Marketplace

There was a time, not long ago, when everything felt like it was being pulled away even as I held it. The weight of distance, the sense that even the people I trusted most were somehow just outside reach - that was the shape of it. I live in Zagreb, and I remember writing to Elena, a friend I turn to when things get hard to name, about how effortfulness had settled into the ordinary, the way even rain on the old stone outside my window felt slightly far away.