



Izvor was familiar to the point of recalling half-forgotten dreams and past lives in which I was sure I had come before. It resembled my hometown, with a single store which was also a restaurant, a bar, and a post office. It was home to five generations of neighbors whose kids were watched, scolded, and cared for by whichever parent was nearest by; where no social secrets were kept. Maybe I felt the culmination of my experience in the Balkans as some reprise of the fabled old America, where we could hitchhike with no destination, smoke cigarettes from train windows, drink beer in public parks, and afford to work only part time in second-hand bookstores instead of climbing corporate ladders and paying student loans and rolling cigarettes to afford an iPhone and a 12-month lease.

There were two tables outside the store where men drank beer with two teenage sons and a starkly beautiful daughter whom I prayed would leave this village before she was married and stuck in someone else’s footsteps. The old women in the store pointed us toward the beer cooler, asked about our trip and how we had come here, and then about the Americani and where I was from and how I got here.

“She says you’ve been here before,” Kris told me in English. “I told her no but she’s sure. She won’t believe me,” he laughed. “She says yes, yes, him, the American, from Seattle.” I shook my head, smiling, overwhelmed by exhaustion and surreal half-memories of a place I wanted so badly to recognize, and forgetting that to shake the head means “yes” in Bulgaria. She shook her head and walked back to the kitchen to cook our sausages, and we walked outside to drink our beer. It went down easy, and we took four more liters and our dinner back to the gravel road. We turned off and walked our bikes up a dirt trail to a hilltop where a lichen-covered gravestone leaned beneath two oak trees. The sun crossed the border to set on Serbia. We scavenged wood for a fire, rolled our last cigarettes, and stayed close to the smoke to keep mosquitoes off. I fell asleep full of beer, green peppers, mountain feta cheese, dark bread, fire-blackened corn and sausage, blissful in the shelter of oak trees, clear stars, and the rippling, rolling, uncomprehended syllables of my friends’ conversation.

The sun was breaking a sweat before I got out of bed, and the campfire coffee came too late to help me awaken without stumbling. Mosquito bites flared up under my sweat-crusted shirt and sore legs screamed curses at the mountains. When my friends conversed or consulted the map, I lost trust in myself and words I couldn’t understand. Loneliness is a sovereign nation of communication barriers, insecurity, and internal conflict. I was hungry again, too, and the hunger taunted me with jeers of ineptitude, inability, and laziness.

The mountains laid bare the inefficiency of our cobbled-together bicycles and physical shortcomings. I isolated myself more as we dragged closer to the border, pushing uphill on manic outbursts, burning out, and coasting alone around long corners, losing hope in Serbia, and realizing my own loss of direction in this long, undeserved vacation I had taken to stave off the responsibilities of adulthood.

We came to a large town, perhaps a small city, sprawling along wide streets and redundant houses like a 1980’s American suburb. There was a lonely, bland grocery shop on the empty main street and we bought bologna and white bread and pasta sauce in a jar and ate on the sidewalk. Sacha stretched his legs and cringed. I laid down and felt my own legs seize up. Even the infallibly good natured Kris was grimacing.

There was a train from this town back to Sofia that we could take home that evening. Serbia was 11 kilometers away, straight uphill on a major highway. We flipped a coin, and were told to stay in Bulgaria. There was a swamp on our map, just outside of town, downhill, and we decided to explore it rather than the border.