Roots Can(not) Wither?

Who am I? Where do I belong? What does it mean to have a home? These are some of the questions that have plagued me for as long as I can remember. I never felt at home in Serbia; within my family. I never felt like me. Since I was young, I didn’t fit in. My family was a puzzle, and I was the piece that didn’t fit anywhere. As hard as I tried to trim my edges, and polish them just enough so that I could complete the puzzle, it never worked. I was an impostor, a thief of my parents’ desire to have a “normal” child; one that would find a nice girl, get married, and pass on the traditions of our family. At least that’s what it always felt like. Stranded in between two competing desires – those of my family and those of my soul. I am a child of rupture, of disarray – a mere echo seeking to bounce back somewhere, to someone. Just seeking to be finally heard.  

I was told I come from a land of heroes and peasants whose duty to their home country had always exceeded their own private lives. A land of neighbors, dreamers, and nostalgics. I was raised to believe that upon birth our hearts are imprinted with a debt to those who came before; those who sang songs of freedom and courage. Mine is the country of poets who write about graveyards in the ocean, who lament the slaughter of children and recount the story of a sheep that evades being eaten by a wolf by dancing. The traditions of past generations reverberate in my blood and form the very foundation of my being. Mine is the land that bleeds for the past and weeps for the future; a land of mourners and a land of bones – destined to always stand in its own way. And yet, it never felt “mine.” It never felt like I belonged to it, nor it to me. I was an outsider in a country whose long-standing traditions and values were never built for someone like me.

I remember my aunt’s father, a Shakespeare scholar, writing a dedication for me in one of his books which had the following inscription taken from a Serbian poem: “Where I stopped, you continue onwards; we still owe a debt, you pay it back.” At the time, this inscription made me feel like I was part of something bigger than myself – a long-lasting tradition that didn’t begin or end with me. Reflecting on it now, perhaps I was wrong. What if I cannot repay that debt? The burden of this question is seared deep into my flesh.

It is a difficult space to occupy – never feeling at home in your home country, never feeling like you belong among your family members, never fitting into any space. What I naively thought, was that this emptiness would be magically filled and occupied if I just moved into other spaces. Yet, I found myself drifting more and more into isolation.

My heartbeat is not my heartbeat. It pulses in rhythm to the hearts and souls of all those who paved the way with their gentleness, whose bare feet have trod upon the cold cobblestones in search of some higher meaning. Perhaps in some future time, I will be able to walk the same path, alongside them, with no shame or guilt. Perhaps one day I will greet them as siblings without the weight of expectations. Perhaps one day I will have a home.