Episode 3: Pressure and Ice

“I was sitting on the carpet in an empty apartment. We had no chairs, no beds. We had a ten thousand dollar debt and a silence that echoed. I looked at my hands and asked myself: ‘Why did I need this?’”

— Magma Star

The nineties in the Balkans were a time when mountains moved, not by nature, but by hate. I, a Croatian, and my husband, a Serb, became an anomaly in a world that demanded clear lines of separation. Our love was an earthquake no one understood. That is why we fled—not with suitcases full of gold, but with one photo album from my childhood and a fifteen-month-old son in our arms.

We landed in Vancouver. I remember that first breath—it was sharp, smelling of an unfamiliar cold and fear.

I was the one who said, “Let’s go.” The entire burden rested on my shoulders: a husband who didn’t know a word of English and a child who had just started walking. My son was my only solid anchor. He was the most beautiful person in the world and deserved everything. While I worked my first job—selling small animals in a shopping mall—I saved every cent to buy him his first toy car, then a bicycle, then a ball. He had to be the best dressed; he had to feel that the world was safe, even when the ground was crumbling beneath my feet.

In geology, a diamond grows under unimaginable pressure. I was still that hidden diamond in the kimberlite, but the pressure of Canada began to crystallize me. After a year, I fought my way into a job in my field. I started earning, paying for daycare, paying off debts. While my husband remained silent in his ignorance of the language, I became the rock holding the entire family together.

I was a mother, a worker, and an engineer. But deep down, I was still that little girl with a photo album, looking for her place under a sun that didn’t warm like the Dalmatian one.