Obssessions. And a Birthday.

I've been kneeling on the living-room carpet for a while, surrounded by plastic bags full of papers, notes, notebooks, paperslips or receipts of various kinds. My knees are beginning to get sore, but I continue to turn each sheet over carefully, my fingertips dusty from the particles of time accumulated over the years. What am I looking for? A message, a sign, anything.

I wonder what you would say to this bulk of papers -- your papers -- a mountain range of a life documented. In fact, perhaps it was you who put all those assorted items together, I'm not sure. Your obssession for keeping, not throwing away, storing bits of previous lives is my obssession too, and I love it. Maybe I'm even worse (sometimes I find it difficult to chuck plastic bags from a specific place, like "Tropic" in Banja Luka; see, I told you). Such a persistently hoarded collection makes it so easy to reconnect: you just plunge your hand in, pull out a piece of your past still throbbing with life, and off you go for a ride, without as much as a ticket. Or perhaps all that is simply a precaution against a possible total amnesia (of one sort or another), where you would at least have the shreds of yourself readily at hand, to start reconstructing, glueing, piecing back together.

Let's see. One bag is full of dozens of copies of some pharmaceutical review you received over the years; I leaf through them here and there -- occasionally I dig out a loose sheet with an unconnected note from the entrails of this or that issue, and this is a real find. Written down who knows when, slipped into a book and forgotten, the words first blink blindly at the surprising light of day they've been exposed to, but quickly pull themselves together, and start to mean. And, torn out of context, they mean fiercely, proudly.

Some of the more recent notes are a zillion loose sheets, and a few old agendas filled from cover to cover with your writings on how to use the computer. From the moment you got our first "home computer" in August 2001, you spent an enormous amount of time trying to get to know how the machine works, sitting at my old school desk in the children's room which became your computer corner. All this so you could communicate with me more easily (none of us liked to remember those times in 1999 when we could afford to talk on the phone only once a month). Page after page covered in notes and diagrams and reminders on how to perform basic operations, described down to the smallest detail. I remember how frustrated you were a few times when the internet wouldn't work for some reason, and you had to go fetch Drazen from the fifth floor to come look into it. And then he'd solve it in less than 5 minutes, and you would sigh with relief. Such stubborness, out of love.

A whole other bunch contains your notes, from various time periods, taken in different English courses. At school, you learned French and German, but you always wanted to learn English -- you said it was the most melodious language. With your musical ear, it would be hard to dispute this. Some of these notes are little scraps of paper where you scribbled quickly a phrase you heard in a movie, and wanted to memorize it. Some of them are more systematic exercises from the courses they offered at your work; some are exercises which you did yourself, from the textbook "Assimil" (4 audio cassettes included), or which I made for you in the form of a quiz -- I even found I graded you a couple of times! (You were very good; and I'm realizing, again, that all my studious note-taking, all my success at school, is just an extension of yours). There is a series of paper slips where you were practicing the spelling and memorizing some fixed phrases, all of which involved a few recurring characters, one of which is Martin. It's funny, you know: I'm sitting on the living-room floor, reading these things you wrote maybe ten years ago (?), pretending that you were then already addressing Martin, whom I was to meet several years later. And it's strange, and cute, this communication across time, and it puts a permanent smile on my face.

Uncategorized and strewn around without any recognizable order are numerous bits of paper with notes written for specific occasions; some of them undecipherable now, when the occasion is long forgotten. I remember your notes when Srdjan and I went to elementary school: they'd wait for us on the kitchen table, with clear instructions on what to get in the grocery store, or where in the fridge exactly to find lunch. Even now I like leaving and finding notes; they're a small aid in mapping out the day, giving some coordinates on who/what/where/when, pre-empting a possible momentary lapse into the chaos of infinite possibilities. This note I found unattached to anything else, although it clearly accompanied a present of some kind -- in it, your clean rounded handwriting is wishing me a happy and carefree fifteenth birthday from you and dad.

Digging even further back in time, I stumble upon your university notebooks: pile upon pile of neat little notebooks, filled with your conscientious writing, and almost no doodles (this is where our student habits differ: my stuff was always covered in all kinds of distracted notes to self or pathetically adolescent messages to the world that no one was ever going to see). Biochemistry, organic chemistry, pharmacology, physics -- mounds of carefully recorded knowledge you thought you might need again, and kept (I did find in one of the notebooks something that got there by mistake, I suppose: a little transparent plastic bag with the lyrics of a few songs and chord changes that you probably heard on the radio and collected for your parents' musical performances -- perhaps you even played some of those songs with them when you went home in the summer, to join the family band). My favourite is this orange biochemistry notebook, with covers almost polished from age and handling. Not expecting anything unusual, I turn a few pages where the ink of your pen is somewhat faded but still perfectly legible -- and suddenly I see something which makes me feel as if I were looking into a mirror. It's me. Next to your notes listing some elements and their properties, there are scribblings of the little me: strange scenes made up of awkwardly arranged angular shapes and whimsical lines, suggesting the outlines of two faces at the bottom of the page. Perhaps it was one afternoon when you were studying for your last exams, and I was waiting for you to finish, and you gave me a pencil and one of your notebooks... Perhaps it was like that. I don't remember this, but it doesn't matter. This simple notebook has held us together, page by page, ever since then.

There are endless and unimaginable ways of being (together), and I am discovering them daily. The most beautiful thing of all: none of this depends on anyone or anything else. This is only between you and me.

Happy Birthday!