skullcrusher

american nightmare

the croatian seaside is my second home. i am still looking for the first one.

i left my heart in a mediterranean summer night that smelled of italian strawflowers and lavender. the moths and flies swarmed, covered every inch of my sunkissed skin. i wasn't rotting then, not yet, but even they could tell i was done for.

i think my favourite part of the seaside was never the sea.

i walked barefoot from nevada to georgia. i thought maybe the south was like the adriatic coast, but even the scorching summer heat felt unfamiliar to my skin. it shouldn't have. we had afternoons just like those in dalmatia.

the new mexico jewlery (that i'm pretty sure originally belonged to the navajo people, i should add) wasn't anything like the one they had hung up on stands in skradin, and the sellers were nothing like that sweet old man in istria that gave me that cat necklace for free and told me not to tell my mother. he showed me pictures of his granddaughter, and his cat sat by his work table, purring gently. he said he'd remember me once i'd come back.

i haven't been to istria since, and the cat necklace broke off after only a couple of days of me wearing it.

the signs in texas told me to repent. jesus is coming, they screamed at me in capital red letters. i think the people of texas should be the ones repenting. no son of god would step foot into a state that waves all those flags.

i passed through oklahoma even though i didn't have to, then through arkansas, then tennessee. my feet might hold even more blisters than my heart does, but i don't regret leaving. a dream brought me to the united states, and it continued to carry my worn out mind through.

this woman in oklahoma, in a small shop in the middle of nowhere, was part of my dream too, whether she was there to help me live and flourish, or i dreamed her up as well. she gave me a cream for my sunburn and i jokingly argued that it was already too late, that the damage had been done, but she looked at me with a wisdom instead of laughing.

"it never is," she said, and i don't think she was talking about my sunburn anymore.

she looked about as old as my mother, though i know somewhere in me that she was young at heart, even as i don't know her. i don't know her, i don't know her name, i don't know anything about her, but she had chestnut brown hair, the type of tan you can only have from living in the heat for the longest time; hyperpigmentation freckles littered her face and a collection of wrinkles surrounded her gleaming, warm eyes.

she didn't ask me to pay for the things she gave me, either. i looked like i had been through enough.

georgia is not my home and it'll never be, but nevada was not my home, either. home is not a place, i learned, that's why i'm out here wandering the states rather that living in one. instead, i look for an adventure, a story, a new chapter, a new family.

the last i had of that was in my great grandmother's small, adress-less, dalmatian house, fifteen minutes away from the beach.