The restaurant Kafe Balkan in northern Phoenix. It’s past noon—lunchtime—so the crowd is expected. Ćevapi steam from the kitchen, burek glows golden behind the glass display, and small pastries tease the appetites of hungry guests. It’s been a year since I first brought my coworkers here. Since then, we come at least twice a month for lunch. The deal is simple: I order for everyone, and they don’t mind paying—as long as they don’t have to wrestle with the language. The food arrives, and Dylan asks how people in Serbia use their lunch breaks. It’s not easy to explain—the differences are huge—but I do my best.
First of all—air conditioning. In Arizona, summer comes in full force. When it’s 40 degrees outside, inside it barely reaches 20. Back home, that would be a mission impossible, because this cooling device is treated like an atomic bomb with delayed effects. A draft works instantly; the long-term consequences come later. To the impolite question, “Why don’t you turn on the AC when it’s already on the wall?”, my countrymen offer a whole fan of “medically based” explanations—that it’s an unhealthy devil’s invention that makes people sick on the spot.
“Well, people there must live longer then!” Steven observes.
“The average life expectancy in Serbia is 75.7 years, and in Arizona it’s 78.8,” I reply without hesitation.
LET’S GO FOR JUST ONE
I bring beer for the group—it wouldn’t be right to look stingy—and explain the next, in America unimaginable, category: “Let’s go for just one.”
When friends run into each other in town during work hours, the conversation usually boils down to four magical sentences:
“Let’s stop by for just one.”
“Okay, but just one!”
“Come on, one more—we walked here on two legs!”
And the grand finale: “As long as we’re alive and well!”
The Americans like the story. Chris refreshes what he learned earlier: “Cheers!” while Jessica switches on the math:
“So, two drinks. That’s not that much!”
“Keep in mind that the average Serbian worker runs into at least ten friends during the day,” I explain the nuances.
And just when it was getting good, the lunch break ends. My colleagues order baklava and cream puffs to go, while images from my youth flicker through my mind: coffee with business talks, rakija for worry, beer for refreshment, and wine for silence when words run out.
It was nice while it lasted. And yet, real life begins before “Let’s go for just one” and after “As long as we’re alive and well.” It’s something like a pause from real problems—an intermezzo in a cheerless reality. Here, breaks are rare. Everything is precisely recorded. Time is measured, results counted, and feelings set aside somewhere. One’s homeland remains inside like a familiar song—you rarely sing it, but you know the lyrics by heart. “Let’s go for just one” isn’t just an invitation for a drink. It’s the feeling that there’s someone you can confide in. That someone understands you even without words.
Leaving one’s country isn’t just a change of address. It’s a fracture of identity, a migration of memories, and the beginning of a new life with no room for mistakes. Emigration isn’t an adventure or a luxury. It’s often the last—and sometimes the only—solution.
When a person is born in a country of chronic political instability, where institutions constantly split at the seams, leaving no longer looks like a choice but like an exit. You leave behind a career, parents, familiar streets, and friends, and step into uncertainty with the feeling that you’re not allowed a single wrong move.
This isn’t, as some like to say, a “migration of experts,” but violence against emotions and an exodus of hope. People of all professions and generations leave, all carrying the same burden: how to start over and still remain yourself. Back home, they were someone. They had a name, a reputation, a job they loved. They knew how the system breathed—who could handle car registration and who an ID card. They had connections but didn’t use them. And then they became a number in line for a work permit. Another foreigner with an accent. Someone who knows how to listen and rarely speaks. People who don’t ask for much, afraid of losing even what little they’ve gained.
At first, everything feels temporary: “Just until we get settled. Until the paperwork is done. Until the kids start school.” And that temporary quickly begins to be counted in years.
Suddenly, someone who lectured at a university works as a driver or waiter. A journalist stocks shelves in a supermarket. An architect installs doors and windows. There’s nothing shameful in that. It’s a beginning—and every beginning is hard.
You go through a school of life no university can offer. You get used to almost everything, but what hurts is the partial loss of identity.
In a foreign language, words slowly slip away. Nuances of character fade. Humor becomes clumsy. Self-confidence is rebuilt from scratch, without the connections we once despised. In those first years, every bit of support matters. A neighbor’s smile. A colleague’s advice: “I’ve been through that too.” Many emigrants remember those encounters better than birthdays.
Abroad, relationships are functional. A neighbor is polite, a colleague correct, but friendships are formed in youth. There’s no shared past, no local jokes, no family ties that bind people together. Visits are scheduled in advance; socializing is planned.
Many emigrants learn to keep sorrow, joy, and dilemmas to themselves. Though surrounded by people, they’re often lonely. It hurts most when you realize there’s no one who can drop by unannounced—because no one has you “on the way.”
“TIMES OF DESPAIR, TIMES OF HOPE—SOME DESTROY, OTHERS BUILD”
Fortunately, in that darkness of uncertainty, a light always appears—most often in the form of a new challenge: ambition.
Not the grand, corporate or Hollywood kind, but quiet, persistent, everyday ambition. The ambition for children to live better. To learn the language. To pay the bills. To stop asking how to survive and start asking how to live.
For emigrants, ambition wears a different face. Titles and awards don’t matter. What matters is proving your worth, enduring, and not breaking.
Many then discover new professions. Artists become HVAC technicians. Engineers drive trucks. Lawyers sell insurance. They don’t just learn new jobs but new values—what it means to respect working hours and to be measured by performance, not party affiliation.
But they also learn the darker side—that even the best workers are just numbers in a system. Big companies don’t care about individuality, spirituality, or talent. Who you were doesn’t matter—only how fast you answer emails, how many calls you handle per hour, how often you click the right option in a computer system.
More. Faster. Harder. Again and again. Conversations are recorded and analyzed—as if we worked for an intelligence agency, not with people we depend on for a living. Tension rises, often not from clients or colleagues, but from invisible figures at the top of the hierarchy who shape destinies without explanation or discussion.
People with experience, knowledge, and a human approach often become a nuisance. They’re too “expensive.” They don’t “run” fast enough. They spend too much time with a desperate client seeking understanding. And the system doesn’t measure understanding—it measures speed.
In such an environment, dedication begins to look like naivety, experience like a burden, and humanity like a flaw in the matrix. Some withdraw, stop trying, and sink into routine. Others fall ill from chronic stress, anxiety, and insomnia.
Yet the problem isn’t the people but a system that increasingly loses its meaning. Thankfully, there are still those who refuse to be mere “human resources” in management’s hands. Few, but brave—the last Mohicans of professionalism in the inhumane reserve of 21st-century corporate capitalism.
Life goes on. Days pass. And there comes a time when we begin to count years differently. Where you worked and how much you earned matters less than what remains behind you.
Most emigrants then think not about careers but about the road traveled. About a struggle in which they preserved themselves. In which they didn’t reach the top but didn’t lose their compass.
In those memories there is sadness and joy, success and failure—but above all, pride. Proof that it wasn’t all in vain. You see it in grandchildren’s smiles, in children’s gratitude, in the trust you’ve earned from friends—even when they’re few, even when they’re far away.
Today, migration is discussed in numbers: how many left, how many stayed, how many arrived. Less often do we talk about how those people live and what they carry inside.
That’s why these stories must be told—not to complain or boast, but to understand one another. Because no one leaves out of idleness.
There are moments when an emigrant who has found stability and rhythm feels a longing for the old life—not for injustice, but for rituals. Coffee in the middle of a workday. Casual conversations. Ease.
Then the other voice speaks up—a reminder that you can’t have both. Without sacrifice, there’s no progress. If you sit in a café all day, you can’t build anything.
And so the quiet argument between inner voices continues in every emigrant’s mind. One calls across the ocean, while the other sternly warns: “Stay where you are, because you weren’t even meant for where you came from.”
Over time, the homeland begins to resemble a winter landscape. Beautiful in photographs. Pleasant to visit. But when you have to push through fog, frost, and ice every day—it’s no longer idyllic.
Time covers it with the snow of nostalgia. It’s lovely to look at, but you know that prolonged exposure chills the bones.
You don’t return to it forever, but you visit. You love it because it’s where you came from. And you keep it, so it doesn’t disappear from memory.
STORY TELLER 
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