The city had a sound, a specific, relentless frequency that had become the soundtrack to my slow unraveling. It wasn't just the blare of tram bells or the incessant hum of a thousand simultaneous conversations on Ilica Street. It was deeper than that, a subterranean thrum of ambition, anxiety, and exhaust fumes that seeped up through the cobblestones and into the soles of my shoes, climbing my skeleton until it vibrated in my teeth. Zagreb was screaming, and I, Vesna, a journalist who had built her career on listening, could no longer hear anything else.
It was the silence that finally broke me.
I was sitting in the open-plan office of 'Jutarnji Fokus', a space designed to foster collaboration and now functioning as a perfect crucible for collective neurosis. Keyboards clacked like a swarm of metallic insects. Phones trilled with the urgency of minor catastrophes. To my left, Luka was live-tweeting a parliamentary session, his sighs growing more theatrical with each 280-character burst. To my right, Petra was negotiating with a source, her voice a low, conspiratorial purr. It was a normal Tuesday, a symphony of productivity.
And I heard nothing.
It was as if a glass bell had descended over me, muting the world into a dull, fuzzy roar. My own fingers, poised over my keyboard, looked like alien things. The cursor on the blank document blinked with a slow, mocking rhythm. Blink. You have nothing to say. Blink. You are a fraud. Blink. Who cares?
The piece was due in two hours. A 500-word op-ed on the new urban planning initiative for the riverfront. I had the quotes, the data, the architect's renderings. I had written a hundred such pieces. But the words, those trusty, malleable tools of my trade, had deserted me. They were like dried beans in a jar, rattling meaninglessly in my skull.
My editor, Damir, a man who wore stress like a cheap cologne, stopped by my desk. "Vesna? How's it looking? We need to slot this in."
I looked up, and I must have had a truly vacant expression, because his impatient scowl softened into a flicker of concern. "You alright? You look pale."
"Fine," I heard myself say, my voice strangely distant. "Just polishing the last paragraph."
He nodded, mollified, and moved on, a shark scenting blood in other waters. The lie had come so easily, an automatic reflex from a body on autopilot. Polishing the last paragraph. The document was called 'NEWDRAFTFINAL3.doc' and contained only a header and the date.
This wasn't writer's block. Writer's block is a temporary dam, a logjam of ideas. This was a drought. The riverbed of my creativity was cracked and barren, baked under a relentless, internal sun of exhaustion.
It had been building for months, this quiet erosion of the self. The late nights chasing a story that would be yesterday's news by dawn. The endless cups of coffee that now did nothing but make my hands jittery without sharpening my mind. The parties where I'd nod and smile, all the while mentally composing my lede. My life had become a series of deadlines, a perpetual state of being not-quite-finished, not-quite-good-enough.
And then there was Luka. Not Luka from work, but my Luka. Or, more accurately, the man who had been my Luka for three years until three weeks ago. The breakup had been the final, brutal twist of the knife, the one that severed the last tendon holding me together.
It hadn't been a dramatic, door-slamming affair. Those, I think, would have been easier. A clean, sharp pain. Ours was a slow, suffocating death by a thousand paper cuts. It was the forgotten anniversary, the conversations that morphed into debates, then into arguments about whose turn it was to buy milk. It was the way he'd look at his phone while I was talking, his thumb scrolling, scrolling, through a world more interesting than the one I was offering him.
The end came on a perfectly ordinary Wednesday. We were eating pasta. I was telling him about a difficult interview I'd conducted with a grieving mother, my voice trembling with the shared weight of her story. He took a sip of wine, put down his glass, and said, "You know, Vesna, sometimes I think you absorb other people's tragedies because you're afraid to examine your own emptiness."
The comment was so precise, so venomously accurate, that it stole the air from my lungs. He wasn't even angry. He was stating a fact, as if observing the weather. He had seen the drought in me long before I had admitted it to myself. He moved out the next day, taking his razor, his favourite mustard, and the last remaining shred of my self-esteem.
Now, sitting at my desk, the memory was a fresh wound. The silence in my head was replaced by a high-pitched ringing, a tinnitus of the soul. I stared at the blinking cursor until my eyes blurred. The words on the screen—'Urban,' 'Development,' 'Community'—dissolved into meaningless glyphs.
I had to get out.
The thought was not a gentle whisper but a primal scream from some deep, surviving part of my brain. GET OUT.
I stood up so abruptly my chair rolled back and hit the desk of the intern behind me. I didn't stop to apologize. I grabbed my bag, my coat, and walked. I didn't look at Damir. I didn't look at anyone. I just moved towards the stairwell, eschewing the claustrophobic elevator, my footsteps echoing in the concrete hollow of the stairwell.
Out on the street, the noise returned with a vengeance, a physical assault. A delivery van blasted its horn. A group of tourists spilled out of a cafe, laughing loudly. The world was too bright, too loud, too much. I felt a panic attack looming, a tightness coiling in my chest, its cold fingers creeping up my throat.
I started walking, aimlessly at first, then with a desperate purpose. I cut through the Stone Gate, the quiet, candlelit shrine a momentary balm, the scent of wax and old prayers a stark contrast to the city outside. I weaved through the crowds on Tkalčićeva, the lively cafe street where I'd spent so many evenings with Luka, each memory a tiny, sharp needle in my skin.
My feet, acting on a memory older than heartbreak, carried me to the one place in the city that had always offered a semblance of peace: the Botanical Garden. I paid the entrance fee and stepped inside, and the moment the iron gate clanged shut behind me, the city's scream faded to a murmur.
Here, the air was different. It was heavy with the scent of damp earth, of blooming magnolias, of quiet. Sunlight filtered through the dense canopy of ancient trees, dappling the paths in shifting patterns of light and shadow. I walked past orderly beds of medicinal herbs, past the roaring waterfall of the rock garden, and found my usual bench by the small, murky pond. A lone duck paddled listlessly in the centre, a perfect mirror of my own inertia.
I sat there for a long time, breathing. Just breathing. In the relative quiet, the events of the morning played back in horrifying high definition. The silent panic at my desk. The lie to Damir. The frantic flight. I was having a professional, personal, and existential meltdown simultaneously. It was impressively efficient, if nothing else.
This wasn't me. The old Vesna—the one from a year, even six months ago—was a fighter. She was the one who'd camped out for two days in a farmer's field to get a quote from a reclusive whistleblower. She was the one who could find the human heart of any story, who could make a city council budget feel like a thriller. She was passionate, she was driven, she was… alive.
What was I now? A husk. A conduit for other people's stories with no narrative of my own. Luka was right. I was empty.
Tears welled up, hot and shameful. I let them fall, watching them darken the grey wood of the bench between my hands. I cried for the lost relationship, for the dying career, for the woman I used to be. I cried until I was hollowed out, until there was nothing left but the dry, aching shell of myself.
It was in that state of absolute zero that the idea came. It didn't arrive with a fanfare or a flash of inspiration. It simply was, as if it had been waiting in the silence all along.
Escape.
Not a weekend in Rovinj. Not a week hiking in Plitvice. A real escape. A geographic cure. Something so far removed from my current reality it would force a hard reset. I needed silence. True silence. Not the muffled quiet of a garden in the city, but the profound, encompassing silence of a place where humanity was an afterthought.
I pulled out my phone, my fingers moving with a certainty they'd lacked all morning. I opened a browser and typed: "most remote places in Croatia."
The algorithms offered up the usual suspects: the Pakleni islands, the Kornati archipelago, Mljet. Beautiful, but still touched by the hand of tourism, by the chatter of day-trippers. I scrolled further, my thumb smearing the last of my tears on the screen.
And then I saw it.
A photograph, amateurish, slightly out of focus. A stark, white lighthouse, standing sentinel on a jagged, grey islet. There was no beach, just dark rocks tumbling into a sea of impossible blue. The sky was vast, empty but for a few scudding clouds. The caption read: "Sveti Juraj Lighthouse. Uninhabited. Automated in 1985, but a keeper remains for maintenance. Last outpost before Italy."
Sveti Juraj. Saint George. The dragon-slayer.
My heart did a slow, heavy thud against my ribs. Uninhabited. The word was a poem. Last outpost. It sounded like the edge of the world.
I clicked on the link, devouring the scant information. The island was a mere speck in the Adriatic, a two-hour boat ride from the nearest village on Vis, which was itself an island famously difficult to reach. There was no shop, no cafe, no Wi-Fi. The lighthouse keeper was a solitary position, a six-month stint. The current keeper was a man, his name wasn't listed. There was one small, historic keeper's cottage that was sometimes, rarely, used for guests or researchers.
A wild, desperate hope bloomed in my chest. It felt like the first real emotion I'd had in months.
I could go there.
I could write about it. Not the urban planning nonsense, but a real story. A profile on the last lighthouse keeper of the Adriatic. A man who chooses silence. A man who lives with the wind and the waves as his only companions. It was a story about isolation, about solitude, about finding meaning in the monotonous, vital task of keeping a light burning. It was the absolute antithesis of everything in my life right now.
It was perfect.
I stood up from the bench, my body feeling lighter, the leaden weight in my limbs replaced by a jittery, electric energy. The walk back to the office was a different journey. The city's noise was still there, but it was background static now, a problem for which I had just found the solution.
I marched straight into Damir's glass-walled office without knocking. He was on the phone, but he looked up, startled by my abrupt entrance.
"I need a leave of absence," I said, my voice clearer and stronger than it had been in weeks.
He covered the receiver. "Vesna, what the hell? Where did you run off to? The riverfront piece—"
"Is not going to happen. I'm burned out, Damir. You saw it yourself. I'm no use to you like this."
He sighed, the long-suffering sigh of a man managing a team of temperamental artists. "Take a week. Go to the coast. Unplug."
"No," I said, shaking my head. "Not a week. A month. And I'm not going to the coast. I'm going here." I placed my phone on his desk, the image of the white lighthouse glowing on the screen.
He peered at it, confused. "What is that? A museum?"
"It's Sveti Juraj. An uninhabited island. There's a keeper there. I want to write a long-form piece on him. 'The Last Lightkeeper.' It's human interest, it's travel, it's a slice of disappearing Croatia."
He was already shaking his head. "Vesna, be serious. A month? The budget alone… and who's going to cover your beat?"
"I'm not asking, Damir," I said, and I heard the steel in my own voice, the steel I thought Luka had taken with him. "I am telling you. I am either going to that lighthouse to write this story, or I am quitting. Right now."
The ultimatum hung in the air between us. He studied my face, and I knew what he saw: the dark circles under my eyes, the pallor of my skin, but also a newfound, desperate resolve. He knew I wasn't bluffing. I had nothing left to lose.
He took a deep breath, his shoulders slumping in defeat. "A month," he said, finally. "One month. You get me 5,000 words of Pulitzer-worthy prose about this… this hermit. And you stay in touch. Satellite phone. Weekly check-ins."
"Thank you," I said, the words thick with emotion.
"Don't thank me," he grumbled, turning back to his computer. "Just don't come back with a beard and a pet seagull. Now get out of my office. I have a paper to put out."
I walked back to my desk, a strange sense of calm settling over me. For the first time in months, I had a purpose. A direction. I cleaned my desk, packed my things, and ignored the curious stares of my colleagues.
That evening, in my apartment that still felt too big and echoed with Luka's absence, I began to pack. I folded simple, practical clothes—linen shirts, cotton trousers, swimsuits. I downloaded books onto my e-reader. I bought a satellite phone rental, as Damir had demanded.
As I moved through the familiar rooms, a different kind of anxiety began to prickle at the edges of my resolve. What was I doing? I was a city girl, born and bred. My idea of nature was the park. I was trading my espresso machine for… what? A percolator over a campfire? I was choosing to be alone with my thoughts, the very thing I'd been running from.
I stood before my balcony window, looking down at the stream of red and white headlights on the avenue below. That was my life. That noise, that rush, that constant, low-grade stress. In a few days, I would be on a rock in the middle of the sea, with a stranger, surrounded by nothing but water and sky.
The fear was real, a cold knot in my stomach. But beneath it, deeper and stronger, was something else. It was a flicker. A tiny, fragile, but undeniable flame of anticipation.
I was going to the edge of the world to find my light. Or perhaps, just to remember what the darkness truly looked like, without the city's electric glow to dilute it. I was going to find the lighthouse, and, though I didn't know it yet, the lighthouse was already waiting for me.