The Shores of now

I stood there, the waves washing away my footprints. My eyes raised to the clouds, I could hear only my own thoughts. Love untranslated, music played and played. As the glare from a hot Croatian sun returned, so too did my mind to the world of the living. I walked back up the shore and pulled my towel from the stones. 

Hours ate the sunlight and the pinks and orange of dusk began to peak above the horizon. I gathered my few belongings and began the trek back along the coast. I passed families and fishermen anchoring their boats just off shore, shouting in a tongue I could not understand. My flip-flops slapped against the cobbles as I wound through the allies of Hvar. The hostel was empty and still. Muted conversation floated through rooms on a salt-air breeze. My fingers traced the worn wooden stairrail, up to the top floor, to the six-person room I shared with my American friend. No one else had checked in, and we were relieved for this respite from packed bunk beds and busy bathrooms. 

Cold shower water felt so good against my sunburnt skin. I stood there for a long time, watching sand fall away from my body, like all the small moments I would never remember no matter how hard I tried. I got ready for the night, pulling clothes from my too-small bag, twisting scarfs into shapes I hoped would pass for a shirt. 

James knocked on the door just as I was trying to find where I had put my shoes. I pulled a handle of rakija from the depths of my locker and opened it amongst laughter and thrilled conversation about the night ahead. 

It was my first truly solo trip, or at least it had felt like it. A long month studying in Palermo. Endless nights spent in La Vucciria, surrounded by strangers who had become my siblings. Sun-drenched days wiled away at Mondello, turquoise blue waters stretching as far as I could see, hemmed in by a mountainous coast. My eyes skipped across the Mediterranean waves, with nothing to search for, nothing to become. 

It was on one of those serene days that my professor told me she didn’t dare touch the sea, for the memories of migrants and refugees who had died in those waters haunted her. They made her feel uncomfortable and maybe a little bit guilty; that a happy vacation for us was a dream for others. That the water we danced in was a graveyard for thousands of children. 

After that day I could never look at the sea in the same way again. After that day, my hours spent learning from humanitarians and activists became everything. I couldn’t live with myself knowing that what waited for me back home was a cozy laboratory life. A life spent studying cures to degenerative diseases that onset at an age most people could only aspire to reach. The years of research felt hollow, they became unjust and lacking. 

Not long after this change in my heart, I left Palermo. Riding the tails of dengue fever or possibly chikungunya, I flew to the ancient walls of Salamanca to stay with a childhood friend. 

My stomach was still recovering and my bones were starting to feel comfortable again. I passed a few days lost down old passageways lined in golden stone. Resurfacing into town squares and market streets for my daily ration of gelato and to go souvenir hunting through stalls of clothing, books, and keychains. 

From Salamanca I flew on to Split, that historic Roman town on the Adriatic. I met up with a university friend and we took a rust-painted taxi into the center of town to find our hostel. The driver was an old man who smelled strongly of cigars and hummed along to an ancient radio as he swerved in and out of traffic along the coastal highway. 

The hostel owner was a woman whom everyone called Mama. She bustled about the rooms, changing linens and making tea. My friend and I stood back, observing. It was a small apartment. Four bedrooms with curtained bunkbeds, a living room with a small kitchen set-up and a sagging grey couch, two tiled common bathrooms, and a little balcony overlooking an empty courtyard. White lace window curtains floated gently up from cracked kitchen sills and the sunset played colors across the floorboards

There were only a few other residents besides Mama. A tall Slovenian man deeply absorbed in the laptop he had propped up awkwardly on a bookcase behind the couch. A short woman from India who kept smiling over at us and who was engaged in a broken conversation with Mama, exchanging hurried comments as she flitted around. A trio of Australians: two boys and a girl who told us they had met at a surfing hostel on the Gold Coast the year before, and who were reuniting there in Split. The boys mentioned that if my friend and I were interested, we could join them at a club later on. The girl quickly added that their nights tended to include mysterious substances and lost hours. There was also a boy from Mexico City, not much older than us. Diego welcomed us with open arms, proverbially and literally, inviting us to dinner that night. 

A few hours later, after we had refreshed the travel away and gotten accustomed to our new lodgings, we found ourselves sitting in a stone grotto restaurant beneath the outskirts of Old Town. Diego and his friend ordered our meals for us, insisting we try pašticada, a traditional Croatian dish of stew and gnocchi. I don’t know if it was the long day of buses, trains, planes, and taxis that we had endured, or the slow recovery of my appetite from weeks of crackers and tonic water, but I remember that being one of the best meals I have ever had the pleasure to consume.

We made the rounds of Old Town backpacker bars that night. As the hours grew, so too did the group chat Diego had begun, adding new acquaintances as we went. There was a heavily-tattooed Dutch girl and her bearded boyfriend, a Belgian girl with a sleek blonde bob who spoke no English, two young British girls on their A-levels celebration tour, a skinny boy from Hong Kong who kept getting kicked out of bars for dropping full glasses of beer on crowded dance floors. A roving group of 20-somethings lost amid cobblestone passes somewhere in the Balkans. I was so happy. I felt perfectly removed from the stress and expectations of home. 

Our journey continued in this fashion, broken only by teary goodbyes to friends we had met just days before. Promises to stay in touch, assumptions that we would be brought back together sometime, somewhere. 

I still talk to some of them. Diego and I send Instagram messages back and forth. I met up with the two British girls for drinks when I was studying abroad in London the next year. I carry with me the cigarette pack a boy from our hostel left atop my locker the night he departed, on which he wrote me a note of luck and hope. 

James and I left Split on a ferry. Sweating profusely beneath the steamy Adriatic sun, we lugged our heavy backpacks through the city to the pier. We both fell asleep on the boat, the hours of sleep deprivation weighing on us. We awoke to a small island town. You could see all of Old Town Hvar from the shore. Our new hostel was just a few minutes walk from the water, though the maze of unlabeled streets and alleys made it quite a bit longer. 

The next day we sat on the floor of our room, with an open rakija bottle and two girls we had met in Split earlier that week, then ran into again on the full beaches of our new host town. The four of us had formed a circle around the handle, trading stories back and forth about life and travel, about our home countries and our dreams. As the sun sank away we left the hostel, buoyed up on the buzz of alcohol, drifting through ancient streets towards the beach bar we had claimed as our second home. 

It was perched on a rocky outcropping about half a mile down the coast. There were no walls, no ceilings, only wooden tables and several bar counters bustling with activity, manned by frazzled bartenders, from which the rhythm of afrobeats flowed. The four of us stood there, gazing out across the sea. Sailboats and cruise ships dotted the horizon. My body waved like the branches of young cypress trees in the wind. I was completely unburdened by life. I had everything that I needed, everything that I wanted. It was a peace that I have rarely returned to since; an assuredness that everything is working out exactly how it should. 

I felt my phone buzz gently in my back pocket. I reached down for it, sure it was a message from yet another one of my newfound friends saying that they saw me in Hvar and how amazing it was that we could meet again. I clicked my phone on and my body immediately returned to absolute stillness. For a second, I could no longer hear the music that pulsed around me. My hands shook in silent frustration as I scrolled through an Apple News notification from the BBC. 

“Greek coastguard threw migrants overboard to their deaths, witnesses say.”

My mind went blank. The rakija evaporated. And suddenly, it was my lack of burden that burdened me. Suddenly, the bar and the people and their carefree dancing disgusted me. I disgusted myself. How could I be enjoying a night like this when not far away, in waters I had floated in earlier, people were dying for the crime of wanting to live? 

It is a feeling I have yet to reconcile; a guilt that haunts me every day. How can I be comfortable in my privilege when there are girls just like me suffering because they were unlucky enough to be born into a different life? 

This question follows me, existential as it is it has continued to consume my mind. As I traveled home, then back to the Balkans and across stretches of Europe and Africa, it hangs on my every breath.

The answer I have come to is far from perfect, but it is better than having none at all. We must, as humans, strive above all to make a difference in this unjust and often cruel world. It is wrong beyond reason to absolve oneself of any responsibility to help others simply because you refuse to make yourself aware of the issues they face. Their suffering is not equivalent to your comfort; it supersedes it a hundredfold. 

That is not to say that enjoyment and happiness is bad. In fact, it is also our responsibility to appreciate what we are fortunate to have, to take advantage of the amazing experiences open to us. After all, the human experience is exactly what we make it. It exists only in tandem with our perceptions. 

Earth is beautiful. Humanity is beautiful. But the way we choose to treat others and the world around us can stain that beauty beyond recognition. It can mean that we look around at the rubble and ashes and proclaim that humans have failed. However, this is far from the truth. For if we can see the rubble and ashes, if we can feel the pain and suffering, it means that we still have eyes to envision a better world and the bodies to build it. Hope can never be lost so long as humanity prevails. Because love is stronger than hate, and goodness is stronger than fear.

I have met hundreds of people along my travels, and I have made countless friends. People truly are good at heart. It is their circumstances that corrupt them. It is their struggles that harden them. When all you know is what you have been told by others who seek to contain you, to control you, then people who are different become people to fear. 

Exposure to other cultures and peoples is the cure to prejudice. Learning and teaching and loving and moving is the only way that we, as humans, can overcome this fear.

So I stood there, on wooden floorboards painted with salt water. My eyes raised to the stars, I could hear only my own thoughts. And I made a solemn promise, to myself and to the world. That I would take my privilege, take my passions and gifts and faculties and put them towards betterment. And that is what Kulterra is built on. Nights spent laughing and singing with strangers. Hours consumed by scopa and hearts, by exploration and art. But also by a conversation with my friend who was held captive by human traffickers in the Libyan desert on his journey to Europe. By dinner with a woman who lost her husband and sons to an ethnic cleansing in the Bosian countryside. By the stories, the testimonies of so many people who have suffered and died because of the circumstances they were born into. 

The Kulterra Collective represents a celebration of humanity and a forum for progress. Our mission is nothing less than to promote goodness and understanding across cultures. Because humanity is beautiful, and too few people get to experience its depths. Because maybe, if we could just talk to people who disagree with us, who are scared of us, they will grow to love us as we love ourselves. Because if you understand someone, truly understand them, you can’t help but love them.

-To writing new narratives