had ever done, among death, loss, rejection, violence and poverty. I found it astonishing how the heart cries for the most banal of things while enduring much more horrific things in silence.

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Letting him go meant I had to let the person I was with him go and move forward into the unknown. 

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When I turned 20, I wept for 36 hours, holding myself in an embrace, combing my hair and praying to myself for forgiveness. 

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I’ve heard of a love that comes once in a lifetime, and I’ve always imagined that it departs through chimneys in the winter when families are burning wood and sitting together. I sacrificed my hot love for the lukewarm of peace. I hope that next January will take the old Ana with it, burn away the stains of half-love and half-personhood, and, in return, give me clarity and let me heal.

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Until then, I can only hope and repeat:

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I am my own sanctuary.

Заслужувам љубов - I deserve love. 

I am my own sanctuary.

Љубовта ќе ме најде - Love will find me. 

I am my own sanctuary.

Љубовта ќе ја возвратам - I will return the love.