Grief is a Current

The sun on my neck is a familiar weight, a warm hand that’s been there since I was a girl. It’s the same sun that bleaches the white stone of the riva, that turns the Adriatic into a sheet of hammered silver, that makes the pine trees on the hill smell of resin and heat. But today, it feels like a brand. A reminder that I am still here, in the present, while Luka is not.

I should be inside. The apartment with its blue shutters and the geraniums on the balcony that I can’t bring myself to water, is cool. But the silence in there is too loud. It’s a silence filled with the echo of his laugh, the creak of his chair, the way he used to hum off-key while making coffee. Out here, on the riva, there is the chatter of tourists, the slap of water against the boats, the tinny music from a café. It’s a different kind of noise, one I can lose myself in.

The old men, Luka’s friends, are in their usual spot by the lighthouse. They have their backs to me, their white shirts bright in the sun, their gestures expansive as they argue about the same things they’ve argued about for fifty years: politics, fish, the quality of the local olive oil. Mario, his white hair a fuzzy halo, takes a long drag from his cigarette and I can almost hear the rasp of his voice as he makes a point. They don’t know I’m watching. They don’t know that I can see the empty space where Luka used to sit, the shadow of him still in their midst. The group is diminished now, a circle with a missing piece. They still laugh, but it’s a different laugh. Quieter. There’s a hollowness to it that wasn’t there before.

I shift on the bench, the warm stone rough beneath my thighs. My sandals are old, the leather soft and cracked. Luka bought them for me on our honeymoon, from a tiny shop in Korčula town. “They are the colour of the sunset,” he’d said, and I’d laughed, because they were just plain brown. But that was Luka. He saw poetry in everything, in the way the light caught the dust motes dancing in the air, in the curve of a fishing boat’s hull, in the quiet dignity of my mother’s hands as she kneaded bread. “You have to look,” he’d tell me, tapping my forehead with a gentle finger. “Really look, Lina. The world is giving you a gift every second.”

The memory is like a knife, sharp and quick. I close my eyes, and I’m back in our first apartment, the one with the damp walls and the tiny kitchen. I’m young, my hair long and dark. I’m standing over a pot of boiling water, trying to make a sauce with the only tomatoes we could afford. I’m frustrated, close to tears. Luka walks in, smelling of fish and sea salt. He doesn’t say a word. He just wraps his arms around me from behind, rests his chin on my shoulder, and stays there. The frustration, the feeling of being lost, it just… melted away. He was my anchor. He was the steady beat of my heart in a chaotic world.

“Dobro jutro, Lina.”

A voice pulls me back. It’s Nada, her face a roadmap of wrinkles, a straw basket hanging from her arm. She’s been my neighbour for thirty years. We’ve seen each other through births and deaths, through joy and sorrow. She has a way of looking at me that sees everything, that sees the grief I try to hold close.

“Dobro jutro, Nada,” I manage. My voice sounds foreign.

She sits beside me on the bench, her weight sighing into the stone. For a long moment, neither of us speaks. We just watch the gulls wheel over the harbour. Nada’s hand, gnarled and spotted, rests on the bench between us. It’s a quiet offering. I don’t take it, but I don’t move away either. Her presence is a comfort, a silent acknowledgment of the elephant on the bench with us. The elephant that is the hollow pit in my stomach, the constant ache in my chest.

“He is still here, you know,” she says eventually, her gaze fixed on the horizon. She always speaks with a certainty that defies logic, a wisdom that comes from living through a war and its aftermath. “In the stones, in the sea. I saw him yesterday, by the fountain. He was just standing there, watching the children.”

A shiver runs down my spine, despite the heat. I know it’s just a story, just Nada’s way of trying to comfort me. But the image is so vivid, so achingly him, that I can’t help but cling to it. He loved children. He always said they were the only ones who were still honest, who hadn’t learned to hide their hearts.

“I saw something too,” I whisper, confessing a secret I haven’t told anyone. “At our spot, on the cove below the old church.”

Nada turns to look at me, her eyes gentle.

“A stone. I had a stone from the cove in my pocket. He, Luka, he used to throw them. Try to make them skip the most times. He was always so proud of it. Last week, I went down there, just for a minute. I stood on the small pebbles, looking out. And I found it. A perfect, flat, skipping stone. Placed right where I was standing. Where he always stood.” My voice breaks. “It’s silly. It was just a coincidence. But I wanted it to be him so badly, Nada. I wanted it to be him saying he still takes me to our spot.”

Nada pats my hand, a simple, warm touch. “It’s not silly,” she says. “Love doesn’t end. It just changes. It becomes the air you breathe. The wind on your face.”

The tourists are a constant, chattering flow around us. They’re wearing bright colours, their skin a shade of pink that will be painful by sunset. They’re taking photos of the church, of the lighthouse, of the boats. They see the picture-postcard Dalmatia. The beautiful, ancient stones. The crystal-clear water. They don’t see the history etched into the faces of the old women selling lavender. They don’t see the ghosts of the war that still linger in the eyes of the men by the lighthouse. They don’t see the twenty years of a life my husband and I built, or the gaping hole he left behind.

I remember the war. I was just a girl, living in a village up in the hills. The shelling was constant, a terrible percussion that shook the very ground. We lived in a basement, huddled together, waiting. My mother would stroke my hair, humming a lullaby to drown out the noise of the bombs. I was terrified, not just of the bombs, but of the future. I didn’t know if I would ever be a person again, if life would ever be more than just surviving. Then I met Luka. He was in the village with his unit, just for a few days. He was a fisherman from the coast, thrown into a conflict he didn’t understand. In that basement, with the world falling apart around us, he gave me hope. He said, “When this is over, Lina, I will show you the sea. I will show you a world that is quiet and deep and full of life.” And he did. He took me from the grey fear of the hills and gave me a world of endless blue and golden sun.

I often think about my mother now. How she coped when my father died, a few years after the war ended. It was a quiet death, a heart attack in the garden. She hadn’t cried, not then. She had just grown quiet, her energy slowly draining away. I’d watch her, lost in a haze of memory, talking to him as if he were still there. ‘Ivo, pass me the salt,’ she’d say, her hand reaching out to an empty space. ‘Did you see the olives this year, Ivo?’ And I’d feel a mixture of pity and frustration. ‘Mama, he’s not here,’ I wanted to scream. But now I understand. Now I see the wisdom in it. The mind, the heart, they find a way to keep the ones they love alive. She wasn’t crazy. She was just refusing to let him go entirely.

I get up from the bench, my knees complaining. The afternoon is wearing on, the sun beginning its slow descent. I need to walk. Walking helped me think, once upon a time. Now, the walking is just motion, a way to stop myself from simply dissolving into the stone. I wander past the main harbour, away from the crowds, toward the old town. The streets here are narrow, a maze of cool, shadowy corridors. I pass the window of a bakery, the smell of freshly baked kruh and sweet pastries drifting out. Luka was a sucker for a good krafne. He’d always bring a bag home on a Sunday, his fingers dusted with sugar. I can almost see him now, his eyes twinkling as he held one out to me, a silent temptation. The memory is a physical pain. I lean against the warm stone wall, my breath catching in my throat.

A young couple walks past, their arms around each other, whispering. The girl is laughing, her head tilted back. Luka used to look at me like that, like I was the most wonderful thing he’d ever seen. He’d tell me I was beautiful even when my hair was a mess, even when I was in my oldest, most comfortable dress. He loved the tiny, invisible things about me. The way I always checked my pockets for a handkerchief before leaving the house. The way I would hum to myself when I was cooking. The little mole on my left shoulder that he would kiss every single night before we fell asleep.

I think of the last week. The last, harrowing week. The hospital room was too clean, too bright. It smelled of antiseptic and despair. He was so pale against the white sheets. The machines beeped and whirred, keeping a rhythm he could no longer maintain himself. He wasn’t scared for himself. He was scared for me. I could see it in his eyes, the same fear I saw in my mother’s all those years ago. He was holding my hand, his grip surprisingly strong.

“Lina,” he’d whispered, his voice a ghost of its former self. “You have to promise me.”

“Promise you what?” I’d said, my eyes burning, the tears I was trying to hold back blurring his face.

“Promise me you will eat your breakfast.” He’d tried to smile. “And you will sit in the sun. And you will go to the market and buy the wrinkly lemons from Tomislav, because he gives you the best ones. And you will let the sunset make you forget, just for a moment. Promise me you won’t let me take the sun from you.”

It was so perfectly, heartbreakingly him. Even at the end, his biggest concern was me. He wasn’t asking me to be happy. He was just asking me to live. To keep the habits of our life, the small things. He was making sure I would keep breathing, even when he couldn’t.

I promised him. I made that promise with my fingers wrapped tightly around his, my tears falling onto the white hospital blanket. I promised, but keeping it feels impossible.

I find myself at the steps that lead down to the small cove. The church, St. Nicholas’s, stands silent and empty above it. Its walls are thick, a fortress of faith built centuries ago. The steps are worn smooth by a million footsteps. I descend slowly, my hand on the stone balustrade. The air changes, becomes cooler, carrying the scent of salt and wet rock.

The cove is empty. The small strip of pebbles is untouched. The water is a deep, intense blue, lapping gently against the shore. It’s our spot. It was our spot. I take a deep, shuddering breath. I see him here, in my mind’s eye, so vividly it steals the air from my lungs. He’s wearing his old blue swimming trunks, his skin tanned a deep brown. He’s looking for stones, his eyes scanning the pebbles with the concentration of a jeweler searching for diamonds. He finds a good one, a flat, grey disc. He turns to me, a triumphant grin on his face. “Watch this, Lina!” He pulls his arm back, flicks his wrist, and the stone skims across the water, bouncing four, five, six times before sinking into the azure depths. He turns back to me, proud as a child. “See?” he’d say. “You just have to give it a chance. Give it the right flick, and it can travel anywhere.”

I crouch down, my fingers sifting through the small, smooth pebbles. They are warm from the afternoon sun. I run my hand over them, feeling their shapes, their textures. Smooth, round ones. Sharp, jagged pieces of slate. Rough, pumice-like rocks. I search for one that is perfect. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s a futile gesture. Maybe I’m looking for a sign. My fingers close on something. A perfect, flat, grey disc. I pick it up, turning it over in my palm. It’s exactly the kind of stone Luka would have loved. He would have made it fly.

I take it with me and sit on the dry grass above the shoreline, the sun on my face. I close my eyes. The sound of the water is a hypnotic rhythm. The smell of pine and salt fills my senses. And I let myself feel it. All of it. The pain. The love. The loss. The stories.

I remember Luka telling me once that the sea was always moving. Even when it looked still, it was never, ever still. It was full of tides and currents, a constant, hidden movement. He said our hearts were like the sea. They held deep, hidden currents that nobody else could see. I always thought he was being poetic. But sitting here now, I understand. The grief is a current, deep and powerful, pulling me into a dark, cold place. But the love is a current, too. It’s the warm, steady tide that remembers his laugh, his hands, his kiss. It’s the one that holds his words. “The world is giving you a gift every second.”

I look at the stone in my hand. I think about the stone I found here a week ago, the one I thought was a message. Maybe it was. Maybe it was a message from a universe that was asking me to look. To see the gift. The gift of his life, of our life.

So, I will do what he asked. I will eat my breakfast. I will sit in the sun. I will go to the market and buy the wrinkly lemons. I will let the sunset make me forget, just for a moment. I will keep breathing. I will keep loving him.

And I will learn to make the stones skip.

I stand up. The sun is beginning to set, painting the sky in shades of orange, pink, and deep purple. It’s the sunset Luka loved, the one he said was God’s daily masterpiece.

I walk back up the steps, my hand on the warm, ancient stone. I pass the men by the lighthouse on my way home. Mario raises his hand in a silent salute. I nod back. I pass Nada, who is sitting on her doorstep. I give her a small smile.

I stop at the kiosk near the harbour and buy a bag of krafne. The shopkeeper, a young man who probably wasn’t even born when Luka and I first started coming here, gives me a curious look. I don’t care. I clutch the warm paper bag, the scent of sweet dough and jam filling my senses.

I walk back to the apartment. The geraniums on the balcony are starting to droop. I take the watering can and fill it, giving them a long, deep drink. The water seeps into the dry soil. It’s a small act. A tiny thing. But it’s a start.

I put the kettle on, my hands moving through the familiar motions. The blue shutters are open. The setting sun streams in, filling the room with warm, golden light. I sit at the small table by the window, our table. I open the paper bag and take out a krafna. The sugar coats my fingers.

I don’t cry. Not yet.

I take a bite. It’s sweet, soft, and tastes of memory. Luka’s face. The war in the hills. The old fishermen. The perfect, flat stone in my pocket. The promise.

The tears come then, silent and hot, streaming down my face. I eat the krafna, tasting salt as much as sugar. I do not wipe the tears away. They are not just for what I have lost. They are for what I had. A love so deep, so strong, that its absence has left a canyon in my heart.

The sun sinks lower. The sky blazes. The sea turns to gold.

And I let the sunset make me forget, just for a moment. I remember the water, the sun, the stone. I remember Luka.

He’s gone. But he’s not.

He’s in the sun on my neck, the whisper of the sea, the taste of a sugared pastry. He’s in the old stone, in the memory, and in the love that is still, and always will be, the current that pulls me forward.

I eat my krafna, and I watch the sun go down. For Luka. For me. For us.