THE DEBT (November 20, 2015)
I dreamt that my beloved and I were visiting a hilltown very like Motovun someplace on the Adriatic coast of Croatia, and that we found a wine store very to my liking in one of its narrow and winding streets. Attended by an older lady who looked and behaved as though she was from Zagreb, the store had an amazing collection of wines from Dalmatia and Istria. In the end, I bought a bottle of an ancient wine for seventeen-thousand kuna, but I was fifty kuna short of the full amount. My beloved was not with me at the time, for she got quickly bored with the wine store, and I told the lady that I would be back with the remainder in a few minutes. She begged me not to take too much time with it, for she did not like to have her cash register out of kilter for too long. I put the bottle in my knapsack, and hurried out of the store. It took me quite a while to find my beloved, but I could not believe that I would pay more than two-thousand euros for a single bottle of wine. When I found her at last, we had hard time finding the wine store again. My debt of fifty kuna was weighing heavily on me, and I did my best to give the money to the old lady as soon as possible. To my discomfort, I woke up before I found the store. The debt made me quite miserable, but it was time to get out of bed. My beloved was about to leave the apartment on her way to work, and she laughed at the amount of money I had paid for a bottle of wine. But she paid little attention to my debt, which struck her as puny by comparison. Indeed, I feel uncomfortable even when I am a single kuna in debt in a store where everybody knows me for years, let alone in a town I am visiting for the first time.