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Kosmos sent me postcards but there was never a return address or a surname. The first card was a photo of a wall and barbed wire and he wrote, Thinking of you in Berlin. Next was an antique card from a dervish house, I am thinking about bridges and you and I am writing my play. And then a card with a picture of the ocean from Mljet Island on which he wrote, If you were here, Calypso, we could stay seven years.

I wanted to write, Go home to Penelope.

The last card I ever received from him was a Henry Payne painting of men choosing between red or white roses. On the other side, I must decide to go home or not, thinking of you. It was mailed from London. The card was an advertisement for a play at the National Theatre and I wondered if he had found work there. I mailed a letter to Kosmos, c/o The National Theatre, London, England, to tell him my news, but I received no answer.

I left Paris forever a few months after he did. I could not survive living in a cold-water walk-up and working under the table in a print shop.

I could not imagine doing what I was going to do alone.

I gave my landlady a forwarding address, but the old woman never forwarded anything. If cards came, she probably used them to line the bottom of her birdcage.

Mam met me at the airport. When the thick glass doors opened into the world I came from, my young city of immigrants and refugees and people born on the land, I felt destroyed. I did not want to be here and I did not want to be in Paris. There Mam stood alone, where she and my father used to be. Her curly hair was pulled up at the back of her skull in a way that made her high cheekbones pretty. She held her arms open to pull me close and I could see she had thrived in the year we had not seen each other. She was holding me in the crowd at arrivals and she smelled like our old home.

She said, I missed you.

I’m pregnant, I said.

Toronto, Sarajevo

I wanted to keep my baby. I look back now and it seems simple but it did not feel simple then. How would I support a child and how would I work? How would it be for her with no father? Who would be her family?

But there was this other feeling that I had few words for. It was a feeling of I can do what I want. It was in the air. Women were speaking. Shedding old shames. Working as bus drivers. As judges. As radio hosts. Keeping their babies. People said things like, I don’t like a woman’s voice on the radio, or, Women are too emotional for boardrooms. But women kept doing things anyway. I watched people condemn my rounding stomach and look for a ring on my finger. I told Mam about this and she said, It’s none of their beeswax.