aut-aut

Despite impossible schedules and emotional fatigue, some friends continue returning. They send memes during meetings. They remember your important dates. They call you out-of-the-blue. Not because it is convenient. But because somewhere, beneath all the exhaustion adulthood imposes, they still consider your inner life important. Sometimes it is simply the stubborn decision to keep returning to people despite the world constantly training you to prioritise everything else.

Serbian couple from the village of Kraljevac, Banatska Crna Gora, Romania, 1907. Radivoj Simonović

“I also came to know certain pages of the village Decameron. Girls whose brothers guarded them from every breeze, and who, until marriage, had never taken a scythe, a hoe, or a pitchfork into their hands.

They went to the communal well and carried water back on shoulder yokes, swaying at the waist like caryatids. Their eyes had a dark veil to them, like the color of blue plums covered in dust. They had a cheerful laughter that I still sometimes hear in dreams. They were beautiful, far more beautiful than people in the city imagine.

Only after marriage, through hard labor and miscarriages, that beauty quickly faded, turning those lovely girls into stooped, withered women. Poor nourishment and poverty smothered the song within them. And often, too, the husbands’ slaps, which, in Banat, were not spared.”