There are two clocks in my house, one at each end. At night, when the lights are off and the house settles, you can hear them clearly. Beneath the soft hum of the furnace, they tick out of sync. One always reaches the second first. The other follows just after, as if checking before committing. This post is inspired by those two clocks.
In the stories that follow, I use the word “they” deliberately. It refers to several people who are not the same person, and they did not live the same life, but trauma bound them together into a shared presence.
I do not include their dialogue, or recreate their voices, or attempt to explain their experiences for them. What they lived belongs to them. What I can offer is only what I observed. These 4 stories are not testimonies of trauma, but accounts of growing up beside it, and of learning how common experiences can shape different lives.
…
1) The Living Room, 2008.
It was a Friday night. My mattress was on the living room floor, pressed close to my siblings’. There wasn’t much space. Blankets overlapped, and shoulders bumped when someone turned in their sleep. The movie had just ended. The screen went dark, and the VCR light blinked steadily, green against the shadows.
“I think the DVD needs to be taken out,” I whispered.
I didn’t want to wake anyone. Still, I was hoping someone else was already awake. Someone tall enough to reach the stacked shelves. I watched the VCR from where I lay, trying to understand the buttons. I imagined the machine eating the DVD, imagined it disappearing inside.
I closed my eyes again, listening to the two clocks talk to each other from opposite ends of the house. One thinking. One speaking.
“Even if the VCR player eats the DVD tape…,” I said out loud.
No response. “…At least we got to watch the movie,” I whispered, then closed my eyes as the end credits theme music replayed softly in my mind.
Then the shouting started.
It came from the basement, sharp and sudden, cutting straight through the quiet. Someone was calling out for their brother. Over and over. The same name. Loud. Urgent.
Then different words. Something about the house. About fire. About everything inside being gone.
I sat up. The house felt smaller all at once. Too many people, too close together, none of them moving. Everyone around me was still asleep, breathing evenly, unaware. I slipped past the mattresses and went downstairs.
They were asleep when I reached them, but not peacefully. Their body was tense, hands clenched, breath uneven.
“Hey,” I said quietly.
It didn’t feel loud enough. I tried again. “Hey, it’s okay.”
I nudged their shoulder. The lamp clicked on, flooding the room with light. Their eyes were open now, bright and unfocused, looking past me.
“It’s okay,” I said again, closer this time. “You’re home.”
I was thinking about the words I had heard. About fire. About a house being burned. I looked around the room quickly, checking. The walls were still there. The furniture hadn’t moved. Everything was where it was supposed to be.
“The house is still here,” I said, even though I hadn’t been asked. “Nothing burned.”
I needed to say it out loud. I needed them to hear it.
“You were just dreaming,” I added. “You’re safe.”
They lay back down slowly. The tension left their body in pieces, not all at once. I turned the lamp off. The room went quiet again.
But I stayed awake.
I thought about how close everyone had been upstairs, how tightly we were packed together on the floor, how none of us kids had moved when the shouting started. I wondered if the fire was still burning somewhere inside them. If it had kept going without me there to interrupt it.
Upstairs, the clocks kept ticking. One already counting the next second. The other waiting to see if it was safe to follow.
…
2) The Windowsill Bookshelf, 2009.
I learned to read! At first, it felt like a trick, something private and impressive, like being able to reach a shelf without standing on my toes. Words unlocked themselves quietly. Signs. Labels. Instructions. Then stories!
Books began to pile up on the bookshelf. School books. Library books. Hardcovers with dates on their spines. I liked to stack them neatly, lining them up the way I had learned to line up letters on a page.
They would sometimes pick one up.
I watched closely when they did. The way their fingers traced the page before committing to a sentence. The way they leaned forward, as if the words might fall away if they didn’t hold them down. Their eyes moved slowly, carefully, stopping more often than mine did.
“I can help,” I said once, too quickly.
I didn’t yet understand how much weight that sentence carried.
They smiled, but their eyes didn’t leave the page. I watched their face change as they read. Something tightening. Something shining. Their eyes filled, not all at once, but gradually, like a room taking on water.
I tried to understand what was happening. I wondered if the content of the book had become unreachable to them. Not because they couldn’t read the words, but because reading them meant standing face to face with something that had never stayed still long enough to be explained.
I wanted to give them everything I had learned. I wanted to take my schoolbooks apart and hand them over, page by page.
“I can read it out loud,” I offered.
But what I didn’t say was that I wished I could stop time at the moment where learning still felt like a gift, and not a widening space between us. That I wished education didn’t feel like a ladder I was climbing while they stayed standing at the bottom, watching.
The clocks kept ticking from either end of the house. One keeping pace with where I was going. The other lagging behind, still marking time somewhere else. I started to understand that learning doesn’t always move people forward together. Sometimes it only makes the distance clearer.
…
3) Travnik, Bosnia. 2024
We walked through a part of the city that still showed its insides. Houses stood with most of their walls intact but no roofs above them. You could see straight through the openings. Rooms exposed to the sky. Staircases ending midair. The buildings hadn’t fallen. They had been interrupted.
Across the street stood a new university building. Glass-fronted, clean, busy. Students moved in and out without slowing down. I watched as we walked, my glance switching between both sides.
A few days later, while we were out again, someone stepped toward us.
I didn’t recognize them, but the person beside me stopped walking. Not abruptly, just long enough to confirm something. Their posture shifted first, then their face. The pause felt deliberate, like checking the time twice before trusting it.
The other person smiled before they spoke. It was not cautious. It arrived fully formed, as if it had been waiting.
I learned later that they had danced together. Not socially, not occasionally, but as part of the same group. The same team that went to the 1984 Winter Olympics in Sarajevo. Back when the city was rehearsing itself for the world.
I stood just behind them, watching the recognition settle. I realized that for years, maybe decades, this person’s life might have existed only as an open question. A name without confirmation. Someone last known before the war, before bodies scattered and certainty dissolved. I wondered if either of them had ever known for sure whether the other survived.
“It’s nice to meet you,” I said.
The other person’s face lit up at me immediately. Not out of obligation, but delight. As if seeing me completed the picture. As if walking beside someone they once knew as a young man, now accompanied by a daughter who looked unmistakably like them, made the reunion land fully in the present.
Their conversation resumed quickly, skipping years, skipping explanations. I didn’t try to follow it. I watched instead. The ease that returned to their movements. The way their shoulders lowered. The way relief can look like lightness without ever being named.
When we walked on, the street hadn’t changed. The open houses were still open. The university still reflected the sky. People passed us without noticing anything had happened.
But something had resolved.
I thought about the clocks in my childhood home. How one always ticked first, confident and loud, while the other followed just behind, quieter, careful. How they never agreed exactly, but together still kept time. I understood then that some people live their lives announcing each second as it comes, while others spend years catching up, waiting for confirmation that the moment they’re in is real.
That day, I’d like to believe the clocks finally landed on the same second. Not forever. Just long enough to be certain.
…
4) Sarajevo, Bosnia. 2024 (NYE)
It was New Year’s Eve when we took a day trip to Sarajevo.
The road curved slowly into the city. Traffic thickened. Buildings rose closer together. Sarajevo announced itself gradually, like it wanted to be approached with care. I watched from the passenger seat, taking it in piece by piece. The hills. The river. The way the city seemed to hold many versions of itself at once.
We parked and started walking.
At first, we moved at an ordinary pace. Careful. Observant. I let my eyes travel. Storefronts. Cafés. People bundled in coats, already carrying the energy of the night ahead. This wasn’t celebration yet, but anticipation. The city felt awake, winding toward something.
We walked faster.
I wanted to see everything. We hit a record store first. I slowed to a near stop, then sped up again, pulled in by how many artists I actually knew. For once, they were all here. No hunting. No guessing. Just spine after spine of names that felt impossibly cool, albums older than me but still setting the pace.
Then the music academy at the University of Sarajevo. That stopped me completely. Solid. Serious. Effortlessly cool. The kind of building that doesn’t explain itself. My idols had studied there. Standing outside it felt like catching the bassline of a song through a wall, close enough to feel it, not close enough to claim it. Like stepping briefly into the afterimage of the eighties.
“We should keep going,” I said, though I didn’t want to.
Our pace picked up again. Walking turned into something sharper, more deliberate. We weren’t rushing yet. We were choosing movement. Choosing to meet the city where it was.
Then we started running.
Not out of panic. Out of affection. My legs chose the speed because Sarajevo mattered. Because the city deserved to be taken in fully, while it was still daylight and still ours for the afternoon. I knew we were only passing through. A day trip. That knowledge made the freedom sharper, lighter, like borrowing something precious without the responsibility of keeping it.
The sidewalks were wet, catching the light as we moved. Old snow sat along the edges in grey, compacted piles, already part of the background. Our footsteps rang out, quick and easy, matching each other without effort. I wasn’t thinking about time or direction. I was thinking about how natural it felt to move through this city, how rare it was to feel so instantly connected to a place.
I felt young. Free. Completely inside the moment. I loved that moment.
The rushing sound of a river overpowered the sound of our steps. And my feet were met by the start of a pedestrian bridge. Then I remembered an article I read some time ago:
The Vrbanja Bridge crosses the Miljacka river quietly. Narrow. Unassuming. It doesn’t ask for attention. If you didn’t know its history, you would cross it without thinking. In the middle hangs a heart. A place meant for stopping, for believing you will make it to the other side.
During the war, people were shot on that bridge by snipers as they tried to cross. People who ran because standing still was worse. People who moved fast because speed was the only chance they had. Freedom, for them, meant making it across alive.
“Wait,” I said stopping.
The sound of the river drained the space I had just been running through. The happiness I’d been carrying emptied into it all at once, washed away and replaced by guilt.
The river moved quickly beneath us, dark and loud against the white of the day. Snow clung to the edges of the bridge, packed down where others had already passed. The sky was bright and open, almost blinding, the kind of winter light that makes everything feel exposed.
I crossed, and my heart began pounding in my chest again, sudden and wrong, like it didn’t belong to me anymore. I lifted my head, looking past the heart hanging in the centre of the bridge, into a winter sky so bright it hurt to look at. Everything felt exposed. The cold pressed in, sharp and unkind, while my face burned hot with shame. The sound of my heart stayed trapped in my ears, loud and unavoidable, as if my body hadn’t caught up to what I already understood
I had been running because I loved this city.
The feeling was crushing. And standing there in the open winter light, there was nowhere for it to go.
We returned to the car and drove back to the same town we had left that morning. The day closed quietly. Around the world, clocks reached midnight, and the year turned.
That night, I lay awake thinking about the two clocks. One always announcing the second boldly. The other arriving just after, careful, delayed. I understood then that I had grown up living by the louder clock. The one that assumes the next second will come. The one that rings in the new year without hesitation.
I have the privilege of understanding war without having been shaped by it. Of learning its history without having had my body trained by fear. The confident clock is not a moral achievement; it is an inheritance I did nothing to earn.
Listening to both clocks now, I understand that my freedom to move quickly, to speak easily, to run through a city without thinking twice, exists because someone else once had to measure time differently.
Digital Dugme 