I was only 18 when I left my war-torn country of birth and set off towards the wormhole of uncertainty.
It was 1998 and former Yugoslavia was in flames. My country, Kosova, was in flames.
Milosevic evaporated anything that he could find that had an Albanian name to it and that was war. But it was more than just a war. I draw, sometimes I draw parallels with current generation of 16, 17, 18-year-old cohorts and the way they perceive the world.
There is that deemed fear in them that the war, it’s the end.
That the war is basically the apocalyptic undertaking of mature people who have gone crazy. And their perception of the war is such that it might well be the end of my physical existence or it might well be the end of my leisurely life, the easiness of which is powered and advanced by technology.
Or that they might deem a war or the war as the embodiment of nastiness, of tragedy, of human weakness, of human aggression, of masculinity at the helm of its own demise.
I don’t know what goes in their mind, but I know very well what went through my mind back then, over 25 years ago.
What went through my mind was that if it is the end for me, if it is something that I will have to pay a price of, I’d rather get moving, I’d rather be on the move, I’d rather get shot at by being on the move.
And remember, we’re talking pre-accession Eastern Europe into EU era, an era where borders were still there, they were physical; they were harsh; they were an embodiment of a really traumatic past.
As past as you could say back, all the way back to ancient Rome's type of consistency. And I didn’t understand that because the furthest I would have gone at 17 or 18 is former Yugoslavia and much earlier than that would have been all throughout Yugoslavia, places in countries like Croatia, Bosnia, Montenegro, Macedonia, Serbia, Vojvodina and Slovenia.
These were the countries that we operated on.
Leaving Subotica, which is the northernmost part of Vojvodina bordering Hungary, it was an interesting juxtaposition between the reality that had settled in me based on my perception of how the world would look like after leaving the atrocious war, and a better life.
A better life.
But that better life, the first impression of that better life was physical borders, was the intimate aggression of the border guard when he or she asked for your passport. And then you’re well into Hungary and then your journey is projected to go to Germany because that’s where your family is and that’s where your uncle is waiting on the other side of the border for you to cross over and join the family there.
But for some strange reason, I did not feel the family.
I felt a newcomer because for them, as it is for me now; the sameness was the same. That’s the same what I feel now.
They became something else.
They became part of the ecosystem that established itself and became part of the ecosystem that exists in today’s sameness. And that was fine, but I did not understand then what would it mean to be in a well-advanced economy and society like Austria or Germany.
So, I took up the harder road. The more challenging journey. The uncertain, very uncertain trajectory in my life.
I had the energy.
I had the aspiration, of course.
Sometimes I’d feel completely floored by the menial resources, physical resources, mental resources that I had used to plow through a different culture.
To plow through the physicality of this trajectory, of this journey which entailed basically crossing mountains, regions of border lines between Austria, Slovakia and Czech Republic.
It was the borders that put everybody off.
It was the fittest that would survive it through if they were lucky. Out of 70 something individuals which according to my diary half of them were women and children, were assembled in this little town in Slovakia after we got smuggled through past Hungary into Slovakia with an aim to head in towards Czech Republic and then crossing over to Germany.
Half of these people did not make it. And the other half of the other half that was left, and that we survived and penetrate through the mountainous regions, the most aggressive looking, unfriendly, spontaneously popped up trees and mountain slopes and mud and the dampness and the wetness and the wetness of these high mountains, were difficult.
But for me, there was something else that was going on in my mind.
I was thinking of that sameness. I was thinking of that sense of wanting to belong somewhere elsewhere. There would be peace, but also where there is inner tranquility. The wanting to be left alone. An 18-year-old type of ecstasy that one experiences. The sense of you left behind the other side of the family, but you feel as you deserve to be here and they deserve to be somewhere else.
And that bothered me. It bothered me because I aimed to find peace and tranquility and I got something else in the end. Not that long soon after that I found myself in a truck, in a lorry at the back of a lorry and the conjuncture there was that I needed to cross over the English Channel because I thought England would be the place where it would prepare me and rehearse me out ready to go to the United States, because England was the means to an end so it was Czech Republic so it was Hungary so it was Slovakia, Austria and Germany and then later Holland and Belgium and France.
These I never forget. This cold October in Lille, in France just before leaving for Calais.
The sky opened up, but it was an interesting colour sky. It wasn’t the blue of the usual mornings that you would have in Balkans; it wasn’t red either that we would normally have in Kosova when sun was setting every evening which to some superstitious people and to the historical legends which traveled through older adults and the people of wisdom was that this was a sign of what was to come, of blood shedding, of redness to the velvet. What I saw in Calais was the shine and the ray of hope that beyond the shores of Calais there was life to be lived there was buzz to be buzzed there was the force of nature that would change your life that there was more than just any life, that there was a stint that would last longer than you ever expected that there was the pull, pull of that sameness that what I aspired for so many years.
Then at that moment, I just reminisced and looked back in my thoughts, and I remembered when I was 13 years old, just five years before. I had prepared a rucksack full of towels, socks, new pair of shoes, a couple of trousers, a pair of jeans, a jumper, a notebook, three pens and believe it or not a couple of sardines, and I’d kept those in that rucksack for quite some times until my mum pulled it under the sofa and said what’s this, and I said well that’s my contingency bag you know expressing like an impatience teenager with an embarrassment part of it because she had found something that I’ve kept away from everybody. She started crying, what do you mean? I said, well I’m not gonna be here for long aren’t I!? What do you mean? Why? she asked with tears in her eyes. Well, because everything is the same here. I said. You just don’t understand, I want a different sameness, don’t you see!? I added. And that was it. And I think that’s done something to my mum because she went quiet and scared and I bet you, in her mind she was wondering what the hell did I mean by that sameness!!! what is he talking about!!! what does he mean by that!? and here I was October 1998 overseeing overlooking English Channel and seeing this sameness turn of events, and feeling the warm closeness and proximity to that sameness because in the end of the day I thought, you know what! I will not give a shit, I just need to be here and I need some rest, I just need some peace, I just need some sameness that these people over there feel every day whether that is monotony randomness, non-spontaneity or whatever, it doesn’t matter; I don’t care what it wears, what it smells and what it looks like. Because it’s all about one thing only, and that thing is survival!
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