galerija/zgodba-wedding-anniversary-gift.jpg
We came here in 2005 with two suitcases and a phone number written on a piece of paper. Neither of us spoke the language properly and the phone number turned out to be wrong.
For our twentieth anniversary I wanted something that held both places at once, because that is the thing nobody outside our family understands. We are not from here and we are not from there any more either. We are from the road in between, and we have driven it more than a hundred times.
So both are on the picture.
The truck carries our flat from the first year, the one above the bakery with the window that would not close, and our house from now, which has a garden and a garage and a door we chose ourselves. Both flags are on the front, side by side, the same size, which took me a surprisingly long time to be sure about.
The number plate is our wedding date. The road runs across the whole bottom of the picture with the border crossing on it, and there is a small car on that road, because that car did the journey for eleven years before it finally stopped.
My mother's cooking pot is on there, the heavy one she gave us when we left, which she could not really spare. There is a jar of her preserves that we still ration. There is the shell from the beach where we went the first summer we could afford to go anywhere.
There are the children, who speak both languages and argue in whichever one is winning.
And at the very front there are two suitcases, the actual two, drawn exactly as they were, because we still have them in the loft and neither of us can bring ourselves to throw them out.
They are open and empty, which is the part I asked for.