My boyfriend’s mother is here from Serbia, and she doesn’t speak a lick of english. She doesn’t particularly like Canada, and the only reason she wants to come at all is for her children: other than that, Canada is something of a vast and empty-feeling place, where all of the people are spread out, fake nice. When Bojan describes Serbia to me, I imagine it to be a rougher kind of Germany. Unapologetic, direct, less social pleasantries, punk, but in less of an angry way and in more of an agonized way, you know? He can’t stand the culture there. Says there’s too much wallowing.
Maybe I would like it.
On the weekends we tiptoe into the house at ungodly hours down the hall into his bedroom, after hours of walking and talking and bike riding and whatever else, light up a match and commence our little ritual of sitting quietly by a candle together. On the floor. Sometimes there’s some whispering, of things I can’t remember right now. I’ll massage his palms and kiss his collarbone and he will rub my calves and press his cheek to my knee. We usually have injuries of some kind, because that’s the kind of people we are; clumsy and damaged. I pick at my scabs, he scolds me and tells me to stop. He picks at his scabs, I point out what he had just said a minute before. We sit in our shared shame.
In the mornings, I wake up and slip out of bed, which is usually the floor covered in blankets because his bed is too small and hot for both of us. He’s passed out on the ground and I slip into his tee shirt. We both agree that, as uncomfortable as the floor was initially, we both kind of love it. My back doesn’t feel so soft. The very, very soft ache feels more like the ache of exercise than pain.
His mother is there on the front lawn, watering the flowers. I think she loves me, from the way her eyes light up when she sees me, but if she does, we have no way of verbally communicating it. Instead, she gives me a big, big smile, and opens her arms wide. I fall in and give her a smile of my own.
I think about this a lot. I know very little Serbian, and the half of the little Serbian I do know is saying bad stuff (although, I suspect that bad stuff takes up half the Serbian language naturally). Dobro jutro, I say, kako ste? And she says, Dobro! A kako si ti? And I say, Dobro! After that, that’s pretty much the extent of my Serbian. I’ve been trying to learn. We stand there in awkward silence, but there’s something else too: its not just awkward, its the awkward of wanting to express affection for someone on such a deep scale and having no words for it.
So we hug when we’ve exhausted my Serbian. She loves hugs. Her hugs are firm, and she likes to rub my back a bit when she hugs me. I give her a tight squeeze, rub my thumb in circles over her shoulder. Touch is the first language we know, and her first words to me are I love you. When I first got Jax, I remember wanting to convey to him how enchanted with him I was, how in love with him I already was, and I remember how many words I didn’t have, how many words I still don’t have. So I would lean down to him and let him sniff me a bit. Let him walk around me in slow circles. I was saying, I love you, I want you to be comfortable. Eventually - and by eventually I mean almost immediately - I was rewarded with an enthusiastic BOOP! of him rubbing his tiny face and kitty slobber all over me. Sometimes he smashes his head into me so hard that I can hear the impact on my skull - how a tiny cat like him does that without breaking, I don’t know. It feels like the same thing, Jax and Ana. Love just oozes out of them.