Page 2 of Slanting Towards the Sea

TWO

ZAGREB WAS AT ITS coldest when Vlaho and I met, on a sleety January night, five months after I’d moved there to study biology. The millennium was still so young that its turn felt like a stake in the ground, a moment that would stabilize the world I’d so often seen slip off its axis.

I was only nineteen, yet the country I had been born in had dissolved, the state I was born in had fought its way back to independence through a bloody war.

The currency had changed three times before I turned eleven: Yugoslav dinar to Croatian dinar to Croatian kuna.

I had been born into socialism and autocracy and was now living under democracy and capitalism, or as close to it as the transitional economy could get.

On top of that had been the broader changes, those of the world in general. Phones having longer and longer cords, until they had no cords at all; computers being contraptions out of sci-fi movies, until they became cubes perched on our desks, getting thinner and sleeker over the years.

And then, of course, the constant changes at home.

My parents operating between their three standard settings: togetherness, indifference, and vile fighting.

I never knew when I walked through the door after school if I’d find them threatening divorce or laughing over coffee.

Me too, morphing over time, from the dutiful daughter always trying to appease them to a rebellious one, until, after the yellow boot incident, I turned into a clammed shell, waiting out the last two years I had to live with them.

Those first months after I moved to Zagreb marked a new start. Everything smelled of freedom and possibility, my lungs stretching out for full inhales, my shoulders relaxing.

I went to classes, met new friends, and partied with the few old ones I had.

I ate in student cafeterias redolent of fried chicken, kale, and pasta Bolognese, the smells alone making the space feel overcrowded.

In these first months it was easy to believe that I could be a different person, one unaffected by my life back home.

But as the winter tightened its cold grip, the newness of Zagreb started to wear off, and I found myself longing for the stone-built walls of the hometown I’d been so eager to leave, for its blue skies and sea, for its familiar pulse and rhythm.

The hole I thought I’d left back in Zadar revealed itself again, and between all the coffee dates and loud student parties and crowded college classes, I couldn’t find a way to weld it shut.

That night in January, my best friend Tara talked me into going out.

It was her birthday, and she was throwing a party in a bar in Zagreb’s center.

The bar was small and packed with students, Red Hot Chili Peppers pumping through the speakers as we poured cheap beer down our throats.

My boyfriend was there, if that’s what I could call him.

He was someone I’d been seeing for a month, but I could already tell we weren’t going anywhere.

I sat next to him with eyes glazed over as he and his friend droned on about some video game.

Suddenly, “One Armed Scissor” cut straight through “Californication.”

The room jolted to a halt. Everyone stopped talking and looked toward the stereo behind the counter, where a tall guy with dirty blond hair wearing a gray hoodie was pushing buttons, grinning at his own ingeniousness.

The familiar angry voice yelled the staccato verses through the speakers, reigniting the rebellious spirit of my high school days, and before I could control myself, I was on my feet pushing closer to the stereo.

It was instinctual. I wasn’t moving with a plan.

There was just this need to come closer to the music, to be in the middle of it.

Or perhaps to pull it inside me, to fill myself with it.

When I reached the bar, he was still there, the tall guy in the gray hoodie, his back turned to me. I lifted my voice at the refrain. His voice joined mine as he turned to face me.

The moment condensed.

His face was incandescent, as though it were lit from the inside.

The room was otherwise dim and filled with cigarette smoke, and of course people don’t glow, but that’s how he looked to me.

There was something in his eyes that offered itself to me.

It was so immediate, so intense, it felt almost like voyeurism.

Like I could see more than I was supposed to, looking into his eyes.

Like I was allowing him to see more than he should, as he looked back into mine.

Time snapped back into place, and we were back in the room, at the party, people and music pulsing around us.

“You know At the Drive-In?” he leaned in to say in my ear over the loud riffs.

“Do I know them? I fucking love them,” I said, the alcohol making me bolder than I was, the profane word moving something in me, him being so close.

“You may have just become my favorite girl,” he said, his words dragging in a singsong accent.

I couldn’t pinpoint if it was from Herzegovina, or Neretva Valley, or Dubrovnik.

All I could tell was that he was from the south, where tangerines and watermelons grow, where beaches are pebbled, and the sea is turquoise blue. “Vlaho.” He offered me his hand.

Dubrovnik then, I thought, the name of its patron saint typically given only to boys from that region. We shook hands. Skin against skin, the grip lasting too long but not long enough. “Ivona.”

“Do you want to get a beer or something?” he asked, a patch of red igniting his left cheek. I’d never seen someone blush in this particular way.

The song ended. A man, presumably the manager, because he had a pissed-off expression and was mumbling expletives, pushed his way behind Vlaho and turned Red Hot Chili Peppers back on.

“I’d love to,” I said, glancing behind my back to the guy I was dating, who was draining his beer in dull light, and I regretted the words before I even spoke them, “But my boyfriend’s waiting for me.”

Vlaho’s lips turned into a lopsided smile, the electricity of the moment frizzing away with my admission. I turned and walked over to my seat, Vlaho’s stare trailing me like an echo following a sound.

That mistake would haunt me for days. I should’ve gone straight back to my boyfriend and told him we were over.

But I waited until we were alone, later that night, to do it properly.

To be considerate, polite. It was still in me, then, that need to appease, to not cause commotion or harm.

Not that he cared. He just shrugged at my “I don’t think this is working,” and said, “Yeah, I agree.”

That small courtesy might’ve cost me my only chance with Vlaho, and that’s all I could think about a week later, as I was mustering the courage to send him a text.

I deleted the fifteenth version of “hi, this is ivona, the at the drive-in girl from last friday,” and before I could challenge myself, I wrote, “send transmission from the one-armed scissor,” and hit send.

The same lyrics we’d sung together that night.

I envisioned the text traveling over Zagreb’s rooftops, through its grimy smog, and into his dorm room.

He lived in Cvjetno, Tara had told me when she’d gotten me his number; he was twenty, and studying economics.

That was all the intel she’d had, given that he’d been a friend of her friend, not hers.

The minutes passed. I got up, circled my studio like a frantic cockroach in sudden light. I turned the TV on. The Mexican soap opera that always rolled after the noon news filled the room with heated words that made me feel less alone.

I picked up my Cellular and Molecular Biology textbook, but the words were too fuzzy to read. I checked my phone every twenty seconds even though I’d made sure I’d turned the sound on.

Minutes distended into hours.

I got creative, coming up with excuses for why he hadn’t replied. Maybe I had the wrong number. Maybe he didn’t have any money on his phone card. Maybe he was in class and he’d left his phone at the dorm. Maybe someone had stolen his phone.

And then the more agonizing reasons. Maybe he didn’t remember me. Or maybe he did, and he was choosing not to respond. Maybe he read the text and laughed at my audacity, at the thought of the two of us together.

I went back to that night, dissecting it in detail. That moment, when it had all stilled between us, was it real?

I couldn’t tell. I had no idea how that was supposed to feel.

Just a year before, in my senior year in high school, our Croatian teacher had tasked the class with writing an essay on the topic of Shakespeare’s quote “To thine own self be true.” The quote dug into the pain that had lain dormant throughout my teen years, that duality of life I had embraced—the armor offered up to the world, and the gentle essence it was meant to shield.

How I’d learned to hide the soft parts of myself, like a crustacean.

Writing that essay, I didn’t censor myself.

I couldn’t bother to; it was our last high school essay, and the teacher only proofread them anyway.

It was not like she would dwell on the meaning behind the words.

But when she returned the notebooks to us, there was a note inside mine, right under the grade:

Feeling in constant pain is actually quite common, among highly intelligent people.

I laid the notebook on my thighs under the desk, ripped the page with her note off, and folded it in a small square to store in my wallet.

I excused myself to go to the bathroom, holding my breath as my legs carried me down the corridor.

After locking myself in a stall, I pressed my forehead against the cold tiles and struggled not to cry.

I had been hiding for so long I didn’t believe it possible that someone could see me. But someone had. And that felt even worse.

But this had been a coincidental sighting.

There was an intentionality to how Vlaho looked at me that night.

A curiosity. So much of seeing is in that willingness to look.

And, more importantly, it came paired with a feeling that under the careless, messy hair, and tattered Nirvana T-shirt, and love of angry music, he too was someone surprised, maybe even eager, to be seen.

But maybe he’d only been buzzed, and that’s what had glinted in his eyes. Only now I couldn’t unknow how much I wanted it, to find someone like him.

Three hours after hitting send, the hope grew so oppressive, so overwrought in my chest, that I let it out in low, humming sobs.

I didn’t cry for Vlaho, not really. I didn’t know him yet.

I cried because I was only nineteen and I was already so tired of carrying around that jagged grain of loneliness on the inside that always threatened to cut me if I made a wrong turn.

I cried because I had all this love inside me, and it had nowhere to go.

The text sounded. “what do you think it even means?”

Then, another one. “i mean, to send a transmission from a one-armed scissor. what is a one-armed scissor anyway? how does it differ from a two-armed scissor?”

I stared at the message through wet eyes. Then I typed, fingers still trembling, “i don’t think even at the drive in know what it means. but still, in a weird way, it makes sense, right?”

“i like the part about dissecting a trillion sighs,” he wrote.

“and writing to remember,” I wrote back.

The phone started ringing then, his name filling the screen. I turned the TV off, cleared my throat. “Hi.”

“Hey,” he said, and I could see him smiling, pulling fingers through his hair, the way he’d done that night. “I thought this would be easier. Given that each text costs twenty lipa and there are a lot of lines in that song.”

“Smart thinking. True economist talking.”

He laughed. “You’ve done your research, I see. I’m at a disadvantage.”

“That’s a bummer,” I said. “That you didn’t ask about me.”

“Not because I didn’t want to know. But I have this policy of not messing with girls who are… spoken for.”

“Well… not anymore.”

A beat of electrifying silence. “Want to grab a cup of coffee?” he asked, his words swaying in his southern accent. Relief coursed through me, the first layer of nacre coating that grain of loneliness inside me, smoothing its barbed edges.