Page 6 of Slanting Towards the Sea
SIX
MY MOM ALWAYS SAID, “The bigger the love, the bigger the fights.” She’d tell me this while making pancakes or an apple pie, or kneading pizza dough, a treat she’d make for Sa?a and me after a particularly volatile fight she’d had with Dad.
Their fights were scary—the aggressive tones and shouting, sharp accusations, the meanness, verging on physical and only miraculously never crossing that line—but I loved these moments of quiet after the storm when Mom would be attentive to me, when she would allow me to get my hands into the flour while she talked contemplatively about life’s truths.
“It’s just the way of things, Ivona,” she’d say.
“When two people love each other, they care a lot, and so they fight loudly. It wouldn’t be good if we didn’t care, now, would it? ”
I was only a child, so I was inclined to believe everything my mother said.
That love was this wild, volatile thing that had the power to both nourish and scar.
But at the same time, I didn’t want to believe it.
In my childish imagination, I envisioned a different kind of love, one that was gentle and kind.
Words like thank you and bless you , and what is it you need , its main discourse.
A space to rest, reposeful and calm with someone lying right there beside me, equally serene.
Someone who sees inside me in a way that makes me translucent; who lets me see inside them too, all the way down to their deepest, most intimate core.
Someone who yields to me, surrenders into my hands, while also offering themselves as a cocoon in return.
That was the image I conjured as I sat in my room while my parents fought, as I tried to ignore their harsh words, the sound of glass shattering.
Hunkering down. This phrase always comes to me when I think of those early days with Vlaho.
By the time summer exams came around, he had practically moved in with me.
Zagreb’s asphalt broiled, a ribbon of wavy heat shimmering above the empty streets.
His dorm didn’t have air-conditioning, and neither did my studio, but mine at least had windows on opposite walls that could create a draft.
His toothbrush joined mine in the cup, his deodorant took shelter in my bathroom cabinet.
His clothes hung off chairs, the backside of the sofa, me.
I loved his clothes, the touch of them, the smell, frayed edges, but I loved seeing him shirtless even more.
He had the body of an athlete, lean and wiry, though he was a bit underweight, and I kept pressing him to eat more.
“You’re just like my mother,” he’d laugh when I’d shovel another portion of my inexpertly cooked pasta with ?al?a onto his plate.
We studied in bed together, in our underwear, sticky with sweat, spraying water over ourselves to cool off.
He was cramming for microeconomics and I studied microbiology, so we threw words at each other, laughing.
“Plasmid,” I said, and he retorted with “monopsony.” “Quorum sensing,” I taunted, and he threw an “isoquant” my way.
“Conjugation,” I said, and instead of retorting, he kissed me, and we were back to making love.
We were always making love back then. His presence in my bed made me feel a little drunk and constantly heavy with want.
It was more than just physical desire, this stream of need coming from the pit of my gut.
A need that, once it had revealed itself, felt so familiar, like it had always been there, I just hadn’t been aware of it.
More of this. More of this! it demanded.
Early into our relationship—it may have been late March or the beginning of April—Vlaho and I were in Cvjetni trg having coffee.
Right at noon, a loud explosion reverberated over our heads, sending the pigeons aflight and both of us cowering under the table.
It was only the Gri?ki cannon going off, a cultural testament to events from centuries ago when one such blast saved Zagreb from the Ottoman invaders.
We knew about the cannon, of course we did, and that it went off every day at noon. We had learned about it at school, it was a well-known fact. But still, every time I found myself in Zagreb’s center when it detonated, my body ran for cover long before my mind could remind me I was safe.
People sitting near us smiled as we straightened ourselves up. Dalmatians , I could almost hear them think. Or perhaps, Provincials . Zagreb hadn’t been bombed nearly as much as either my or Vlaho’s hometown, so people here didn’t have the same instinctual response.
Vlaho laughed, brushing off our reaction as if it were dust lying atop his arms, and in that whimsical move I recognized the echo of the same terror that had lurched through me.
I thought of my mother’s words about love, and my childhood dream about what it could be, and I felt myself on the cusp of something.
It would’ve been so easy, expected even, to laugh the insignificant incident off, and move on.
But a fear gnawed at me, that if we did this, if each time we talked we allowed even a dust mote of dishonesty to fall between us, it would eventually gather.
More than losing Vlaho, I was beginning to realize, I was afraid of not being myself with him.
“I hate the cannon,” I said. “I hate everything it reminds me of, all the memories it stirs up, and that I can’t stop my reaction when it goes off.
” I said it with such urgency that the air between us trembled.
I wasn’t talking about the cannon, not really.
I was communicating something deeper, presenting him with an offering of almost radical honesty, a chance to be exactly who we are with each other.
He turned serious, then nodded, slowly. “Me too,” he said.
Over the course of the following months, I waited for the inevitable.
For him to lose interest, to become tired of me.
To become overwhelmed with this constant hunger I had for his closeness, for keeping such sharp focus on us.
Not letting one thing slip away from me, wanting to get every detail between us just right.
“You will leave me,” I would cry to him at night.
“You will grow tired of me.” There was never a person in my life who hadn’t.
It was that I thought too much, saw everything myopically.
It was that I felt too much. It was that I dissected my surroundings the way no one else did.
Do you have to make such a big deal out of everything?
they said. Do you have to be so sensitive?
But I couldn’t find a way to be something other than what I was. I could only hide it. “You will leave.”
Vlaho would hear me out, always a smirk on his face, and say, “But where would I go? You’re my person.”
Our apartment was a lair, and we lay low in it, allowing the world to rage above us, to come and go as it pleased. Preening, grooming, curling up next to one another, needing each other’s body heat like we’d never been warm before.
He never left the apartment unless he had to, and when he did, he left me Post-it notes lying around the house.
You look so beautiful while you sleep , stuck to his pillow.
You’re in the notes of every song I hear , on the kitchen table, next to a fresh pot of coffee.
I feel you all the time, in my lungs, in between breaths , on the mirror in our bathroom, next to the reflection of my smiling face.
And from this comfort, this contentment, a new fear was born—of losing the love that I never thought I’d find to begin with.
Some nights, I would climb on top of him as he was reading, holding him so tight he would gasp.
Wishing we could meld together, that I could crawl under his skin and stay there.
“What is it?” he’d ask, but I couldn’t speak, devastated that I would never get close enough to him, that there would always be the skin, the bones, the substance of flesh between us.
We would never be one body, there would always be this fear of us breaking into two.
That’s when the dreams started.
In those dreams, Vlaho stood with his back to me, and no matter what I did, I couldn’t get him to acknowledge me, to look me in the eye.
His face, stoic and cold, always angled away, looking out into the distance, anywhere except at me.
I would call to him, repeating his name with the sort of desperation that tore my chest apart.
Pleading, begging, but no words would come out.
My legs were leaden, glued to the ground, unable to move me in front of him, to force him to see me, to hold him to me.
I would wake up from these dreams with a palpitating heart and pain in my stomach so intense it felt like I’d been gutted.
Vlaho would sleep beside me, oblivious as I stared at him in the dark, hurt and resentful, even though I knew he had done nothing but sleep.
It terrified me that he had such power over me, the power to annihilate me if he so chose.
Sometimes, he’d wake up to find me looking at him with dismayed, wild eyes.
He’d reach for me, but I’d pull away, curl into myself, caught up in the utter horror of losing him.
In those moments, my mother’s words would come to me like a whisper in the night.
The bigger the love, the bigger the fights.
Only I wasn’t fighting Vlaho. I was battling myself.