I do not know who started it first -the idea was hugely exploited by many writers and actors, movie makers etc. Idea is what would have happened if a certain things in our lives decided to take specific turn or not? Or we could sublime it also into a question –who would you be now if something significant in your life took a different twist? What would have happened in a case that certain things in our lives decided to take a different outcome? Would that made a significant change, and how deep? And who would you be now and where if that was the case?
Steve Buscemi has directed the movie, a very funny and depressive in a same way, about a guy from a small American province. In one of his interviews he admitted that he was basically picturing himself and his own life that would have been lived if he never took the decision to leave the small town where he was born.
On the other hand, Paul Auster in one interview admitted that one of the main characters in his famous novel -City of Glass (The New York Trilogy, Vol 1)was constructed having in mind his own life’s circumstances that had changed rapidly at the moment when his father died, leaving the significant inheritance, that provided the possibility for Auster to became a writer in the first place. If not for that inheritance Auster's magnificent novels probably would not exist as we know them. Everything that happens with the character is basically the Auster’s imagining of himself and of the crossroad turn where his life would have taken him if there was never the money that saved him and made it possible for his art to grow.
Those are just a few examples.
I do not know why this has come on my mind today. This kind of thoughts is choosing me, and not the opposite. And is the reason for me to write this blog post after all. I have an experience of surviving the war and living in the city under the siege.
Unlike Hilary Clinton I know what is like when a real sniper bullet whistles next to your head.
As a 14 year old teenager one morning I heard the shelling and explosions. It was the begging of the war in Bosnia. The Serbian army took the city under the siege which lasted for almost 4 years.
Who was I back then? I had a collection of about 1000 comic’s books, me and my best friend were passionate comic strips addicts and we even dare to produce them and even publish in some magazines. I was also playing basketball in a local team and dreaming about becoming the NBA player. Also I was painting. In the school I was making great results. The whole world was beneath my feet. Some of you maybe remember the one of the first computers ever made – Commodore 64 – I was in the possession of one.
Like the most of kids of that time in Bosnia, or in the former state of Yugoslavia I was raised pretty much in a secular way. In my family there are Croats, Serbs and Bosnians or Bosniacs. Being from the family of such a diverse origins was at the same time a blessing and a curse.
I was never preoccupying myself with any medieval issues. But medieval issues preoccupied me and my life back then by force. Comics have disappeared; basketball disappeared, painting as well. People started to focus on the saving bare lives and questions about nationality and religion came into the focus. Serbian aggression was so brutal and it made me realize that reality could be much worst than any fiction. Those questions which I never had anything in common with, were screaming their way in now. The whole world suddenly shifted from its ground and turned into something else. I comprehended then that such a thing is possible. The word as we know it is fragile and there is always a possibility that everything that we consider for granted can easily turn into the dust. And not by our own will.
I failed to become painter although I do paint now occasionally. I have failed to become a writer. I have failed to become a creator of the comic’s books.
But I have survived. And my experience is sufficient for a couple of good novels for which I believe that would never be written. Or maybe I am wrong.
When talking with the friend the other day we recalled some of that time and also remembered of a few of our friends who were stuffed with various talents as teenagers. One of them was able to speak English fluently and even wrote rap songs with stunning rime and rhythm. The other had similar capabilities. Those were not the only things in which they were showing the unique supremacy as kids.
But one of them later killed the man accidentally; the other one became a junkie. The question that we were wondering on was - were these persons affected by the war in such an ominous and unfortunate way and become something that nobody could ever imagine that they will become? Or maybe is due to their psychological profile? Most probably- to find yourself in war surroundings could boost all your weaknesses, or on contrary, all the best that you have. But it could never give you a slightest insight on who you were meant to be. You are forbidden to even dare to try to collect the small pieces of mosaic that once constituted your soul which are suddenly turned into the fragments of unrepairable broken glass. Even if you do find a piece of that glass somehow, your face reflected in it would not be same and complete. Only thing left will be the blurred image that 20th century has swallowed irreversibly.
In the first year after the war, me and the friend of mine went to Croatian coast for a few days. Two hours drive and we were there, on the sea. I meet a beautiful girl and we stayed together for about two years. Also there was a guy with who I become friend with, a guy who owned a vacation house in that beautiful city on the Croatian coast. He was living in Germany but every summer he would come to the same gorgeous place and enjoy the sea and fun, and his nice vacation house, together with his girlfriend. I remember so many pleasant evenings there, me and my girlfriend, he and his girlfriend. That house was huge and my friend was so kind to offer a room for me and my girlfriend at our convenience, more true he was insisting for us to stay on every occasion. My girlfriend was living practically a block away, but she stayed with me in his house for the many of unforgettable nights. It was like a paradise to me because for 4 years I was unable to go to the Croatian coast, to enjoy the sea and the smell of pines. For four years I was living the life of the one of the characters from Auster’s novel – In the Country of Last Things.
And suddenly everything was there – I was young, I had a beautiful woman beside me, and a friend was inviting us again for a bottle of vine in summer garden of his house. Like a piranha forced on the vegetarian style of life for so long finds sudden opportunity for feast- I was grabbing it all.
So many evenings spent in my friend’s garden with our girlfriends are now some of the gentlest memories of my life.
In the living room of that same house there was a sofa. Sofa like so many others, brown with the nice tiny brown straps, there was nothing special about it. It hit me that I had noticed it only the second or the third time I had a chance to be in that room.
-I used to have same sofa!! – I bursted one night in front of everybody, and suddenly interrupted the conversation that was at its peak. Everybody turned at me in doubt. I just repeated for a one more time- I used to have the same sofa! And than I realized that my behavior might seem little strange to the others.
Only later that night when I was alone with my girlfriend I explained to her that in my house back home, in the house that was damaged by shells during the war – the very same kind of the sofa, with exactly the same color and model used to occupy the most important part of our living room. That same sofa was damaged during the bombing when many parts of the other furniture were smashed. My sofa was turned into pieces already for a long time since then. Pieces of its fabric and wooden texture are now rotten and lost like the pieces of so many things that once constituted my world. And I was looking at it now, at the very same sofa, it was there like it always used to be, untouched, me and my girlfriend were sitting on it and touching each other hands gently.
