J and I met on one soggy afternoon at a charity networking event. She was there to represent her organization, I a creeping wallflower looking for new causes to attach myself. We struck up a conversation, thus beginning roughly two years of friendship.
It was one of those relationships made up of long stretches of total silence, interrupted by the occasional coffee where chats are resumed as if in continuation of yesterday. We sometimes caught fragments of each other’s worlds, and shared a profound and ineffable connection.
J and her husband are moving to Belgium next week. But first they’re making a detour to Argentina for a much deserved rest on the banks of Rio Parana, then a trip back home to Serbia. They met in college, both strangers to this country. She was an activist advocating for sustainability in the face of a rapacious society, he an artist confined to monochrome. I sometimes wondered if it was this shared discord with their surroundings that had brought them together. Sadly this is a conversation we probably won’t ever get to share.
We did talk about how she found herself here, apt topic on the eve of her departure. Her story began with sitting in class, at the age of nineteen, listening to her professor describe a beautiful land of ancient, tortured people. The teacher asked if she wanted to move there, and she said yes. She imagined this place to be a canvas of misty watercolor, when in actuality her first year consisted of sleepless nights rolling in soggy bedsheet, and a course on ‘international politics’ that was apparently set in a fictional world where the only other country existed was America.
Around this time she found her calling. Growing up in the tremulous years of the Yugoslav wars, she had a resilience that few others shared, and was undaunted by what would emerge to be a monstrous challenge: save the planet.
But this place has a way of grinding you down. It feeds on zeal and replaces it with apathy. Outsiders eventually lose their ‘otherness’ or be driven away. After seven long years J has decided to move on.
“I’m as enchanted as I was seven years ago.” Those was her parting words to me. “But this is a place I can only love from afar.”
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