Biljana
Biljana was almost perfect, of course, for me,
despite all her flaws and despite her past—
which she certainly had.
I didn't come to love her because I was in love with her.
No—I fell in love with her because I loved her.
Her stick-out ears, a crooked nose that was always running,
she wasn't exactly a femme fatale
that turns heads in the street,
but in my eyes, she was the most beautiful,
because my love made her so.
She won me over with her words,
the way she thought,
the logic she used.
It was enough just to listen to her
to want her...
She was special to me:
the only one who knew who Lilith was
and understood why one day
I would give that name to my future daughter;
the only one who wasn't impressed by
Desanka Maksimović’s “Strepnja”*
and held, as I did,
that it was an anthem of losers;
the only one, after all the others,
from whom I had something to learn.
I was grateful to my exes for being the wrong ones,
because I thought I had finally found the right one.
While other girls were learning how to seduce men,
she was learning about Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, and Liszt—
and how to hate Schumann and Schubert.
With her, I once again enjoyed the small things—
watching movies while munching popcorn,
discovering the charms of Chinese cuisine,
learning how to eat with chopsticks,
learning to relax, not be constantly rigid.
She was the only one I placed on a pedestal,
and that’s why she fell so low in my eyes;
perhaps she wasn’t used to such heights,
because everyone else had trampled over her...
Though she sought love, she didn’t know how to love.
Her need for attention was stronger than love.
You cannot have someone who belongs to everyone.
If only she had fought for our love with the same passion
with which she defended her lies;
if only she had kept even a single promise;
if only she had honored me by honoring herself—
for that was the only thing I asked for;
if only she had dealt with her past,
we would have built our future on healthy foundations.
Despite everything, I blame myself,
because I should not have allowed
myself to fall alongside her because of her.
I had to be stronger, face the truth,
overcome the fear of being without her;
if I couldn’t lift her up,
I had to move on.
When I thought I had experienced all the pain,
she hurt me even more.
The pain is in every tear I dedicated to her,
in every morning that dawns with her in my thoughts,
in her pain that I caused,
in every poem I wrote for her.
Sometimes I catch myself listening to
Pavarotti’s rendition of “Una furtiva lagrima,”
remembering how impressed she'd been by it,
while staring at her last SMS, which I still keep:
“You don’t have to believe me, but I love you. Too much.”
I regret that we were not halves of one love entity,
and that I never got to see her most beautiful version;
but I hope she is happy even without me,
even though I am not happy without her,
that we did not give up on us in vain,
that she finally managed to build a happy self.
Zera Princ
*Strepnja (“Anxiety” or “Apprehension”) is one of the most famous poems by Serbian poet Desanka Maksimović (1898–1993). The poem portrays a woman who deliberately keeps her beloved at a distance, finding beauty and happiness in anticipation, longing, uncertainty, and the idealized love that exists before fulfillment. The author of this poem refers to it critically as “an anthem of the defeated,” seeing in it the glorification of fear and hesitation — a retreat from the possibility of love in order to avoid the risk of rejection.
