When I was growing up in the 80s, in our first home, we had a long hall that connected all the rooms in the apartment. There was a phone that was placed in the middle with a chair next to it, and it was always occupied. Even though my dad made sure to place a phone in each of the rooms, everybody preferred this very spot, because you could be on the phone with somebody without missing out on the life that was going on in the rest of the apartment.

The kitchen and the dining room were two steps in front of the chair where the smell of Mom’s mouthwatering dishes would tickle your nostrils and get your mouth watering. The windows at the end of the dining table opened up to a seventh-floor panoramic view of the sky and the swallows, which often appeared in the frame and snatched any sorrowful thoughts away. On the right side of the “phone chair” was the door to the living room, so you could hear the TV buzzing in the background, just loud enough to let you know if there was a good show about to start. To the left of the chair was the entrance to the apartment where the jolly postman, our cleaning “auntie”, playmates, or a neighbor short of that one ingredient could pop in at any time. Those were still the days where people didn’t need to announce their arrival and strangers were always welcome.

And then there was this one spot that could not be seen from the phone chair – a booth-like space that was hiding just behind it. It was the apartment’s storeroom: no bigger than 1.5 square meters in size. My parents used it to store everyday stuff like bed sheets, pillows, and off-season garments – a space often forgotten, but dearly missed if you didn’t have it. We called it “špajz” (read as schpeiz), a shortened loan-word from the German “Speisekammer”. The Bosnian version of the word created an image suspended between two definitive sounding consonants, a fully enclosed self-sufficient space.

That little blind spot became the entrance to a h(e)aven on earth for the six-year-old me. I could nestle in, snug as a bug in a rug, between its wooden storage boxes, and disappear into my own world – my mother occasionally peeping around the door just to see “If I’m still breathing”. And since my body filled up all of the free space, there was never any room for extra playmates, freeing it from any other social activity.

This created a strange kind of energetic whirlpool of possibilities, where the energy of creativity was always swirling, instantly catching me in its grip as I stepped in through the door. It was the best tiny art studio I could have wished for. The drawings and the model clay sculptures that I made provide tangible proof of the time I spent there, but I don’t remember having made them. It is the immaterial memory of the space and the feeling of dissolving into the free flow of time that got stored away in my memory instead.