Notes

Dear Edmund,

I guess it has already been three weeks since we've last seen each other. This time has been very transformative, albeit ambiguously so. I'm sure you can relate. Walking into these familiar streets, which used to be the only ones you knew, doesn't merely evoke a sense of nostalgia, but alienation. Not that they've changed much, you did. Gained experiences of the past year changed the way in which you relate to your surroundings. My sense of home has continuously been heavily disrupted, starting with me moving from Serbia to the Netherlands on my sixth birthday. That's why I struggle to grasp my cultural identity, torn as it is between multiple places. My family is an even more complicated story, whose pages took a dire turn way before my birth. Still, as fractured as this family tree was, I identified with my mother's side and most of all I identified with my mum. That was the building block of my sense of home. In this past year, I've realized this block is molded by guilt, formed during long years of a very toxic upbringing.
In my case this surrounding is not merely a geographical, cultural one (that being Serbian), seeing that's something I've been dealing with for a very long time: it