ten miles south of kosovo

and west of Skopje, above Lake Matka and its St. Andrew Monastery hemmed by cafes and wooden tables shaded by red and white umbrellas, across that water as surprisingly green as an anole's backside on a small boat steered by a captain who only grunts when I pay him and up the eastern face of that gorge, the trail a mess of unsettled rocks outlining steep Zs from one side of the incline to the other and back again till we get to the monastery wall at the top and through the gate where the monks have been replaced by working Joes taking slugs out of cans of Skopsko while on break from tending the modest garden there, or perhaps dirty blue pants and a wifebeater is just the uniform of this sect of monks, the sect of Saint Nicholas, to whom the small church is dedicated to, and in whose honor every inch of the inside of that church has been painted in scenes real and imagined from the bible, painted sometime in the mid-1600s and then abandoned by all before being heavily graffitied, with the eyes of every reachable saint scratched out in the traditional fashion of non-Christians wishing to defile, but also graffitied thoroughly and at chest height for the entire circumference of the room with such pithy observations as “Goran [was here in] 1830” and so on, so that we are moved to (nearly religious) wonder at the universal human compulsion to piss on one another's scent, and so not at all surprised to find, framed by the legs of two horribly blinded saints crippled not by their Creator but by their Viewers, a dedication to the seemingly distant place of our birth: