Body Without a Home

The first time I saw her, Lejla sat on a bench before the gallery. It was a gray, overcast afternoon, and the sky seemed to press down on the city, suffocating it beneath a heavy, muted blanket. The wind whispered in sharp, erratic gusts, tugging at her dark hair, sending stray strands dancing across her face. Raindrops, a fine, almost invisible mist, clung to the air, yet they left a damp sheen on her coat.

Beneath that black coat, her body was twisted, not just in posture but in something more profound, intangible, as if she were trying to shrink into herself, as though her very existence was a burden she couldn't escape. Her shoulders hunched forward, drawing inward, a futile attempt to fold herself smaller, to disappear. She seemed to carry a gravity of her own, a heaviness that made even the air around her denser.

Her hands were folded in her lap, a delicate, almost fragile arrangement that would have seemed serene if not for the tremor that never left her fingers. No one else passing by seemed to notice those subtle, frantic vibrations — the shivering of a trapped bird caught in a silent storm. Only I could see it. Only I could sense that silent, desperate struggle in those hands.

Her hands were like birds that had lost their wings, broken things that still remembered the freedom of flight but were now tethered, trembling in the hollow space of her lap. Her fingers twisted and clasped against one another, an unconscious dance of anxiety and despair. Even though she sat still, the world might see her as just another lonely figure on a bench; to me, she was a storm hidden in the stillness.

Her gaze was cast downward, but it was not focused on anything real. It seemed to pierce through the rain-slicked pavement, beyond the scattered leaves and puddles, reaching into some unseen, unreachable darkness. The world around her moved — cars rolled by, people walked past with umbrellas raised, laughter echoed from somewhere far off — but none touched her. She was a wound, raw and exposed, trying to shrink away from a world that had no place for her.

And yet, for all her attempts to disappear, she was impossible to ignore. A fragile paradox — a whisper of life so determined to vanish that it became the only thing I could see. The first time I saw Lejla, I saw everything she was trying to hide.

She handed me a coffee. The moment she crossed the threshold, it felt like she carried the scent of something dark, invisible, and unspeakable. The coffee was bitter. Too bitter for such a delicate moment. It was as if she-bitter, cold, twisted—was trying to disguise herself in an ordinary gesture, inside a simple cup. As if every spoonful of that drink was an attempt to translate something she couldn't express in words.

"Bitter," I said after the first sip, my gaze locked on hers, trying to grasp the incredible depth of pain radiating from her.

She smiled. "It's honest."

I had nothing to respond. I couldn't say anything that would save her, anything that would make sense of what she was. Because the truth was... she was ruins wrapped in silence. Language was merely the binding element, necessary to bridge her unconscious voids. But what can you say to someone who hasn't learned how to live yet still breathes?

My colleague Tomas was an artist from Prague who had come to show his drawings. He knew what a picture was, but didn't know what pain was. That was our first meeting. He imagined the city through words and lines, and Lejla—Lejla was only those words and those lines. But she was lost, and so was the translation.

At first, I translated his interviews word-for-word. Then, I started translating Lejla, but not just her words. I started translating her sorrow, sleeplessness, and fear of being seen. And that was the problem. My translations became the truth, but she couldn't own them. That wasn't her truth. But it was mine, or at least what I thought was mine.

While we were sitting one day, she said, "You don't have to understand me. I know you can't."

"Why?" I asked her.

"Because you don't know what it means for the body to be just a place that gets lost in unconscious battles. What does it mean for the body to sacrifice itself to stay afloat? You can't translate any of that."

And that's when I realized that her hands, face, and body were territories that didn't belong to her. They weren't her home. And language? Language was just another barrier, another attempt to shape something that couldn't be shaped.

We used words to connect all around us, yet they were just poor copies of something. Tomas spoke in unclear metaphors. At first, I translated them, trying to make them more transparent. But Lejla didn't want clarity. She needed chaos.

"He said the city feels like something painful it remembers." I translated Tomas's words, imagining what Lejla wanted to say. And indeed, he said, "The walls here have sad skeletons." But he didn't know what it meant to survive the ruins, to survive a city where nights aren't counted, to survive the feeling that nothing ever ends — she couldn't tell him that.

Silence ruled between us. Lejla was so quiet, I thought she was tired of all her unconscious struggles and having to show up. I didn't know what to say. She was just a puzzle in a body, and language was too poor to translate her into something I could understand.

One day, I tried to pull her out. I offered her an escape: Let's go together to a new city, a new beginning. But all she said was, "Don't look for me. There's no place for me anymore. I would first have to find my way back to myself to leave, and I'm not sure I'd recognize it."

I didn't know what to say. I couldn't hold her back, love her how she needed to be loved, or translate her because she wasn't from this world. Lejla was silent and lost in every attempt I made to speak her name.

And so she disappeared. In silence. Without words, without goodbye. She left no paper note. No forwarding address. She simply vanished.

It was like she had never been here. Like a part of me evaporated, lost in translation. And she never came back.

Years passed. But I still hadn't forgotten her. I would think of her, and I'd believe a part of me had gone into those secret words, those lingering sounds she couldn't pronounce. Maybe she was still out there, somewhere, without language. Without a home. Just a soul in a body that didn't know how to be alive.

The last thing I heard was from someone who had seen her: "They say she's not silent anymore, but she looks older. Like someone who has long since died but doesn't know they're dead."

And then I realized—she was never lost. Lejla had been without words, language, or a home, and didn't want to be found.

Maybe that was her truth.