Page 4 of Slanting Towards the Sea
FOUR
WHILE WE WERE TOGETHER, Vlaho and I joked that we had more anniversaries than Croatia has islands.
There was the day we’d met, in that bar on Tara’s birthday.
There was the day I first texted him, and he asked me out on a date.
Then, the date itself, which took place ten days after we first agreed to see each other, because just before we were supposed to go out, Vlaho got the flu.
“She’s cooking chicken broth on the hot plate,” he messaged me on the third day, in the short intermezzo when the ibuprofen knocked his fever down. “I can barely warm up milk on that thing.”
I hadn’t been to his dorm room, but I’d been to my friends’ plenty of times.
Cvjetno was considered one of the better dorms, but it was still dilapidated.
Built decades ago, renovated only once since.
The furniture dangled off walls, half-ruined by neglect and reckless partying.
Each room had two beds with barely half a meter of space between them, two desks, and a small entry hallway with a closet on each side, a tiny sink with a single cupboard, and a counter where you could put a hot plate, providing you had one.
Most of the students ate in the cafeteria downstairs anyway.
I couldn’t imagine a middle-aged woman sleeping in such a room, in such a bed, and it said something about his mother that she was willing to do that to nurse her son back to health.
Her being there made me jealous. I wanted to be the one on the adjacent bed in his room, running a damp cloth over his forehead, tucking him in, reaching over the void between our beds to hold his hand.
I also wanted to be the one with such a mother.
We could never agree, later on, which one of those ten days marked the actual beginning of our relationship.
It might’ve been the day when he said he saw my face every time he closed his eyes.
Or the day I told him that not being able to see him was a whole new brand of loneliness.
Or the day he said, after a smattering of late-night texts about all the things big and small (your favorite color?
the least favorite subject in high school?
the one thing you wish you could change in the world?), that I felt as familiar and essential to him as the sea.
Those ten days, the suspense of the wait was so delectable and agonizing, a constant current moving things around in my bloodstream, the whole body a pot of water held over low heat.
I gathered information about him like I’d once hoarded trivia.
He was nearly tone-deaf, but he played the electric guitar when no one was around to listen.
He loved the sea, unsurprising for a Dalmatian boy.
He’d collected mollusks and seashells when he was a child, much like I’d collected pine nuts, acorns, and leaves of all shapes and sizes around Lovorun.
He wanted to learn how to sail, but his dad never got around to teaching him.
His dad was a first mate on a large tanker ship, sailing the high seas six months a year.
When he was home, he couldn’t be bothered to do anything sea-related, happy to be land-bound.
But one time, his dad skippered a catamaran from Cavtat to Vis and took Vlaho with him.
They slept in sleeping bags on the prow instead of in the cabins, and Vlaho said he would never forget the moonlit outline of the island ahead, the expansiveness of that night sky that seemed both unreachable and also like something he could absorb.
How he felt insignificantly small, yet important because he was a part of something so much bigger than him, impossible to fathom.
“Yes,” I said, remembering the times I spent in my baba’s olive grove when I was a child, bura cold on my cheeks, the sea foaming in the distance like a rabid beast, the sharp olive leaves scraping against my face as I reached for the fruits.
That sense of being one with nature, of existence itself, in its purest form.
And then I thought of the first time I saw him, his eyes. “I know exactly what you mean.”
Sometimes, he’d wait for his mom to fall asleep before texting, because she kept reprimanding him for being on the phone and not resting enough.
I wanted him to rest too, but I was too greedy to break off communication, starved for one more message, one more glimpse into who he was and all the ways we might fit together.
Deep into the night, one of us would lose the battle to sleep, and doze off.
I would wake up to sunlight filtering through my window, still in my sweatshirt, my neck craned against my bedpost at an unnatural angle.
I’d reread his words from the previous night and smile so hard my cheeks twitched, a delicious ache pulsing in my heart.
And so, we were together before we ever saw each other after that first call.
Together, before we finally met on Zagreb’s main square, under the street clock, his face drawn from the illness but as beautiful as I’d remembered it from that dim bar on the night of Tara’s party.
Together, before we walked up the narrow stairs along the park that led to the Upper Town, the trees around us bare, the damp smell of decaying leaves earthy and grounding, the hush of the upcoming snow thick in the air.
That tender awkwardness of finally occupying the same space, our bodies not yet familiar with each other the way our minds already were.
We stopped under Lotr??ak Tower, where we could take in the whole of Zagreb laid out before us, lights flickering as far as the eye could see.
“Do you have trouble orienting yourself in Zagreb?” I asked, looking toward the Lower Town.
Apart from the hill we were on, Zagreb was flat, and when you stood somewhere in the street surrounded by buildings, you had no way of knowing which side of the world you were facing.
I got lost more than once because I couldn’t tell where the north was.
“Sometimes,” he said. “It’s becoming easier with time.”
“This is the only place where I can find my bearings. This hill,” I said. “It’s so much easier on the coast.” We were both from the Dalmatia region, my town marking its northernmost part, his on the far south of it.
“Yeah,” he said. “Back home, all things slant towards the sea.”
He took my hands and rubbed them between his palms.
“Your hands are cold,” he said as if this had surprised him, and then he leaned in to kiss me. And when he did, something inside me reoriented itself, my world softly tipping into his direction, as if he himself were the sea.