Dara, Sofia, in the middle of August

This was the year when all shit went down.  

Dara had the feeling there was a black hole hidden somewhere where the good intentions, the plans and even the usual fabric of the mundane life were sucked and destroyed. It wasn't affecting only her, but the people around her too. Maybe misfortune and troubles were contagious. At the beginning of the year, Dara got fired from the institute and for the first time in her life, she found herself jobless. She took it in a good way realising how relieved she felt without the burden of deadlines and the conflict with the director, and with so much free time. It felt like a vacation until Dara tried to overcome dissatisfaction and the unpleasant feeling of downfall by immersing herself in personal projects. She made a research trip encompassing all of Europe which ended in a car accident. And with her laid up in the hospital for an entire miserable month. When she was finally released, she found their apartment robbed and on top of that, their cat was missing. Not much had been stolen, but for some time she felt like her own home she loved so much had been polluted. These feelings and issues became insignificant when her grandmother suddenly passed away. Dara was devastated. She lost her only living relative and she could not imagine making plans for her marriage with Yavor. The wedding got postponed indefinitely.

People around her experienced similar misfortunes, adding to the grim sense of doom and overall unhappiness. She has never expected at her age to go to so many funerals in the span of only a couple of months and that her friends would suffer a genuine epidemic of divorces or separations. The only good exception was her best friend’s pregnancy and the following marriage. The rest were more bad events that were piling up and the year was nowhere near its end.

 One afternoon Dara made a detailed list of all the unfortunate events that had happened to her since the start of the year. Dara couldn't help but notice the high frequency of accidents and fortuities and that made her feel vulnerable. She scheduled herself a full medical check-up, became over-cautious when crossing the street, entirely cut off using her car... and finally stopped leaving the house. She closed herself off and instead went deep in the realm of the novels. She would read whatever books she could get her hands on no matter if they were good, badly-written, interesting, or odd. Dara read them and forgot what they were about the minute she opened the next book. Each of them was another brick Dara put between herself and the threatening chaos she couldn’t handle. Yet the symbolic wall behind which she was hiding from the inevitable and surely worst event that was coming next, didn't help much. 

The anticipation was driving her crazy. Something much more significant was somehow waiting for her and was going to bite. 

It was around this time when she met him. This happened the night before she got the letter. Well, it wasn’t exactly a meeting, nor was it at night. At first, she noticed a distant and transparent silhouette. It didn't even seem real, for it was getting lost in a sunlight way too strong. And then she carefully approached... or rather, she was the one getting pulled closer to it. He didn’t notice her, for he remained as he was, his back facing her, standing still and a bit hunched over. Dara tore her eyes away from him and became aware of her surroundings. Her bare feet were sinking in sands soaked by the water, but she felt neither cold nor wet. Muffled were the sounds of the ocean as if they were passing through thick glass. The wind was blowing but somehow her light dress did not waver at all, while pieces of rubbish left on the beach rolled and rustled sadly around. The shadow of the man was stretched toward her, with a tiny head Dara was flat-out stepping on. 

The whole place seemed deserted and vaguely familiar. Dark-pink waves were splashing, transparent and devoid of foam. The sky was a bit of a menacing presence; with a nuance of red so dark, it could be black. The sand was silver and it extended towards infinity, in both directions. In three directions, she corrected herself upon taking a look behind her back. A sea of waves and a sea of sands. And a man right on the edge between the two. She glanced up the sky and corrected herself again – between the three.

Dara made a small, hesitant step forward, uncertain whether to call out to him or perhaps back off. The sun was blocking her view, but she could well see that the man was tall and his shoulders were drooped. His posture was closed and forbidding, so she just couldn’t get herself to speak to him. She absently stared at the man some more, and finally decided on stepping back. 

He then turned around. She sensed his gaze upon her, and it felt as if she was being inspected. She still couldn’t see any details on his face but his presence was palpable. What frigged her was not the face or the presence but recognition. For a few instances she was seeing not a man, she saw the embodiment of all her premonitions. The startling aspect of it was that she felt both scared and attracted to him. Not to the person so much, but to unknown, to this inevitability she was expecting for so long. A weird feeling of both right and wrong gave her a pause.

He stood half-turned towards her. Dara opened her mouth, but at that very moment, he materialized inches away from her, cautiously leaning over her. His cheekbones, forehead, and nose seemed to blur and slip away. She blinked and stepped back.

"Was it I tha..." he started, but his voice startled her so much she tripped and jumped in her bed.

The pulse drummed in her head while the stranger still stood before her eyes. It was a dream, she finally realized, along with relief and regret. The usual nightmare. Dara took a deep breath thinking about the red skies, the ghostly wind, the double bass voice ... Dogs started barking, a horse neighed sadly, then an early bus passed noisily. The beach fell apart, the man's eyes faded. She tried to keep the mix of anxiety and longing, but gradually it slipped away, too. She wiped the lonely tear from her cheek and turned to Yavor. She pressed against his back, hugged him tightly, and tried to fall asleep again. 

In the morning that man and everything related to him seemed to slowly but surely fall back into oblivion. The dream had long dissipated, what remained, was the elusive and irritating feeling of something to be recalled. Some job that needs to be done? Perhaps an appointment she missed? Was it a birthday? A meeting? When she finally managed to convince herself that nothing had been forgotten, she again found herself having that same funny feeling from before. Something was going to happen. The tension drove her restless to the point that she decided to go out of the house.

"Something is coming for me," was the mantra circling her mind rhythmically and in sync with her footsteps. Her gut was telling her to get scared. It would be soon. Very soon. She was whispering to herself while walking slowly along the empty park alley, staring into her own shadow. She had this vague thought that the shadow's colour was kind of strange, purple. Could shadows be purple? Could they attack her? She really tried to shake those thoughts off. Like, seriously? It was high time she started to go out more often, to get up and made sure to find a job, because otherwise she was bound to go crazy.

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At that moment, she almost collided with someone. The person seemed to have jumped out of nowhere right in front of her. The silhouette flickered in the haze, a silhouette of a woman. Dara could barely see her face, as the sun was beating behind the woman. She stepped back with a strong feeling of déjà vu.

"The magic is strong within you, girl," the woman said after a short silence. Her hoarse, drawn-out voice pierced the purple veil before Dara's eyes, and the figure took on flesh. Gypsy. Old and ornate. The magic of the moment fell apart at once. 

Dara tried to smile and keep on walking but with a quick movement, the Gypsy woman blocked her way. Dara let out a sigh. Oh, how well she knew what would follow - a boring attempt to get her life foretold. It would be something about some news of course, or documents waiting to change her life, or about her husband. Most certainly about him. What a good man he must be but how he was never ever good for her. Meaning, he simply can’t love her as she does so she will definitely have to meet someone else. Right? Would it count for a future husband? Or God forbid if she started talking about diseases. She could almost hear the Gypsy's warnings: "Beware of evil eyes, because a long road you will take, bad people you will meet, and a bad disease will be waiting for both you and the baby that you’ll be carrying." Dara laughed inwardly - guess she could foresee stuff just as well as a Gypsy. What else? Something sinister perhaps: "Be careful what you eat and what you drink, avoid yellow eyes as they will bring you to your death". She sighed again. The Gypsy just stood silent and patient. Dara braced herself to tell her that she hated her future being predicted. And it didn't even matter if that future was good or bad.

"I won't foreshow anything to you," the Gypsy seemed to answer her thoughts. "I don't want your money either… I don't want anything from you, girl. Just know that your magic is very strong. When the time comes, you shall remember. You will once more return to where you’ve been before. But quite differently so."

And just like that, she left. All of a sudden Dara was left confused on the spot. She saw a glimpse of the woman emerging nimbly from the park and turning down the street towards the church. When did she manage to get so far? ... And was that really all the woman wanted to tell her? She looked back at her own shadow as if that could help her. Magic. Strong magic. Not that she believed in those things. She continued slowly. She had to remember something. Well. That’s exactly what she had been trying to do ever since the morning came. Trying to remember.

“Maybe it’s already happening,” she thought and this got her startled. She stopped, overwhelmed by a fresh, new feeling that something had gone terribly, terribly wrong. "My whole life is so messed up", she thought, "displaced ever since my very birth." Dara raised her face to the sun, closed her eyes, and let the warm redness under her eyelids soothe her. It occurred to her that the world would be much more beautiful if the sky was red, a dark red, almost black. But the sky was blue, there was no magic, and if her life was messed up, there was no one to blame. She shrugged and finally walked out of the park.

Regardless of how much she pretended not to care about the meeting with the Gypsy woman, on the way home she was already sure that whatever was coming for her had caught up to her. Her heart was beating fast and shallow, her head was dizzy and her mouth dried up. Dara felt scared, relieved, and confused at the same time. "Something has already come for me," she said quietly and the phone vibrated. She stopped and took it out slowly. Very slowly indeed with an empty mind and feeling cold despite the heat. She stared intensely at the glowing screen. The notification had arrived. It was a new mail with a small caption that read “Kolver”. She was invited to Kolver.

She sat on the bench near the entrance of her house feeling her knees weak. And for the first time since the beginning of the year, she started to cry. She wasn't thinking about her invitation, no. She was thinking about Boyan. About the nonchalant way, he announced in January that he had received an invitation from the University of Kolver. She was thinking about the smile on his face, the smile of a winner. She was thinking about the pain she felt then, the bittersweet feeling of loss, joy for her friend’s success and disappointment. She was crying because of the separation because she didn't have a proper farewell with a dear friend. She was thinking about the shame and the crushed dreams, that oath they made a long time ago and their cracked friendship. She cried over her guilt. She was in shock.

If someone asked Dara the previous day what was Kolver to her, she would have probably answered - a failed dream. It was rooted in her childhood and was connected with her grandmother, with her mother, with her secret ambitions and with the competition between her and her closest friends - Yavor and Boyan. It was much more than that of course. It was the dream of most of the scientists from every field in the world. If the Nobel prize was the biggest recognition a researcher could dream of, the Kover invitation was the biggest opportunity to create something, to get fame, to make a real impact on the world. It was exclusive, elite and far too impossible to achieve. It was legendary.

Receiving an invitation from Kolver. What were the odds?

It was well known that certain people really did receive an invitation from Kolver, but who they were and what was the reason they were chosen was unclear. All that was known about the process was that a group of scientists from Kolver University chose a single person every year. Adding to the mystery was the fact that you couldn't apply for Kolver; you couldn't hope to plan your academic record in a way that would make them notice you.  It didn’t work that way… Yet people somehow, somewhere, got lucky.

Boyan had become one of them. They had indeed talked over the years about how amazing would going to Kolver be. When they were younger that was their biggest dream, but that was all in the past now. It has turned into something to laugh about, a symbol of a childhood gone by… The impossibility of that dream had forged a connection between them perhaps even stronger than many of their other shared experiences. When Boyan turned out to be one of the chosen ones it hurt them as a group, hurt their relationship. Of course, they were sincerely happy for him, they were over the moon, actually. But the thought of their common dream coming true for only one of them… it was painful. So painful actually that one day Dara caught herself thinking that all the problems and failures in her life must have begun right after Boyan had received that damn invitation. She regretted it later about the awkward last moments with Boyan's family the day before the departure. Boyan didn't send them any letters from Kolver, she didn't write to him as well. She couldn’t admit the extent to which she was hurt by his absence even to herself.

Dara sat under the big chestnut tree, a tree she considered to be her friend as well since it had been in front of her house for the entirety of her life so far.  She finally let herself cry over everything that had happened, over her grandmother, her ruined marriage and her lost friends. She cried, but also smiled through her tears, as she too was a winner. One of the lucky ones. She got the letter too. She spent so many months in odd expectation, waiting for something to happen to her, but she absolutely could not imagine it was going to be that invitation. In her head ringing were the words “News and documents are about to change your entire life… On a long journey, you’ll go.” Nonsense, she told herself, because it was her that made it up, mocking the Gypsy woman. Nonsense, yeah...

"Breathe", she ordered herself, "why are you suddenly acting like such a crybaby? Boyan is waiting for us there, we’re all going to Kolver... The chain of disasters had ended. Finally."