Tiles
A year ago, Karina moved into the apartment that her father gave her to use, but she felt a strong restlessness deep inside. That apartment belonged to her grandparents, it was the place where she grew up and she somehow felt that it belonged to her, without having to obtain a “permission” by her father.
One winter night, she sat alone in the apartment and felt lost. She should have been happy, probably, but there was some kind of unclean energy in the air. Not knowing what to do with herself, Karina took a pen and a sheet of paper, and began to spill words without thinking.
“A choice without a choice… You give, but on your terms… No, I don’t want to be here, I don’t want to be in the space that you occupy even when you are not physically present in it…
You give me an apartment to use, but not a home… You seemingly give me the opportunity to choose what I want, and you silently limit me in a way that I can choose from what you want.
Here, you picked the fucking tiles yourself. Why? In order to save a bit? I mean, why did you need this whole thing with the apartment anyway? To clear your conscience, to believe that you have done something for your daughter?”
Karina looked at the letter, put the pen down on the sheet of paper. She looked around: she saw the misplaced parquet, the cracks on one wall, some slats and a bag of plaster left in the corner of the living room. Anger seized her again and she grabbed the pen.
“Can’t you see that I live in your fucking garbage… in your mess… under your roof… Even if the ugliest space in the world was to be given to me, but with pure intention and no conditioning… I would be able to turn it into a home. But like this, what should I do? Where should I plant my roots?”
She left the pen on the sheet of paper again, but remembered her friend Daria. She immediately grabbed the pen. She pressed it as if she wanted to crush it with her fingers.
“Yesterday I was at Daria’s… I saw her tiles… What did it cost you to wait for me to make the choice for MY tiles?” It’s not like a person renovates the bathroom every day… Why did I allow that? ‘You don’t check the teeth of a horse received as a gift’… this is the type of relationship I allow to be in…”
Karina paused for a moment. She asked herself whether she has ever been consulted by her parents when it came to making decisions. Perhaps it was her being excluded from the participation in the decision making that affected her, that made her feel so powerless and helpless? She kept on writing.
“Probably it’s because I don’t feel that this space is mine… and I see an opportunity that you want to invest and to help me, in a way… and in order not to miss the opportunity, I submit to your conditions… I submit spinelessly, to get anything… I feel that these are my five minutes to ‘grab and run’… What am I? A stupid mouse that eats the crumbs?’
Karina felt shivers down her body. She gritted his teeth and clutched the pen.
“Fuck you Tino… you will never be my father… never!!!
I wonder what I should do with myself? Now that I know, in the depths of my soul, that I cannot accept something given in an incomplete way…
And now what? Should I go work at McDonald’s in Germany and earn for an apartment? Should I go on a boat and work there? How can I arrive at a space and a place that gives me the feeling that I am at home… that I have arrived… that everything is fine… that I can take a breath, put down roots…”
Somewhat drained, Karina put down the pen and continued to look at the sheet of paper, which was no longer white. She imagined herself sending the letter to her father, but dreaded the thought: how he might react? She imagined him reading her words, and for a moment she was overcome with shame, and then an entire cocktail of emotions broke in: anger, rage, sadness, more shame, more anger. She took the sheet of paper, folded it in half, folded it again, and hid it in the ledge above the window. Surely no one will even think of looking for something there.
Karina could not stand the strange pressure she felt in the apartment: that space seemed to have nothing to do with her. It was as if she did not know how to get near it, to feel it as close, as her own. Why?
A month later, Karina traveled to Spain: she was given the opportunity, through a friend, to move to a commune where she lived together with thirty other young people. This living together seemed like a real dream to her at first, and it seemed to her that it could last forever. But nine months later, when she was already completely isolated from her previous life, happened something that seemed to wake her up from her dream. One morning she and several others from the commune, went out to collect wood, and Juan, one of her friends, fell from a tree and hurt his spine badly. “Hey, this could have been me”, Karina thought, and this was a thought that threw her into a long stupor. For days she thought about herself, about the people she knew, about the future… and one evening, while sitting alone in her room, she suddenly began to cry. To cry, cry, and cry. And when she stopped, she went out into the fresh air, and inhaled with a full chest. In that moment, she knew she was going back home. She knew she had something to finish.
She arrived back at her apartment in Bitola, immediately turned on the heater and sat down at the kitchen table. She took out a sheet of paper, picked up a pen, and glanced at the ledge above the window. She knew what was there. But now she knew she could do better.
She got up, went to the toilet, took a shower, and stopped on the way out. She looked at the tiles, smiled and continued, still in her peignoir, towards the kitchen. She made herself a large cup of mint tea and returned to the table. She sat down and took the pen in her hand. She glanced at the white sheet of paper and exhaled deeply.
“It’s been a while since the bathroom was renovated (okay, let’s try to forget about those tiles), so over time the anger and repulsion I had towards the whole situation have subsided.”
She paused, glanced at what was written. She liked the tone that radiated from her words. She kept on writing.
“I was often hurt by the fact that, when it came to important matters that have a long-term effect on me and the entire family, I was excluded from the decision-making process. Often I was not even informed about something that you (you, mom and Matej) had already decided. Through those situations I have felt that I do not belong in this family and that you have no respect for me as a person. Hence, I wanted to emphasize that I can do it myself and that I don’t need your help for anything, if that help is not given to me wholeheartedly, without me pressuring or reminding you.
She paused and reread the text she had written. She nodded, smelled the mint, had a sip from her teacup and picked up her pen again.
“As I grow and mature, I begin to realize some things about the prism through which I perceived reality – that it was not quite right. Perhaps it is better to say that I notice that I have been quite selfish and vain in my attitudes towards life. As time passes, I become aware of the brevity of life, and with that my heart begins to soften and many perspectives and beliefs through which I experienced reality change.
Allow me to go back to the case with the tiles and the bathroom. I always had some expectations that – because I was traumatized by you – that I deserve, that is, it is logical that I am given a completely renovated apartment. I was bitter and angry that, on one hand, you are building a house for yourself and having fun with it, and, on the other hand, you give me the crumbs of “your apartment”. On top of everything you brag and you don’t help me. That was constantly the prism through which I looked at you: as an indignant little girl demanding compensation for the damage.”
Karina straightened up in her chair and exhaled deeply. She felt a great relief. For a moment she looked out the window, and remembered the rich year spent with friends in Barcelona.
“I needed to change my environment, to get the opportunity to see the things from another angle, from the adult side. Being in Spain helped me change my focus from what I don’t have, to what I have, that is, to what I have been given. For example, I no longer see that I have an old apartment, but a living space that I don’t pay rent for, and I’m really grateful for that.”
As soon as she wrote the word “grateful”, Karina felt an invisible wave of heat pass through her body. She paused, somewhat surprised. She knew of gratitude as the most healing feeling, and she hoped that one day she would be able to feel it towards her father, but she did not hope that it would come so spontaneously, “through the back door”, by writing. She smiled, hugged herself with one arm without realizing it, and encouraged, she continued to write. And she didn’t stop until she was done.
“I no longer see that I have a disgusting father who is to blame for everything that happened to me: now I see that you are a man who made mistakes in the past, but the man who exists now and who you are growing into – as hard as it was for me to admit it this on its own – is really different. He really tries and gives as much as he can, with everything he can… and that’s enough, and more than enough. It’s wonderful actually… more and more I start to see how you take care of me through small things: you are making researches in order to get closer to me, you take care of Kiki, my parrot, you’ve been paying my bills for almost a year because I’m on minimum income since I quit my job… and many other things that I’m opening my eyes to now… thank you…”
When she finished, Karina felt as if she had taken out of herself something big, something heavy, which she didn’t know if it looked more like a lead chain, or a huge lump of gold. But it didn’t matter. For a moment she wondered if maybe she should send the letter to her father, but that thought quickly evaporated: it didn’t matter either. The most important thing was that she could now sense what should be expected of her. Why should one go so far to reach something as basic as understanding?
She drank the cooled tea, got up from the chair and headed to the toilet. She opened the door and the blue color of the tiles filled her eyes. Karina continued to look at them, then her vision blurred. She remembered Juan. “I should write to him”, she thought. “I never thanked him for being my friend.”
The short story of auto-fiction “Tiles” is a co-authored work by Ana, one of the three participants in the first, “pilot” workshop on creative writing short story of auto-fiction “On the natural flow of things”, and Živko Grozdanoski, the author of the workshop, who is also the editor of the short story. “Tiles” was written in the second half of 2023 in Macedonian, along with the writing of the short stories “The weekend” and “Love letter”, by Laetty and Živko, the two “co-travellers”, and was translated into English by the author of the workshop, in consultation with the co-author, and with the help of the website Deepl.com.