My father dreamed all last night that he was saving me from the bombs, he was sleepwalking as he used to do when he was young, taking me as a baby in his arms and rushing to the door. It went on for years, his war trauma, until it stopped with this new war. He passed it on to me, I started dreaming his dream. Last night when he took back his dreams and fears from me, I slept heavily. It is definitely not the same war, and our dreams are not the same, his dreams are male, mine are female. At least that.

Today I am going to visit them, my parents, they are only 15 minutes on foot from my place, in the center of Belgrade, too, but since the war started, I haven´t managed to go and see them. It seems distant and dangerous, as if in another city, not only another district. Is that how are we going to live, as in a labyrinth, divided in districts, as if they were different states, divided cantons? A NATO officer looking at the map of Belgrade and pointing where they are going to strike said, Belgrade is a lovely city, I used to go often to Belgrade. Yugoslavs had good lives, skiing in Austria, travelling all around the world without visas. We want them that way again if they change. But I don ´t want to live as Yugoslavs lived once, it was a big lie, a big illusion, and I am Ibsen´s Nora who lost her world in one second of truth, starting life anew, as cruel as it must be.

I hear people say, it is not the bombs I am afraid of, but the sirens I cannot stand anymore. My neighbor who complained about our loud music now is complaining about it being foreign, aggressor´s music. The crack in the time, back to the future: the fifties?
One second I forgot what happened to us. The next second a commonplace occurred to me: we had a life we didn´t appreciate, we quarreled, complained, made each other suffer, and now all the veils have fallen, we are united in love and suffering. Pain it is, I know, but is it love?