Distance and Connection Will Always Find Each Other

A cappuccino at my spot by the sea, a cigarette half-smoked, it’s 8am. Bitter and warm, taken in the cool air, before the day turns to scorching. I learned to do nothing for an hour. Isn’t that the American dream?

It’s officially that time of year when us Americans contaminate social media with a pseudo-reality of living like a European, innocently captioned European Summer. Last summer I took it to another level. I packed up my shit and I fully sent it—one way, to my grandparents’ vacant home in Croatia. A place I only knew via culture, conversation, and oh yes, soccer!

Going to my grandparents’ home growing up also doubled as going to my dad’s house. Shoes off at the door, crosses over archways, rosary on dressers, some sort of meat and red sauce simmering from sun-up till sun-down. I sat with my siblings on the plastic-wrapped couch while Croatian soccer games played on the TV with the volume all the way up. My Dida (grandfather) in the room next door with Croatian radio streaming through the desktop, again volume all the way up. Words being spoken in a language I only understood in food.

It felt like I spent my entire childhood going to Croatia but really I was just going to Cliffside Park, New Jersey. And now that I’ve summered in the Balkans, let me tell ya, that shit is not the same.

And here we are, the beginning of the summer and I’m a couple months out from jet-setting back to my very own roleplay of a euro-local.

So until then—the only vehicle that drives my nostalgia is food. So be it.

June 17th, 2026—what may very possibly be the first game of a winning World Cup series for Croatia, and I bring myself back to all versions of the country I now know. To the sea, to my grandparents’ patio among the fig trees, to the cicadas’ sweet songs and thunder’s late-night claps. To the cigarettes, the wine out of plastic bottles, the two-euro cappuccinos. To the dobar dan and laku noć with my favorite Croatian dish and a dessert I spent all summer soaking in the sweetness of.

Main: Blitva, paired with Grilled Calamari and Lemon.

Dessert: Figs, honey-poached.

Blitva. Chard, garlic, olive oil, a Yukon gold gone soft in the pot. The chard is cooling and a little bitter, the kind of green that asks you to stop straining—it drains the heat, it clears the eyes, it moves what’s stuck. The olive oil is sweet and it forgives you. The potato is sweet and neutral and it holds everything down so the bitter greens don’t scatter. And then the garlic, the one hot note on an otherwise temperate plate—warm, acrid, descending, the clove that guards the gut against a raw season. Cooling without chilling. The whole argument of the Mediterranean table is in a bowl of greens.

Grilled calamari, lemon. Squid is a flesh of the water, sweet and salty, cool the way the sea is cool, building the blood and the fluids back up. But you put it over fire. The char is yang—it dries, it warms, it changes the cold thing into a hot thing. And then the lemon, sour and cool, drawing everything back inward just as the fire pushes it out. Yin meeting yang on a plate you eat standing up, by the water, with your fingers.

Figs, honey-poached. Figs, sweet and neutral, moistening the dry places, the fruit that loosens what’s stuck. Honey says the same thing again, sweeter. And then the cinnamon bark—hot, deep, a heat that goes down to the Kidney and anchors all that wet sweetness so it doesn’t pool and turn heavy. The vanilla just lifts. It’s the same move as the garlic in the greens, the same move as the char on the squid: something cool and yielding, corrected by a single point of heat. Cinnamon doing for the dessert exactly what the clove does for the chard.

But the figs are the tell. They grow where almost nothing else will fruit—rocky, salt-stung, half-starved of water, right up against the sea. And the harder the ground, the sweeter the fig; the salt drives the sugar up. In the five elements this is the control cycle: Earth controls Water, sweet against salt. When Water draws on Earth, the Earth answers by growing sweeter. The salt pulls and the sweetness comes up to meet it.

Salt in, sugar out.

The coast doesn’t just serve you the pairing. It is the pairing.

Salty and sweet. Hot and cool. Yin and yang. The polarizing opposites that we become so familiar with that we only name them in comparison but never complement. Isn’t it when the sun reflects off the sea that we stand in awe of the magic? The sparkle? The light?

And then the savory and the sweet hit your mouth at the same time. You shimmy, you moan, your eyes get big—some oral orgasm that can only compare to sex.

The sparkle isn’t the sun. It isn’t the water.

It’s the place they touch.

June 17th and I’m not there. I’m in Los Angeles, watching Croatia once again from a screen, eating the figs to get back to the patio. I’ve always watched Croatia from somewhere else. The food is the only thing that closes the distance.

So Croatia plays in the cup today and I’ll cook the meal and watch from the ocean rather than the sea.

But how can I feel salty when paired with something so sweet?