Page 27 of Slanting Towards the Sea

TWENTY-FOUR

I EXIT THE HOUSE before I have the chance to self-sabotage and concede. If I stay, it won’t be long before they snatch this small victory from me. It is the way of my family. I resist, and then I question myself into submission.

Doubting myself comes so easy. How could it not when so many times in my life I’ve seen my perspective differ from others’?

Sometimes it feels like my inner compass is set to a different north than everyone else’s.

Vlaho was the only person who never questioned my sense of reality or the truth.

The only one who never thought that my rivers ran too deep or that my skies stretched too wide. But look how that ended.

Maybe there’s something wrong with them , the psychiatrist told me long ago when I asked what was wrong with me, and I folded her words inside me to validate my instincts when I doubted myself. But now I see them for what they are. Everything is relative. They’re not right, and neither am I.

My feet move in time with my frantic thoughts as I walk the same street with the Italian villas I’d texted photos of to Asier a couple of weeks ago.

I’d been brimming with excitement then, the kind only the prospect of a new relationship can bring.

If Sa?a and Dad knew about him, they’d think he’s the reason I want to sell.

They’d assume I’m desperate for this man’s affection, lecherous after years of being untouched and neglected in this particular way. The thought makes me feel dirty.

All those flirty little texts we exchanged, the need for Asier to like me, to be attracted to me, to find me funny or smart or beautiful; all the late-night daydreams, imagining how it would feel to put my arms around his neck, or fold my curves against the lines of his body—they open a cavernous shame now, as if my dad and brother can see inside my most intimate thoughts.

I can hear them mocking me with the type of contempt reserved for lonely old maids who can’t help but be swayed the first time someone throws a crumb their way.

The worst part is, now that I see it through their eyes, I cannot unsee it, cannot unsee myself as this pathetic creature selling her family’s most cherished heirloom to the corporate devil for the sake of what? A few compliments?

I think of Asier’s murmured gorgeous , standing before that hotel in Split, and feel ugly in every conceivable way.

I reach Branimir’s Coast, but instead of walking across the bridge and into the old town, I move onward, farther along the promenade, and then across the park with the big bronze statue of a sailor gripping the helm.

The sailor has a determined look on his face, and it strikes me that even like this, somewhere on the imagined brassy high seas, he seems to have better bearings than I do.

I walk around him and toward the white building that sprawls along the road like a sail.

The light is on in Vlaho and Marina’s apartment.

I stand in front of the lobby door. As I put my finger on the buzzer, I imagine myself going up, entering their home, sitting on their couch.

Vlaho would make me mint tea, because he knows it always calms me down, and Marina would sit cross-legged beside me on the couch, her hand squeezing my knee as she she’d hear me out.

And then, in her signature way she’d say something funny like Way to deal a blow to the patriarchy , and I’d feel a momentary irritation that she was turning my distress into a joke, but before that moment even elapsed, I’d be laughing, grateful for the new perspective.

All this plays out in my head, as real as I am, standing here, but I let my hand drop to my side.

There was a weird energy passing between us the other day, when they sensed something might be happening between Asier and me.

If I go up, I will have to circle around the truth—the fact that I did think of Asier that way.

It feels pivotal, this thought, like the end of an era.

My miniature world is losing its breadth, becoming even smaller.

I skulk away, blending with the evening shadows.

I find refuge on a bench in the crook of my town’s neck, at the bottom of Jazine cove, from where the old-town peninsula resembles a woman’s bowed head resting against the bosom of the sea.

The dark-blue hues of dusk fall over buildings of different styles—some ancient, some medieval, some socialist—rising above the city walls.

Her buildings are her scars. She has been destroyed almost completely several times in her history that spans three millennia.

Last time, in World War II, when she was carpet-bombed to the ground, and less than a tenth of her old, gorgeous buildings survived intact.

But she rose again, and here she is, pulsing with life.