When you talk,
I hear the birds sing

Even 30 years after it happened, the trauma is still very real. When the light hits the room in a special way, his mind travels back to his childhood, and he gets lost in his thoughts. Some days, he barely recognizes himself in the mirror, feeling like a stranger trapped in his own body, making it hard for him to identify with himself. These are also the moments when my voice and face become unfamiliar and strange to him. It is hard, for both of us.

Zrinko’s home country doesn’t exist anymore. When he was 3 years old, Yugoslavia vanished and got split up into little pieces. New borders arose, and old ones disappeared. All that remains is the collective nostalgia of a supposedly better time, and the trauma that gets passed on from one generation to the next.