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 incomprehensible 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 perceive it. In any case, God grants wishes, sometimes not exactly as we imagined them, but in a way that we never dreamed of.
In my early youth, my fantasies about the world and life were filled with a desire to travel around the world, to traverse the Earth’s vast expanses and encounter diverse climates and people. At first, the thought was as fluttering as a butterfly. Erratic. It would appear in moments when I was holding a textbook on a subject that did not interest me, and it would transport me to some distant lands, which I knew existed and were becoming closer to me in my mind. I am grateful for the boring topics that sparked my imagination about the world we live in and the unexplored areas that fascinated me. Ever since the day I walked, there had been that spirit of an explorer in me, a spirit that had always driven me to find out what was beyond the hill at the end of the meadow where I was playing. Over the river that I couldn’t cross. Across the borders of our homeland, where some people spoke foreign languages, unknown to me. Over time, these thoughts stabilized, evolved into a desire, and then gradually took shape 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. There, in some distant future, the day I finished school and college, and when I was independent enough to go on the trip. In all the paintings I created, I saw various countries, distant Africa, and its colorful world, which I knew only through paintings or television shows. So then I traveled, in my mind, through South America, through the wondrous streets of Buenos Aires, or climbing the heights of the Andes, or sailing the Amazon. Every uninteresting topic from history or language, the various Iliads and Odysseys, the different chemical formulas of glucose and fructose, led me to desire to set out when the conditions were right. My desire oscillated; in the moments when I spent time with friends or on vacation, it disappeared only to reappear when the monotony of school obligations reigned around me, and I had to master the material that I was unsure 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 stating what my plans were, but in a twisted, ambiguous way, much like writing an essay, using various stylistic figures to hint at what the plan might be. A cash register with the balance of savings was also kept in that diary. Like any plan, this one had its beginning and a point from which I would start and proceed. The place of departure, Sarajevo, had been determined from the beginning, and the time when I should leave mathematically pointed to the beginning of the nineties of the twentieth century. Only the route of the trip was not determined, although the time required to circumnavigate the world was approximately calculated to be several years. In those fantasies, I didn’t think about my family, my brother and parents, my friends, or my loves. All this was in the background because the main goal was a journey into the unknown. By explaining the plans, one route became dominant and the most attractive, almost realistic. I would head east through Serbia and Macedonia to Bulgaria, then to Istanbul and further east through Anatolia. Here, the route was interrupted, and I was still unsure whether I should continue my journey east towards Iraq and Iran, and then further to Asia, or turn south towards the Middle East, including Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan, and eventually head south to Africa. Countless times in my mind, I passed this road to the east through Sofia, Istanbul, and Ankara, always adding details that seemed interesting to me 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 thing for the wish to come true. Maturing and spending my youth in Sarajevo, my fantasizing about traveling around the world spontaneously receded. In love with the city that I discovered every day, I realized that it was a place that gives joy to my heart, whether it was the smells of the city, its crisp air, cold water, kind-hearted people, friends, family, sympathy, love, or the specific language of the city. Places to go out, food, sports, or music. Coffee drinking and the lightness of existence that I felt every new morning. Each new return to Sarajevo from various trips brought a new feeling of joy, and regardless of the beauty of the places from which I returned, the arrival in Sarajevo always had a special charm. All those little everyday things that fed my soul with peace and love pushed my plans from my early youth away. Only a diary remained, which sometimes reminded me of my fantasies and plans for the trip.
And then, overnight, the departure date became clear. On Friday, April 17, 1992, I set off unexpectedly through Belgrade, Skopje, and Stip, then through Bulgaria to Istanbul and on to the Middle East, specifically to Syria. It was just as I had planned in my imagination many years earlier. The only thing is that the desire, the youthful one, to travel is gone. But it was too late to give up. This was warned by images of the coming war and a dark cloud that hung over Bosnia. The photos of Istanbul, Damascus, and Latakia were coming closer, and they were as I had painted them in my fantasies. Everything was indescribably known to me. One evening, as I walked with my father through the streets of Latakia, he asked me what Syria and the city I had arrived in looked like. I said briefly, just as I imagined the Arab world: living streets, crowds of people on the streets, street vendors, loud speech, and noise. Arabic music is in the background. I must have seen it in my previous life or a dream. And was the wish a wish or a vision of something in the future?
The text is from my second book “From Sarajevo to Hyperborea,” published in 2023. J.F.
