On My Own

Written by Marija Rakić Mimica

(IG: @marijarakic_mimica)

“Being alone has a power that very

few people can handle.”

— Steven Aitchison

“Fuck, why?” my mother screamed when I told her for the first time that I was leaving my husband.

I’m not happy. How’s that for a reason?

She was sitting on the sofa, her hair in a mess, dressed in a white robe with a cigarette in her hand, constantly scratching her face in a nervous way, like an allergic puppy.

“How are you going to survive on your own?” She looked at me as if I told her that I intended to travel to Mars on my own, in a laboratory-manufactured jet aircraft.

I don’t know. Fuck it, I don’t know how I’m going to survive on my own.

Hell, I don’t understand what it is with pushing the concept of women’s independence and then troubling us with the idea that we have to handle all life situations without help.

For one thing, I don’t know how to top up oil in my car on my own.

Once I made a mistake: as I was nervously pulling out a dipstick and putting it back, looking for markings for minimum and maximum, I was wiping it with a cloth and oil dropped all over the engine.

Or wherever.

I don’t know car parts and I don’t plan to know them. Later, while I was driving, I was waiting in panic for the smoke to start rising form under the hood, which I barely know how to lift up; last time I tried to do it, something got stuck and then I hysterically pulled it up and down until I forced it to open.

Then I gaped at the engine with no comprehension.

Since then, I just kindly ask a gentleman at a service station to check my oil, water and tyre pressure, I pay him and go in peace. Why should I do everything myself?

There are people from different walks of life. I do too many things myself anyway, in addition to raising a six-year-old girl starting school in September.

I’m not afraid of loneliness.

I’m scared of time that is ahead of me: shock reflected in confusion and real physical pain I feel because I’ve lost my partner (which I could compare to his, God forbid, death) and anger and pangs of conscience that I try to hide away from my child by acting as a monkey with a wide, unnatural smile whenever I see her around.

Meanwhile, I cry as I wash my face in the morning or most often when I’m in the car, so I’m actually making an effort, as my psychiatrist says, to channel my emotions in a meaningful direction.

I’m scared of anxiety and panic attacks which incapacitate me for daily activities, leaving me walking around my apartment like a frightened roe deer.

When this happens, my mind focuses on many things, such as where I’m going to live and how I’m going to pay new rental and cover monthly overheads, such as purchasing a new car because the current one is on the death bed, just like my marriage.

I’m lying.

Most of all, I’m scared of what happens after I submit a request for mandatory spousal consultation to the Social Welfare Centre.

After that, I’ll be waiting for their summons while thousands of thriller scenarios with elements of horror will be going on in my mind:

a socialist room with rotting and damaged brown furniture, my spouse and I sitting on wooden battered chairs, waiting for a blonde lady, her hair tied up in a casual bun and her red glasses perched on top of her nose, to acquaint us with legal, psychological and social consequences of divorce. And of course, she'll also discuss the importance of our child’s welfare and preparing joint parental custody plan.

She’s going to tell us all about it, she’ll help us to learn everything. Without looking us straight in the eyes once.

“Have you thought about what you want to do with your life?” Zoran’s question caused in me a sensation similar to that when I teach a new lesson and accidentally scratch the board with my nail, making my arms and legs shivery and goose-bumped.

No.

I’ve no idea what I want from my life. I’m even surprised that I know what I don’t want.

I don’t want to be married.

I don’t want to be a part of this legally and socially arranged union of two people, imposing on me rights and obligations.

I don’t want to comply with the socially conditioned need to “belong” to somebody and thus regulate my sexual and biological drives for a would-be feeling of security.

I haven’t planned or imagined my future in this way. In my naïve twenties, I had no idea what it meant to live with a man, to have a child, to raise it with compromises, or what co-existence with somebody’s virtues and faults or everyday consideration of somebody’s shortcomings and constant attempts at preservation and nurturing of love looked like.

And I definitely could've never imagined how it would feel — the brutal realization that everything you've shared with someone is suddenly no more.

Not suddenly, but gradually the desire to correct all the things bothering you when it comes to his behaviour, habits or life energy, that I fell in love with, and later sucked me out of all my energy that the only thing left for me was to run away. So, I ran away — killed it all in a single blow.

“Alright, we’ll talk about it”, I lie to him now, just as I’ve been lying to myself for the last two years.

This is just a common marital crisis, I hear the voices in my head. I had so many sessions of psychotherapy on my own, hysterically sobbing, wiping my nose, and loudly swearing while behind the wheel of my car.

A wonderful routine.

You talk to yourself; nobody bothers you and nobody pretends to listen to you.

“You’re lying," he said and put down the phone.

Although I proposed to go our separate ways amicably to end the divorce proceedings farce as soon as possible, Zoran didn’t agree with Ema living with me and seeing him on a regular basis. So he filed a suit, supplementing it with a report on mandatory consultation, not older than six months and proof of participation at the first family mediation meeting.

Pre-divorce mediation at the Social Welfare Centre was worse than I had imagined it: the lady neither had a bun nor red glasses, but an austere and thin face with no visible traces of a smile, and her role was to try to improve communication between the spouses so that we can jointly analyse how and when the problems had occurred and what caused our separation. She also aimed to acquaint us with the legal, psychological and social consequences of the divorce.

Yada yada yada.

Zoran was sitting next to me, without talking to or looking at me even once, and the lady was addressing him much more often than me because he was mostly giving moral lectures and monologues on my infidelity and not respecting the man, that I, rightly said, had chosen for myself.

He was talking to such excess that, at one moment, I just decided to keep quiet and observe a vein on his forehead. It looked like a gossamer thread,

becoming more and more visible as he was getting upset while talking that he couldn’t have come to any kind of agreement with me because I hadn’t wanted to accept any of his proposals. He was also frustrated at how I wanted Ema for myself, that I wasn’t giving him a chance to be a father to his girl

I can’t stand monologues or the bloody gossamers on his forehead. I stopped talking again. At that moment, when I finally decided to leave, I kept silent as he continued preaching from his honourable altar and calling for mediation because I didn’t want Ema moving every

week — I wanted her to have a home.

I didn’t plan to forbid her from seeing her father. I was not a demon, as he presented the image of me to these outsiders, who had been included into our intimate circle by pure chance and had no feelings for us, the break-up of our love, or my girl's future, who currently didn’t know whether she would live with Mom or Dad.

You ego-tripping male, I’ve just fallen out of love and am taking care of my child.

I went through mediation at the Croatian Mediation Association.

The famous one that was conducted out of the Social Welfare Centre, and in which the role of mediator was allegedly irreplaceable. Now, if you asked me, I would gladly replace the lady nodding her head at every word of my soon to be ex-husband, and ignoring me because I had no respect for the father-figure.

Just waiting for the two of us to come to an agreement so that she could go and have a cigarette in the kitchenette, holding it in her manicured and bony fingers, as she closed on yet another case, with any other human being having a little piece of heart and soul.

I would like her to stop for a moment and ask us how and where did our love disappear.

Somewhere along the way, I would say to her, between a romance-killing routine and mid-life crisis

During my divorce proceedings, I pretended to be a human being in front of my child, crying mostly in the toilet or in the car.

Cursing his father’s mother only when she was not around me, loudly wondering at my stupidity and naivete only in solitude, for a while, I was officially and seriously damaged woman.

After the summer holidays, Zoran gave up on his request for shared custody for an unknown reason. Ema’s welfare, I guess, somehow became irrelevant when he realized what living with a child on his own meant. Instead, he offered me cash payment for the apartment we had lived in and all joint property investments.

He had inherited from his parents a new car that we had bought for them six months before I left, in order to travel over Europe during the winter school holidays.

After twelve years, I finally bought two-tiered red and white curtains for the living room and refurbished most of the rooms with lighter shades and more modern furniture. However, I didn’t stay in that apartment much longer.

Some mornings, before going to work, I would have coffee on the balcony. During these morning rituals, I completely adapted to myself and in each sip, I tasted our life that was. This always happened when I poured coffee in two cups.

The cherry tree in our neighbour’s garden suddenly became so small and thin, as if it had never spread its kitsch crown into our apartment.

I decided to buy a new apartment during the second semester of Ema’s fourth grade, when we decided that we didn’t want to live in the suburbs any more. So, we looked at several apartments a week in the city centre and looked at each new apartment as if it would be our home.

We eventually decided to buy a forty-meter square apartment in Bačvice.

While I was moving, when I was pulling out a box with our things from one of the last lorries, I saw a neighbour on the balcony next to ours, waving at me and smiling with distrust.

“Neighbour, are you going to carry it up all on your own?” she cried out, leaning over the rail, while her false, homemade perm vibrated.

“Yes, I am”, I said and smiled to my girl, holding the entrance door to the building for me.

About the Author:

Marija Rakić Mimica was born in 1982 in Split.

She graduated in Croatian language and literature and comparative literature at the Faculty of Philosophy in Zagreb.

She has won four literary awards for her short stories; Prose for the best prose manuscript by an author under 35 for 2015, Brod knjižara Brod kulture 2016, third prize in the competition Story in the City of Trogir City Library, first prize for prose in the Literary Competition "Ticket 2020."

So far, she has published prose in all major literary magazines. Short stories were also published in the collections 20 + 1 The Most Beautiful Story for Summer published by Brod kulture, in thefinals of Lapis Histriae 2014, the finals of the Zlatko Tomičić Award 2018, the Bedekovčina 2015 collection. She published a collection of short stories Dancing in the Yard.)

She is currently the leader of a drama workshop at the Sunce moje malo Kindergarten and the Book Lovers' Club at the Peristil House of Culture and Language in Split. She is employed in Split as a Croatian language teacher in high school.

Follow Marija on IG: @marijarakic_mimica