Our family routine permitted us every year to spend more than a month at the seaside. One of my uncles had a beautiful house in a small place on the Adriatic Riviera and we would have the privilege of spontaneously melting into the scenery every summer.

It happened often enough to call It a habit that I would wake up before anyone else. I would love to wander in the garden in the silence of the morning. The sun would be still mellow but already strong enough to invite the little lizards to join me on the stairs and stone pavements. It would be my time to play with them while the rest of the family was still asleep. They would be so friendly to me and come into the palm of my hands so I could pet them on their head. They would close their eyes and seemingly smile. That connection and fascination with little lizards that started when I was two years old never left. I was known in the family as a lizard whisperer.

As I am not high enough to reach the Petrof upright piano's keyboard, on which my father is searching for the combination of sounds that describe emotion and the story he wants to communicate to other people, I am as good as invisible. I am following the struggle and sound manifesting in his legs and toes while I stand still and wait for him to notice me and give me a moment of his attention. Interrupting him is not an option. Patience and bravery is the way to achieve my goal. Hopefully, he won’t get scared of me when he notices me, like the last time he did. I am too young to know that time is measured by a clock. As I am indulging in my own creative process of drawing on the floor, the tips of my colour pencils are the strokes of time. Now they are worn off and must be sharpened so I can go on not interrupting anybody again… 

Time was never passing for me in a linear way, and my age did not follow the expected curve of life. In my small years, I was able to offer mature reactions as they were asked of me and I felt as if a grown-up person was living inside of me. Maybe this is just in general one of the qualities of time, but sometimes the feeling I have is as if living life backwards, going forward in time and age to be born again, while shedding more and more layers off the child within me.

From time to time, there are moments where I get overwhelmed by triggers that make me think about my roots, belonging and passions as driving forces towards that youthful eternity, moments like when someone dear passes away, moments in which I feel the reality is shifting… 

When god was creating a life for me, for some reason, understandable only in a far future, he didn’t give me a burden of shame.

The feeling of privacy and shame was always a curious topic to me. A sense of protection built-in people from outside judgment and view. It can be associated with shyness and mistaken for integrity. For sure it is an easy way of dealing with the responsibility I thought. A responsibility to be the most honest version of oneself…

As I was brought up to believe that humans are the main protagonists in life, and animals are kept for their needs without a grain of doubt about that fact, I was an owner during my childhood, of a very sweet, depressed yellow canary bird in a cage, a couple of uncommunicative tiny fish in a round aquarium, and the sweetest turtle kidnapped from a seaside forest on the way back from one of our summer vacations.

I don’t remember what happened to the yellow bird, I remember that the fish ate each other, and the last golden one died of loneliness, and that my beloved turtle never woke up on one of the early spring days.

Encounters with the dogs which my grandparents kept in the village house were at the level of an annoyance since they were just kept to serve as a live alarm system, barking the whole day and night…

One day, when I was about six years old, my uncle brought home a young woman he wanted to marry. I thought of her as a fascinating petite gentlewoman. Her different beauty than what I have seen in my family mesmerised me. She was quiet and kind. She treated me with warmth and understanding. Almost like a child. I fell in love with her pretty fast.

After the wedding passed in a usual manner, smelling of alcohol, music and reckless joy, she was mostly alone and I was always welcome in her home. I felt being in her company, that nothing else mattered to her, that she had no other ambition at those moments than focussing on my wellbeing, feeding me something delicious or telling funny stories…

Children were strange to me back then. I found it difficult to relate to them, simply because they were so spoiled, overprotected, and unreasonable. Helpless and rude. They had toys and games I didn’t know how to play since the opportunity to do so was rare. I didn’t go to visit them, not to catch the germ of ordinary, and they didn’t dare come visit me. I was busy becoming a violinist, and they didn’t dare to face my tall father.

I met Margareta when we were four years old. We went to the same kindergarten and later to the same class in the first grade of school…

There was no other place I wanted to be at as a toddler. Disciplined synchronised movements reflecting in mirrors. The sound of the pointe shoes lifting the angelic beings of ethereal beauty into the air seemed to me like a sound of my destiny. It didn’t matter that I had no shoes to stand on, I stood on my toes anyhow… I learned every step of the 'Swan Lake'. Odil and her mesmerising 32 fouettés were the toughest but the most satisfying…

When God was creating a life for me, for some reason, understandable only in a far future, he had me born in a northern province of Serbia, an eastern republic of a country that doesn't exist anymore, Yugoslavia. My mother language was Hungarian and I was, therefore, a different kind of a normal kind of an accepted sort of folk, which belonged to the colourful bouquet of nations and nationalities that enjoyed the open doors of paradise and the beautiful brotherly feeling of equality and opportunity…