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essays | places
Bosnia and Herzegovina
bullet holes and make-up
Bullet holes and makeup
eventually they made up
let bygones be bygones
from buy guns to bye guns
too many dead from the fight
many more dead inside
after the twilight the night
only mascara can turn it bright
light as a kite
what you can’t fathom
you can only forget
a glimpse
passages RIP | Why rip their children’s beds to shreds with shrapnel fury and rocket rage? Why rip those families and friends apart for someone else’s change of heart? Why rip into those lives with bullets and knives, buy greedy gain with blackest pain? Why rip open their roofs with misled missiles guided by the ill indifference of those sitting afar? Why rip off their limbs with the obsession of those few who knew, who sow their green in other’s blood? Why rip peace into pieces for all of humanity’s worst reasons? R.I.P.
Sarajevo / Bosnia and Herzegovina · 2017
While everybody devours the views from the Old Bridge, its neighbor's are up for grabs.
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pristine blue
Mostar / Bosnia and Herzegovina · 2017
You see corner shops disappear at every corner. Well, every other corner.
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corner shoppers
Sarajevo / Bosnia and Herzegovina · 2017
places / stories
Sarajevo / Scars Like Trenches
The scars were bullet-shaped holes. Deep too, like trenches. But they'd plastered so much makeup over the surface that eventually those holes looked more like shadows.
Nobody looked at me. When you blend in, you are invisible. And that invisibility is a freedom. I indulged many freedoms in Latin America, Asia, and Africa, many more than were afforded to me by any Western straitjacket-state, but not this one. Suddenly, my DNA read person, not foreigner. I’d almost forgotten because what you don’t have doesn’t take up much space in your mind. And so I walked and smiled invisibly until I’d left at least one or two atoms of mine in every nook and cranny of Sarajevo.
Mostar / Drinks and Times
Helena A refugee of the Bosnian war, Helena had to leave her home country, but it never left her. Throughout all those years in Finland, and the more recent chapter in Croatia’s Zagreb, she missed the heartiness that runs deep in Bosnian culture and people. And matters of the heart matter, more than others. That’s why Helena moved back. Leveraging the capital of her business background, she now runs a hostel with her friend Vecca who shares the same history and itenarary of displacement. The two women go way back and make the perfect match going forward with this endeavor – Helena lighting up the place with her mischievous ways, and Vecca holding it together and down-to-earth.
Mostar / Bosnia and Herzegovina · 2017
I could have spent a little lifetime in Bosnia, if I had one to spare, and I knew that the moment I knew them. Helena and Vecca and good laughs and drinks and times. How easy a life when no one is watching, when there’s nothing to do but to be and raise a bottle and down some doubts.
During the day, that town was a circus but at night it was empty and quiet as a funeral home.
Unfinished business I have none, not there, not anywhere. But unfinished games, plenty.
elsewhere
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