A lot of people know about my best friend Mihael. They know that our relationship has inspired the infamous Diary of a fag hag and that we spend loads of time together, which is visible through countless photos and videos all over our social media profiles.
We talk, wonder around together, dance, sing, visit festivals, travel, eat, drink,…and we’re comfortable with each other up to that point where we have no mysteries between us. And I do mean that in the most literal sense.
The story of us began several years ago on Halloween night; our mutual friend invited us both for a night on the town. I was a fairy and he was a corpse. Five minutes after we had met, I told him: I’m going to love you next week., and my prophecy came true. We were close almost instantly.
Soon after that, the following summer, my friend decided to go to USA for a few months and see how it goes. We had spent loads of time together before that in our hometown Slavonski Brod, but in Zagreb, where I was studying, as well as he would visit me frequently.
But it is not my intention to make this exposition here, our common biography, there will be a space and time for that. I wish to talk about the poetry book I wrote about my friend and dedicated to him that was written sometime in between our firs encounter and his stay in the States.
It has been published this year under the name American dream: Prophecies about a friendship, and it has proven to be just that – prophetic.
I wrote about us who we were and who we had aspired to be and quite nicely managed to predict the people we were to become. Not many people can do that so precisely, so I’d be lying if I was to be modest about it.
Because I could go on and on for hours as to why this book was written, but also because that is of little to no relevance to the actual book itself, I did the same thing I did when I published Love prostitute and ask somebody else to write the review (you can read the reviews on Love prostitute here).
This time I’ve asked a published Croatian author whom I’ve had the pleasure to interact during our blogging days over ten years ago, the phenomenal Daniela Trputec to write her own view of my work.
She submitted her review in Croatian, so the only intervention on her original text was the translation to English, everything else is hers word-to-word. Here’s what she said:
“Vedrana is a warrior with a pen in her hand, she goes through deadness of presence in order to liven and color it, whilst writing about her Mihael, she transforms that dimension into their reality.
At moments, her Mihael is given the properties of an angel, archangel who commands the heavenly army in a war against Lucifer’s forces during the celestial war. By doing so, Vedrana displays an innocent, child-like, warm, playful side of her personality, but also places herself and Mihael into much more real battles, battles of gray everyday, in which they use magical, colorful paints, to cover up the stains of expectations from their environment.
She sees all layers of “sanctity” in him, as wall as illusory “dirtiness”, through her poems she displays duality present in all of us, but everything she does on her path is a game, research, passion towards life, towards dissecting human relations and emotions.
That is how Vedrana shows her essence, she is not afraid of being who she is, on the contrary, she turns it into her very own absolute, her law, her only unchangeable mark, that is the starting point of her ‘me’.
She is a modern age witch because she has the radars of her spirit and body on, her poetry is her own prophetic tool with which she gives her own self predictions, she warns herself and trusts herself the most.
Her only love, only faith, is her own art, she is in love with what it is and what it is to become. Her poems speak in a touching, glorifying, rapturous tone about beings that have met, and both of them believe it was a karmic meeting, at times they exchange roles that they make up for themselves, at times those relations are brother-sister, mother-child, father-child, brother-brother, sister-sister, male lover-female lover, female lover-female lover, male lover-male lover, because they have no gender, in their relationship they seek the purest parts of themselves and, in that way, they never have enough of each other. Always brave, in their own world, surrounded by their own audience that never seems to get them quite fully, or it gets them very little, but it is solely their own choice, they love being cocooned in their secret world, because for them, it is a source of inspiration, liftoff, flying…
Mihael and Vedrana come together in her poems, they are a spark, warmth, light and magic. She preserves their relationship from the impact of time in her poems, she saves the love for the end.
Vedrana writes with her heart, her poems take readers in an unknown place where they can peek for a moment, but cannot be, live, exist, they can only want to.
And just that desire led Vedrana towards her creativity, the desire to find herself, the desire to present herself and give it all. The desire to be braver than the bravery itself and stronger than strength.
But is that not what we all want?!
Vedrana is a young, talented artist that changes our world, she sticks out of the frames in order to inspire others to keep their heads up, just the way they are, without prejudice.
She teaches us what it is like to wake up from the dream of reality because reality is nothing but a play, a display, a moment, and when the curtains are down, the real life begins.
So let us all be willing to play her/our game from time to time, inspire her to dance on the moonlight in virginal beauty, in a night of new moon, like from a fairy-tale, so she would, once more dive in the deepest depths and so she could write a
p e a r l.”
Things about stuff 