Our desires are a strange thing. Are they prompted by some of our knowledge of future events so that they appear so suddenly, in a way that is not understandable to us? They occupy our thoughts, so it seems to us that these are our desires and hopes, unaware that this may be just our vision of the future, shaped by the way we see it. In any case, God fulfills desires, sometimes not exactly in the way we imagined them, but in a way that did not even appear to us in our dreams.
In my early youth, in my fantasies about the world and life, there was a desire to travel around the world, to pass through the vast expanses of the Earth, and get to know other ambiance and people. At first, the thought was fluttering like a butterfly. Fickle. It would appear in moments when I was holding a textbook with material that did not interest me, and actually drove me somewhere far from the room where I was studying, to distant places I knew existed and were becoming close to me in my mind. I have to be grateful for those boring topics that made me fantasize about the world we live in, and about some unexplored areas that attracted me. Ever since the day I walked, there has been a spirit of an explorer in me, a spirit that always made me want to know what was behind the hill at the end of the meadow where I was playing. There across the river that I couldn’t cross. There, across the borders of our homeland, where some people spoke foreign languages, unknown to me. Over time, these thoughts stabilized, grew into a desire, and then slowly into a sketch of a plan for a trip around the world. I even started saving money from my pocket money for the journey I was preparing. In some distant future, the day I graduated from school and university, and when I was independent enough to start the trip. In all these images I created, I saw various countries, distant Africa, and its colorful world, which I knew only through photographs or television shows. So then I traveled, in my mind, through South America, through the wonderful streets of Buenos Aires, or climbing the heights of the Andes, or sailing the Amazon. Every uninteresting subject in history or language, the various Iliads and Odysseys, the different chemical formulas of glucose and fructose, pointed me toward a journey, toward the desire to set off when the conditions were right. My desire oscillated; in the moments when I spent time in company or on vacation, it disappeared, only to reappear when the monotony of school obligations reigned around me, and I was mastering material that I was not sure I would even need throughout my life. I never told anyone about my plan. I kept a small diary with a rough sketch of the plan, never clearly exposing what my plans were, but in a twisted, ambiguous way, as if writing an essay, using various stylistic figures to hint at what the plan might be. In that diary, a cash register with the savings balance was also kept. Like any plan, this one had its own time beginning and a place from where I would start and where I would go. The place of departure, Sarajevo, was already determined from the beginning, and the time when I was supposed to leave mathematically indicated the beginning of the nineties of the twentieth century. Only the route of the trip was not clearly determined, although the time required to go around the world was approximately several years. In these fantasies, I did not think about my family, brother, and parents, nor about friends or crushes and loves. All this was in the background because the main goal was a journey into the unknown. Unfolding the plans, in my mind, one route emerged as dominant and most attractive, almost realistic. I would go east, through Serbia and Macedonia to Bulgaria, and then to Istanbul and further through Anatolia to the east. This is where the route was interrupted, still unsure whether to continue my journey east towards Iraq and Iran and further to Asia or to turn south, towards the Middle East to Syria, then Lebanon and Jordan, and further south to Africa. Countless times in my mind, I walked east through Sofia, Istanbul, and Ankara, always adding details that seemed interesting in my imagination. And the more time I had to fantasize, the further I got on my way.
They say that for a wish to come true, you don’t need to think about it actively; you need to imagine it and let time do its job for the wish to come true. Growing up in Sarajevo, I came to see my fantasy of traveling around the world spontaneously as unrealistic. In love with the city I discover every day, I realized it is a place that fills my heart with joy, whether it was the smells of the city, its crisp air, or cold water, kind-hearted people, friends or family, sympathy and love, or the specific language of the city. Places to go out, food, sports, or music. The eternal drinking of coffee and the lightness of existence that I felt with each new morning. Each return to Sarajevo after various trips brought a new sense of joy, and regardless of the beauty of the places I was returning from, coming to Sarajevo always had a special charm. All those little everyday things that fed my soul with peace and love pushed my plans away from my early youth. All that remained was a diary that sometimes reminded me of my fantasies and plans for the trip.
And then, overnight, the departure date became clear. On Friday, April 17, 1992, quite unexpectedly, I set off from Sarajevo airport via Belgrade, Skopje, and Stip, through Bulgaria, to Istanbul, then to the Middle East, to Syria. It was just as I had imagined many years earlier. The only thing is that the desire, the youthful one, to travel has disappeared. But it was too late to give up. The images of the coming war and a dark cloud that hung over Bosnia were the final warning. The images of Istanbul, Damascus, and Latakia became closer and were as I had painted them in my fantasies. Everything was familiar to me in some indescribable way. When I was walking through the streets of Latakia with my father one evening, he asked me what Syria and the city I had arrived in looked like. I said, briefly, just as I imagined the Arab world. Live streets, crowds of people on the streets, street vendors, loud speech, and noise—Arabic music in the background. I must have seen it in a previous life or in a dream. And the desire, was it really a desire or a vision of something in the future?
Leave a Reply