Time Shelter

Sooner or later all utopias turn into historical novels.

The nation nationalized, the fatherland fathered anew. I wrote that online. Less than an hour later I had been reported and my account had been blocked.
I managed to catch a flight out the next day.
The borders were closed two days later.
After a dictatorship of the future, as my friend K. would say, came the dictatorship of the past.
It’s nice to know your home country so well that you can leave it shortly before the trap springs.
I had already lived through what was to come.

If anything can save this country from all the kitsch that is raining down on it, that is laziness and apathy alone.

I no longer remember who said that a nation was a group of people who have agreed to jointly remember and forget the same things.

Never, ever visit a place you left as a child after a long absence. It has been replaced, emptied of time, abandoned, ghostly.

Then you saw some book on my bed, that very first night, we had just gotten undressed, you turned around and said no way, I’ve got to go, I can’t sleep with someone who reads Coelho

A few years ago I flew on some domestic flight from Belgrade to Montenegro standing up as if on a bus, hanging on to a metal bar. The driver, pardon me, the pilot, was just an arm’s length away from me. There was no door, just a threadbare curtain that was unhooked on one side, so he and I shot the breeze a bit. At one point he lit up a cigarette and I was praying he didn’t open up the window to ash outside, and thus wreak havoc with the cabin pressure.

If we are not in someone else’s memory, do we even exist at all?

Was it some sort of joke, planting forget-me-nots in front of a geriatric psychiatric center?

I wrote that, clearly, in order to survive there, in a new place, you had to cut off the past and to throw it to the dogs.