your life story in 4 minutes

"It's one of those days when it'll rain if we go, and it won't if we go home."

So we did both.

We hailed a cab, the wine bottles clinking in our backpacks and totes - an anticipatory toast. We rode all the way to the Yellow Fortress. Those heavy, dark clouds followed us up, greeting us with hints of raindrops at the top. My favorite spot in the city, with that view that held me captive just a few weeks ago, that view that tugged at me to stay all day, to make a home out of dirt and trees and ground and sky - it was a restaurant. That small cafe I had smiled at then was now an institution, tables lining the length of the semicircle ruins. As it was days before Ramadan in a predominantly Muslim area, we drank in the view instead of the wine, then made our way down the steep road back to town, into a taxi, and all the way to the gazebo in our yard.

We poured wine and ate meats and cheeses and turned the 36 questions on the way to love into a game. We asked and answered - finding our commonalities and enjoying our differences. We told our life stories in 4 minutes, falling in love with friendship and the shared experience of this summer, of being in this place - this city with its fortress cafes and sidewalk cafes and homemade patio cafes.

To know each other gave context for our ticks and neuroses, our actions and inaction. Knowing each other, I realized that night, replaces judgment with understanding, eye rolls with compassion. To know someone is to create space for them in our hearts, to more easily forgive because we know their motivations. We start to defend them instead of assume the worst. To get to know someone is to call them friend.

Only the clouds were gray that night.

{photos: a monday night at kino bosna}