"You all keep saying the same thing," Marko said, his voice low but steady. "'' You ask where I went, what I did, and why I’m back. You want to know if I’m a hero or a failure."
He walked to the center of the room. "The truth is, I didn't go away to become something. I went away because I didn't know how to stay. I spent twenty years looking for a place where no one knew my name, where no one would ask me anything. I worked on ships, I built houses in the mountains, I sat in squares in cities where I didn't speak the language." pitaju_me_svi
The bus hissed as it came to a stop at the edge of the Adriatic. Marko stepped off, his boots crunching on the familiar white gravel. He looked the same, yet entirely different. The sharp jawline of his youth was now hidden behind a salt-and-pepper beard, and his eyes, once bright with the fire of ambition, were now as deep and unreadable as the sea at midnight. "You all keep saying the same thing," Marko
Marko didn't leave the next day. He stayed. He fixed the shutters on his mother’s house. He painted the old wooden boat that had been rotting in the harbor. "The truth is, I didn't go away to become something
He realized that the "everyone" they spoke of wasn't a judge or a jury. It was just a community trying to make sense of a gap in their own history. He wasn't a mystery to be solved anymore; he was just Marko, the man who came home.
Finally, Marko stood up. The tavern went quiet. The clinking of glasses stopped.
Marko offered a tight, polite smile. "Just traveling, Stjepan. Just living." But "just living" was never enough for the people of Omiš. The Gathering