The Book of My Lives

by Aleksandar Hemon

As a Bosnian in Chicago, I’d experienced one form of displacement, but this was another: I was displaced in a place that had been mine. In Sarajevo, everything around me was familiar to the point of pain and entirely uncanny and distant.

I have learned since then that war is the most concrete thing there can be, a fantastic reality that levels both interiority and exteriority into the flatness of a crushed soul.

Nothing in my experience had taught me how to get a job in America.

You and me both!

They couldn’t care less; it took me a few weeks to learn that (a) rambling about American movies could not even get you a most penurious job; and (b) when they say “We’ll call you!” they don’t really mean it.

It was there that I understood what Nelson Algren meant when he wrote that loving Chicago was like loving a woman with a broken nose—I fell in love with the broken noses of Edgewater.

We—immigrants trying to stay afloat in this country—found comfort in playing by the rules we set ourselves. It made us feel that we still were a part of the world much bigger than the USA.

There is always a story, I learned on that walk, more heartbreaking and compelling than yours.

I was not capable of helping them in any way. During my visits, we argued much too often: their despair annoyed me, because it exactly matched mine and prevented them from offering comfort to me—I suppose I still wanted to be their child.

We missed each other, even while we were together, because the decaying elephant in the room was the loss of our previous life—absolutely nothing was the way it used to be. Everything we did together in Canada reminded us of what we used to do together in Bosnia. Hence we didn’t like doing any of it, but had nothing else to do.

Narrative imagination—and therefore fiction—is a basic evolutionary tool of survival. We process the world by telling stories and produce human knowledge through our engagement with imagined selves.

Isabel’s indelible absence is now an organ in our bodies whose sole function is a continuous secretion of sorrow.