Milena stood waiting.

She had arrived as the sun reached its highest peak, raging against the lone cloud that bashfully stained the blue sky. Unable to move from its spot on a windless day, the cloud had evaporated little by little, disappearing as the sky turned orange.

At some point, Milena should have sat down. Her legs were beginning to tremble. But sitting down would be a concession to how long she had been waiting and she was too scared to admit how long it had been.

With her back to the hotel, Milena watched birds flit about in the forest. The trees and bushes and grasses once encircled the hotel, but were now becoming one with it.

A shell of a building, the hotel had been bombed-out when Milena was too young to have any memories at all, back when the war still raged in the streets. Now, of course, it raged only behind closed doors; the signed treaty had merely drawn a line in the sand instead of uniting those on each side of it.

All that was left of the hotel now were the concrete walls and stairs. Space was left where windows had been blown out and doors had crumbled. Elevator shafts were empty chutes full of forgotten fiberglass.

Even the stairs were not so much intact. Only teenagers, the first generation born after the war, who didn’t have a full appreciation of death, dared to climb the stairs in an attempt to prove their bravado. The number of attempts decreased sharply after a set of stairs collapsed, claiming one life and one set of legs that might have been saved if help had come more quickly. But the hotel was tucked away, up a hill in the woods, miles from anyone who could hear cries for help.

As Milena stood waiting, she imagined going home later and telling her sister how long she had waited. She imagined describing the fear, the attempts to distract her mind from thinking of the worst possible scenarios, and the distaste she had for never knowing when Ilir would show up.

Of course, it was an imaginary conversation that would never happen.

Milena couldn’t tell anyone what she was doing. As far as her family was aware, she was simply going for her Saturday afternoon walk. Her family didn’t know that Milena came to the one place to which she was strictly forbidden to return, didn’t know that she spent all week looking forward to a handful of hours without them, and didn’t know she had fallen in love with a boy on the other side of the line drawn in the sand.

It took Ilir all night to arrive at their meeting place. She didn’t know exactly how long. He of course needed to cross the mountains that divided their countries, watching simultaneously for wild animals and border police as he traversed under cover of night. Sometimes he arrived in a clean, pressed shirt. Other times his shirt was dirty, as if he had been running through fields or forest. Once, he even showed up with a freshly split lip. But no matter his appearance upon arrival, whenever Milena asked how his travels were, he always answered the same way: “Uneventful”.

They both aimed to arrive at the old hotel by noon every Saturday. With the uncertainty of Ilir’s road, he was often late. Milena had come to expect him no later than 2pm. Twice, he had arrived later than that, but he had never missed a day.

Milena herself usually arrived somewhere in that two hour time range. If she were too consistent, her mother would catch on that she was meeting someone. Sometimes family plans caused her delay, but mostly Saturday was a day the family spent apart. Still, Milena made sure she never left the house at the same time.

Of course any delay on Milena’s part was nothing compared to a delay from Ilir. The worst that could happen to Milena was that her family would find out she was involved with someone they considered to be the enemy. They never would; Milena and Ilir were very careful. No text messages, no emails, no letters, no documentation at all. The only gifts that were given were unmarked, unsigned, unsuspecting items that could be passed off as clutter or even garbage to anyone else.

Like the gray rock flecked with copper that Ilir gave Milena the day they had their first kiss. Milena kept it on her window ledge until her mother picked it up and threw it in the trash mindlessly one day while telling Milena about the ridiculous rebel downtown who was entreating people to find compassion for their enemies on the other side of the mountains.

Later, when her mother was out of sight, Milena plucked the rock from the trash. She considered leaving it under her pillow, but that would be too conspicuous. So she kept it under her bed on the inside of the back right leg.

But if her family did somehow find out about Ilir, the shame on the family and threat against Milena’s life would be so great that no one would ever tell a soul. Granted, Milena would never be allowed to leave the house and she would never see Ilir again. But at least she would still be alive.

But if Ilir were caught, he would be paraded downtown, where strangers who didn’t even know his name would clamor for the blood of the wretched trespasser, chanting for his death, which would either come mercifully in front of the audience, or excruciatingly later in the anonymity of a prison cell.

Today Ilir was later than he had ever been. As the day dipped into evening, Milena reminded herself that he had never missed a day. Still, she rubbed the corner of her scarf anxiously, wearing it thin, while she waited at the entrance of the abandoned hotel, refusing to sit.

Looking around in the hopes that a change of scenery would distract her, Milena poured over the graffiti that decorated the decaying walls of the building.

She remembered the first time she truly appreciated the graffiti; it was during her first date with Ilir in the middle of autumn. They wandered the grounds of the old hotel, trying to read the different messages left by passersby. Then, as the sun set, Ilir took Milena’s hand for the first time and held it tenderly in his. On the way home, Milena collected a leaf that matched the sky at sunset to commemorate the moment. She still had the leaf, pressed in her favorite book on the bookshelf in her bedroom.

A year later, in celebration of their anniversary, Ilir showed up with a can of spray paint so that they could leave a message of their own. Milena was terrified that something in writing would reveal them, so they agreed to mark the walls with a word that connected them, yet wouldn’t identify them. Then Milena laid out her scarf and sat on it while Ilir sprayed each of the four letters on the wall: “love”.

Since then they always met next to their “love”. As Milena looked at it now, she noticed that someone had sprayed a circle around it and a line through the circle. She smiled immediately at the silly notion that her and Ilir’s love could be cancelled or forbidden. But then she realized how close the sun was getting to the horizon and didn’t find it funny anymore.

As Milena’s mind wandered from one possible reason for his tardiness to the next, she resisted imagining the worst danger of them all. Most of the risks she could handle. The deterioration of the edifice was avoidable. The treachery and length of Ilir’s travel was actually unknown and likely all in her head. The remoteness of their meeting place away from help if it were needed was also how they stayed safe from prying eyes. The mere fact that they could be killed for being together was worth the risk for love. But the one danger that still paralyzed Milena in the few, rare moments during which she allowed herself to conceptualize the extent of the risk was the fact that the trail up to the hotel was littered with landmines.

Milena and her sister had found a Safe Path among the landmines a decade ago. They had been taught to fear the hidden weapons and told they would die if they stepped on one, but their young idea of death had not been enough to keep them from breaking the rules. So they gathered all the ribbons they could get their hands on, tying them to trees along the Safe Path as they discovered it.

For eight years, Milena and her sister escaped to this forgotten fortress, staying safe on their designated path, to play and gossip and bloom from girls into women.

The only reason Milena was not nervous that her sister would follow her up here one day and discover her secret affair was the same reason that she wouldn’t be going home to tell her sister how long she had waited for Ilir as she had imagined.

The sisters had been teasing each other the entire way to the hotel two years ago. As they followed their ribbons to their Eden, Milena’s sister spun around, gently shoving Milena a step backward. She lunged forward to retaliate. Her sister, always with faster reflexes, slipped out of her reach at the last moment, stepping outside the Safe Path and landing in mud. She slipped, tripped, and tumbled down the side of the hill. Milena screamed, afraid to go after her among the potential landmines.

When her sister finally came to a stop, she carefully picked herself up and waved at Milena to reassure her. She was okay. She looked around as she tested her limbs and brushed off as much mud as possible. She motioned that she would take the shortest distance to get back on the Safe Path, far behind where Milena waited for her.

Milena turned back the way they had come to meet her. Her eyes were down, keeping an eye out for stray roots she might trip over, when her sister stepped off the landmine. Milena looked up in time to see her sister’s body hit the ground.

That day, Milena had found the strength to carry her big sister’s body home. When she met Ilir, she found the strength to return to the path that no longer felt safe.

Over time, sunlight had faded Milena and Ilir’s “love” on the hotel wall. Now, the light retreated from it, the orange sky tinged with purple. Milena stood waiting, still, and wondered if she would have the strength to lose one more person she loved in this place.