Every year after summer vacation comes the familiar school-essay prompt: “How did you spend your summer vacation?”
Go ahead and try answering that honestly. I didn’t make it to Greece, for reasons already covered before the summer even started. I couldn’t make it to my uncle’s either, a visa problem again, since he’s out in a village in Germany.
So where better to spend it than our own square, packed with the migratory birds who’d flown back for mating season in Kosovo, some of whom found their life’s fortune here and brought someone back with them to settle into the diaspora. Some of them arrived in rental cars, others in their own, loaded with debt and a few looking to sell a car before flying back out, timing their return trip and the search for a better life around it. In the beginning and now at the end of the square, we’re all still circling the same spot. Now there’s a second square too, so we’ve got three total instead of one. Hopefully we’re figuring out who gets to stay where and who doesn’t.
I’ve heard plenty of opinions about these new squares, arguments that Pristina should be centered entirely around them, over other locations that matter less. Now the squares apparently need several million euros of citizens’ money spent to fix up citizens’ lives, even though, in my opinion, a slab of concrete or marble more or less doesn’t change much for the average person who never had the chance to cool off at a real beach this summer anyway. Which raises the question: now that we’re all stuck in Pristina, how exactly are the next generation supposed to go visit “the uncle in the village” the way we did? Uncle doesn’t live in the village anymore either. There’s nowhere left to go.
From before the war, two things stick with me: that I didn’t complain nearly this much back then and that when I did, it was only ever about the Serbs. It isn’t the Serbs now. I genuinely don’t know who’s left to hand a piece of the blame to for the impossible, chaotic life quietly taking shape in this country.
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