Slanting Towards the Sea

by Lidija Hilje

moment when she looked at me as if she’d never seen me before. I understood then that knowledge bore power. It made people take notice.

The story became a part of the family lore, something my mother complain-bragged about to the three neighbors she always had coffee with. And I became ravenous, hoarding words and their meanings, facts, and trivia. I wanted more of that power, more of that sense of self. Striving became a hook in my chest, always lurching me upward.

I can’t remember the last time someone said I had potential. But the thing about potential is that it doesn’t go away. If you fail to realize it, you don’t simply lose it. Instead, it sediments inside you, like tar or asbestos, slowly releasing its poison.

independence through a bloody war. The currency had

changed three times before I turned eleven: Yugoslav dinar to Croatian dinar to Croatian kuna. I had been born into socialism and autocracy and was now living under democracy and capitalism, or as close to it as the transitional economy could get.

Those first months after I moved to Zagreb marked a new start. Everything smelled of freedom and possibility, my lungs stretching out for full inhales, my shoulders relaxing.

How I’d learned to hide the soft parts of myself, like a crustacean. Writing that essay, I didn’t censor

But when she returned the notebooks to us, there was a note inside mine, right under the grade: Feeling in constant pain is actually quite common, among highly intelligent people.

There was an intentionality to how Vlaho looked at me that night. A curiosity. So much of seeing is in that willingness to look. And, more importantly, it came paired with a feeling that under the careless, messy hair, and tattered Nirvana T-shirt, and love of angry music, he too was someone surprised, maybe even eager, to be seen.

Or the day I told him that not being able to see him was a whole new brand of loneliness.

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.

“Yeah,” he said. “Back home, all things slant towards the sea.”

But because that poverty is still catching up with him, threatening that if he doesn’t make more, more, more, it will come and reduce him to what he’d been that long-ago day.

Someone who yields to me, surrenders into my hands, while also offering themselves as a cocoon in return.

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.

She was very much the product of the land she grew up on, rooted in karst’s scanty red dirt, made rough by the elements, much like the olives she tended. But like the

olives, she still managed, almost unwittingly, to produce something nurturing from that roughness.

At meals, the clock on the wall striking evenly through quiet conversations, its beat a metronome of grief.

Instead, as I climb into bed, it climbs in after me and sits on my lungs when I turn the lights off.

And she leaned in and said, “Well, maybe there’s something wrong with them.”

took those words and deposited them inside me. They got me through many a storm later on, a proof that my internal compass wasn’t completely defective, that I wasn’t inherently faulty for being the way I was. They gave me hope that one day I might find someone who’d shuck me like an oyster and find all the pearls I was hiding within, and this hope became my bread, my water, and my air.

If people want to love you, they do, no matter how flawed you are. But if they aren’t inclined to love you, nothing you say or do, no amount of your own goodness, can make them change their mind.

you can’t quite call them out on misogyny because it’s all jest and banter.

What a simple notion, to go. How stupid it seems now, to have stayed.

It is deeply ingrained in us, Dalmatians, this yearning to return home. Like we are born with a homing beacon, this need is always present, a rope tightening, pulling us back.

see only shades of gray. Some people, the majority, see the basic colors. But a few have this incredible gift,” she leaned in, and for the first time I felt warmth emanating from this woman, “and see all the glorious hues and gradations of gold, teal, turquoise, peach. You, Ivona, are one of those lucky few who see the whole spectrum.”

I often walk by those villas on my way to the town center, daydreaming of waking in one of the rooms with high ceilings, gossamer white curtains swaying in a gust of sea air, framing a view not unlike this one. Not because I dream of being rich, but because there’s something about waking up to such a view that makes you take life in big gulps.

he’d learned then that there was no point in trying to force grief out of people, not until it was ready to come out on its own.

straighten in my chair. The thing about feeling too much is that sometimes you have to force

yourself to feel less. That in order to preserve your heart, you have to close it off, deliberately deny it its main function, and reduce it to a mere pump.

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,

I squeeze the sponge dry, gathering thoughts that scatter like beads of soapy water over the ship’s beams.

I breathe in, looking around the marina. A cool breeze sweeps in from the park across the street, raising the hairs on my arms. The evening is so beautiful it hurts. It feels abundant, like raw potential, like everything is possible, but nobody knows better than I do how misguiding potential can be.

For the first time, they reveal themselves to me for what they were. Choices. My choices. Because even conceding to someone else’s wishes, giving in to meet someone else’s needs—even sacrificing yourself—is a choice. These decisions then became threads, that became strings, that became ropes, wound tight around me, and Dad, and Vlaho, and all the other

he sent me a poem about an olive tree he had “accidentally come across” online, as if one can stumble upon poetry without intending to,

“Seasons,” I say. “That it’s forever changing, but always stays the same. That it makes you feel alive

like nothing else can. That’s what I love the most about this place.”

There’s something about the way he kisses that reminds me of Beethoven symphonies, the constant change of tempo, a buildup, a release. Adagio, andante, presto. It’s making me a little lightheaded.

He’s right, of course. It was selfless and selfish at the same time. An act of altruism, rooted in fear, as so many of my decisions have been. I was so afraid of taking ownership, of taking up space. Afraid of waiting for loss so much that I did the act of cutting myself. The fact that Asier sees me with such clarity is both scary and riveting.

To accept that you were wrong about something isn’t only to accept the mistake itself. It’s accepting each time you acted

on that false belief.

It wasn’t that I didn’t have anything to tell her. It was that I was afraid that if I did speak, she still wouldn’t listen.

My heart sits a little more comfortably, a little more open in my chest.

There is so much blood under my own skin right now, all the vessels, veins, and capillaries bursting with life. Life, as in the good and the bad. Or perhaps, the good alongside the bad. The warmth to wistful smiles, the happiness that comes with an expiration date. The exhilaration of having something, perfectly balanced with the despair of losing it. But does the loss negate the happiness that preceded it?

If I had known I’d lose the grove, would I not have groomed it anyway? If I had known I’d lose Vlaho, would I have renounced him on that first night? If there is a certainty that I will invest in this new relationship with Asier and end up disillusioned and scarred, would the journey still not be worth it?

THERE’S AN ACRONYM WE use in Croatia that perfectly summarizes the absurdity of our bureaucracy: F-T-1-P. It’s short for “Fali ti jedan papir,”

which literally means, “You’re one paper short.” It captures not only the nature of our bureaucratic system, but how we choose to deal with it as well. Not with anger and rage that lead to protests and change, but with ironic jokes that allow for things to stay exactly the same.

“It’s like we’re in the belly of the universe,” he says, and I feel a surge of pride for my beautiful country. I think of my mom for some reason, how easy it is for love to live right next door to resentment.

Varoš is the quaintest part of the old town, where streets are the narrowest and the buildings huddle together like gossiping old nanas.

It seems to me we’ve always been, and always will be, two islands bathing in the same sea with our backs to each other—him facing the sun, me facing the moon, both of us resenting the light the other got. But one of those lights has gone out already, and now the other one is fading too. I guess where it leaves us, then, is in the dark.