I spent the afternoon with my new friend Magdalena, a waitress from a café I had breakfast at a few days earlier. We met at Costa Coffee next to her restaurant and nabbed a corner booth.
“Do you mind if I smoke?” she asked.
“I don’t mind,” I replied not sure how much of a choice I had.
We decided to took a stroll on the promenade running along side the Danube. Being outside not only allowed for more room to maneuver but some how dissipated any formality the two of us had sitting across from each other in a stuffy restaurant.
We exchanged ideas with a rare vulnerability as she suddenly listened with a heightened interest in what I had to say. We hung on each other’s words as if our lives depended on it.
We talked about relationships, plutonic and romantic, long-term goals, and life in Belgrade.
“If I could leave tomorrow I would,” she told me.
She was a young woman with lofty goals. The way goals should be, I thought.
She told me her dream was to move to Spain and continue working as a make-up artist for television and theater. I told her it was possible as long as she had a solid plan but she deflected my rah-rah speech promptly naming all the reasons it couldn’t happen; a lack of money being the main culprit.
We decide to have lunch after our Danube stroll at a nearby deli just a few minutes before she needed to head off to work.
The cashier asked if I was half Korean and half Italian, Magdalena explained.
“There’s absolutely no way she guessed that!” I exclaimed.
“Well,” she said. She figured you’re not Chinese or Japanese because you’re not short. So you must be Korean. And she can tell you are Italian by the way you dress,” referencing my blue blazer and scarf.”
We sat eating together as if we’d known each other for a lifetime, or two. She seemed to emanate a sense of knowing and understanding about the world well beyond her years. I thought back on my early 20s and reminisced about that sense of angst and longing I had for the world to open its arms and offer a sign that everything would somehow work out.
“I know how you feel. It’s like you’re so young but you’re running out of time,” I remember a friend saying to me one New Year’s eve.
I wondered if that was how Magdalena felt.
As we finished our sandwiches and gazed off towards speeding buses and busy shoppers the clouds began to roll in.
“I told you,” she said. “It’s going to rain.”
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