Time Flies
Innocence. At the age of twelve. It slipped away, inconspicuously leaving you on your own. Smiles gave place to tears. Laughter to sadness and anger. This was how nightmares took over dreams.
Childhood. Also at the age of twelve, another victim of war. You didn’t know one can lose a childhood. It struck you, out of the blue, listening to a classmate complaining about their parents, being grounded, losing an allowance and shopping privileges. You never had an allowance to lose and the only time you’d go shopping was in the eleventh hour. Even then if anything could be mended or patched up, it was. Funds were scarce and had to be preserved for more important things, like medicine and sanitary products. Though they were improvised from time to time. These were the things no one asked about as they were given. But not to you, a former refugee. You knew your parents were doing their best. Complaining was a privilege you didn’t have.
Pets. The tiny viridescent coloured budgies living in a beautiful golden cage on top of your fridge. The irony of being in the cage struck years later. And a mottled brown tortoise procrastinating on the balcony. They were left behind. You avoid mentioning a jumpy taupe bunny who died just before the war started. The loss was too hard to bear. You would have never allowed yourself to truly love a pet again.
Home. This was obvious even to you, at such a young age, when you boarded the last convoy leaving the country. Ever since you‘d been drifting, like walking through autumn, you were here and there, disappearing and coming back, not fitting in really.
Name. No one would enunciate it correctly ever again. Phonetic languages are hard for people living in countries with opaque orthography and morphological constraints. Their mispronunciation reverberating in your head, on a loop, giving you new identities was sometimes hard to shake. In time you became apathetic to it, one might even say you were excited about the prospect of a new name. Why would anyone limit themselves to a merely one?
You still get lost in translation. But knowing this was your way to accepting it.
Friends. Some willingly, and some not. Only the most determined stayed. It’s not easy being a friend to someone who loses things.
Empathy. Mainly for people who’d given up. You’d come to realise that depression was a real deal but had you given in, you wouldn’t have lived to celebrate your thirteenth. You couldn’t go silently into the night, it wasn’t in your nature. After all, you came from a country that goes through turmoil more often than some people go through partners. Perhaps it’s embedded in your DNA, the perpetual survival. Was Darwin right, you ask yourself time and again?
Later in life, you would lose many more things, refugee status being one you had never regretted.
Youth. The creases on your skin canyons deep and your nails, which you still bite. Your slender figure and tight skin to the C-section (this you welcome as it gave you your daughter, the best creation nature ever concocted). Your eyesight which you also welcome (to a certain extent) as you pretend time’s been kind. You still allow yourself these little fabrications.
Your train of thought, and occasionally your marbles. No patience for trivial things. You let them roll off your back, like the fake smiles and insincere words of contrition.
Sleep. This particular loss you don’t mind as life is too short to slumber through it.
Umbrellas. Many of them. Even now, thirty-odd years later, you can’t seem to hold onto one. Recently you made a decision not to buy them anymore. Some things are just not meant to be.
It took what seems like a lifetime to understand that endings birth new beginnings. You see your lost innocence in your daughter’s eyes. Your childhood in her playfulness. Your youth in her agility. Your husband’s and your character in her inherent behaviour. He lost many of the things you did. You’re cut from the same cloth.
You see your fleeting empathy in her kindness and it makes you wonder if all those things you lost are truly gone, or they get to live on in your child.
Andrea Damic (she/her) born in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, lives and works in Sydney, Australia. She’s an amateur photographer and writer of prose and poetry. She writes at night when everyone is asleep; when she lacks words to express herself, she uses photography to speak for her. Being a non-native English speaker makes every publication worth the struggle. Her literary art appears or is forthcoming in JMWW, Bending Genres, Roi Fainéant Press, The Ekphrastic Review, Sky Island Journal, The Dribble Drabble Review, Your Impossible Voice, and elsewhere. She spends many an hour fiddling around with her website https://damicandrea.wordpress.com/. You can also find her on X @DamicAndrea, Instagram @damicandrea and FB @AndreaDamic.
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