Sandra Cule

It has been forty five minutes since we went to bed and I am still not asleep.

The AC is too loud. Why did we turn it on? It doesn’t work anyway; the room is as humid as it was an hour ago. Also, what ever happened to the enormous cockroach that Sandra saw upstairs two nights ago? If I remember correctly, cockroaches like humidity. Should I text Ricardo and thank him again? I think I remember reading on Wikipedia that Mexico indeed has a high Gini coefficient.

Our last night in Tulum, my mind is running a million miles per hour. We have to get up early to get to Cancún and fly back to San Francisco, and we only have one more day before Sandra returns to Europe, and it just hit me that fifteen days have passed since she came to the US, but that it all has felt like a lifetime’s worth of experiences.

I keep thinking about all the contrasts we’ve seen in such a short time. One night, we’re on the decrepit Hollywood Walk of Fame, passing by some anguished souls who are lying on the ground, clearly high on something. A few nights later, we’re at the Dolby Theater in Vegas, all decked out, and watching Lady Gaga sing “The Best is Yet to Come.” Another night, we’re in a self-driving car, cruising around San Francisco, listening to Ice Spice and Nicki Minaj. Then we’re in a taxi, on a gravel road in Mexico, asking our driver Ricardo why we keep seeing so many armed officers on our way to Yucatán, even though we already know the answer.

I grab my phone and send a text to Sandra on WhatsApp.

“Awake?”

The two check marks show up. The word online appears below her name. Bed sheets rustle upstairs.

“Why are you not asleep?” Sandra groans from the loft.

“I think I am overwhelmed by life,” I whimper. “You know, the extremes of all that we’ve seen. It’s just all too real.”

“Finally, Denis,” she laughs, “shed a tear for once in your life.”

It has been a running joke between us for the past two weeks. Ever since Sandra came to visit, I have been amused by her visceral reactions to the absurdities of modern American life. She, in contrast, has been amused by my ability to numb any reaction to the same absurdities. In other words, by how much more capitalistic I have become.

The two of us are childhood friends. We both grew up in Mostar, a city in southern Bosnia and Herzegovina, where we met at an after-school English class. It was 2004, and major events were happening across the world: Spirit and Opportunity rovers landed on Mars, the European Union expanded by ten new member states, and Mark Zuckerberg launched The Facebook at Harvard University.

None of that was, of course, even remotely relevant in the world of twelve year-olds in Mostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina, where the hottest topic was Britney’s new provocative single “My Prerogative.” At the after-school English class, in between learning about present simple and present continuous, we were having a heated debate about the Princess of Pop and her controversial image. Sandra, an opinionated boy-band and rock fan, was unimpressed by the lack of pop culture knowledge in the room.

“It’s not even her song,” I remember her telling me with utmost confidence. “It’s Bobby Brown’s. Whitney Houston’s husband. And his version is much better.”

I didn’t know how to respond. I had no idea who Bobby Brown was.

“I think you should be listening to Blue instead,” she then added. “That is music. Duncan is my favorite.”

Her unabashed defiance made me want to be her friend even back then, but it wasn’t until a year and a half later—when we both enrolled in competitive ballroom dancing classes and decided to partner up for competitions—that the two of us actually started hanging out. Over the next five years, we trained frequently and rigorously for the competitions, spending much of our adolescence on the road. And, once we enrolled in the same high school, even when we weren’t competing, we were still spending time together. We inevitably became like brother and sister.

That’s why Sandra’s visit to the US, almost thirteen years after I had left Mostar, carries significance. Not only is it her first time in the States but it is also a testament to the endurance of our friendship throughout our twenties, even with an entire ocean between us.

The first stop on her visit is San Francisco. The morning after her arrival, we are in my apartment, getting ready to grab breakfast at The Mill on Divisadero. Sandra is brimming with excitement, repeatedly going over our itinerary for the next two and a half weeks, and the only time she becomes fleetingly silent is the moment I tell her about Karl, the notorious city fog that’s forecasted to last the entire day. In other words, there goes her chance for good Instagram content.

“Fine, Karl!” Sandra yells at the fog from my apartment window. “I am going to LA tomorrow anyway.”

Sandra lives in Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina, where she had moved from Mostar about two years ago to head the local branch office of the Regional Youth Cooperation Office for the Western Balkans, known simply as RYCO. A non-governmental organization, RYCO was founded by six Western Balkan countries—Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia, and Serbia—to drive reconciliation and cooperation among the youth in these regions through diplomacy across all socioeconomic aspects. As Sandra puts it, by helping shape the young minds in the country, her goal is to build peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina after the tumultuous war that ravaged the country three decades ago.

She has achieved a lot in this job and her success has been tremendously topical. Not because a new political upheaval has been happening in the region, but because outsiders, who usually know Sandra only superficially, have frequently doubted her skills. Sandra is charming, she brings levity to conversation, she is fearlessly glamorous, and she maintains a strong social media presence, all of which are typically seen as characteristics of an influencer, not necessarily of someone with a serious, subdued demeanor expected in diplomacy.

And yet, to me, who has known her since she was a kid, it was immediately obvious she would be the perfect fit for this type of work. She is outspoken, eloquent, and passionate. She is a disarming negotiator and a natural marketer, with an uncanny knack for content creation and brand development.

That unabashed defiance I witnessed in the after-school English class two decades ago is still the backbone of her personality; it’s just that it has burgeoned into something more profound these days: defiance against the unspoken expectation that a woman can be either a hardworking professional or a glamorous socialite, but never both.

“I intentionally go against that stereotype,” she tells me while we eat our avocado toasts at The Mill. “I know it’s a risky image to have, but I made a promise to myself that I would never stop being myself just so that others could fit me into a box.”

I ask her what that means.

“What I see today is that,” she continues, “women want to prove they are equal to men and that they can do the same jobs as men, and somehow, we got the notion that in order to do that, women need to suppress their femininity. Be less glamorous. Be less concerned with their image. Be more like men.”

“You don’t agree with that?”

“No,” she replies. “Why should I stop being myself just to prove I am equal to men? By suppressing my femininity and my glamour to prove I am equal, I am actually letting the narrative be defined by a man. I have my own lane, and that’s where I intend to shine.”

Sandra has received criticism throughout her career that her social media presence and thriving personal brand are just a distraction, a camouflage used to hide her minimal involvement at work. The narrative sounds amusingly similar to the one that surrounds the Kardashians, and even more so because Sandra uses that criticism—much like the Kardashian sisters—to turbocharge her success. One anecdote in particular stands out.

“My branch used to be understaffed, so it was difficult gaining traction on projects across the wider region and even across the country because we simply lacked presence in numbers. Much of the work we do is in the public sphere and visibility is really important. I knew I had to work ten times harder to build strategic alliances without that visibility, so I figured I needed a way to amplify our presence. Being active on Instagram and posting content regularly was my way of doing that.”

“Why was this an issue?” I ask.

“People said I wasn’t doing the job, that I was just going around and posting photos of myself, of the clothes I was wearing, and just being vain. The rumors really made me doubt my skills and my commitment to the job. The thing is, there were also guys who were doing the same thing, but they were not facing any backlash. So, I said, you know what? I am going to be even more present on social media and even more active with my content.”

It ultimately paid off. Sandra’s colleagues followed suit, and the team’s social media content became a critical tool in driving engagement for their branch office. For Sandra, the success went beyond the engagement metrics; she proved to herself that staying true to her values, even amidst the backlash from others, pays off in the long run.

After just one day in San Francisco, Sandra and I make our way south, and we spend the next five days hopping between Venice Beach, Santa Monica, Beverly Hills, and San Diego. With each day, she falls deeper in love with the cinematic beauty of Southern California, and in turn, through Sandra’s eyes, I relive the magic of seeing those scarlet sunsets and those magnificent Pacific waves for the first time.

The only time I feel the need to lower Sandra’s expectations is the night we plan to go to Hollywood. I tell her that it won’t feel anything like the Hollywood she sees on TV, and that we could even skip the whole ordeal. But she is adamant. She wants to see Elvis Presley’s star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and so we head to Hollywood in the late afternoon, joining Angelenos on the congested freeways at rush hour.

When we get to Hollywood, Sandra is aghast. Smell of weed at every corner, throbbing blue and red lights everywhere, an Iron Man busking next to a guy playing conga, drunk Scandinavian dudes taking a photo with a Spiderman, breakers rallying the crowds to trap being blasted from the speakers, hooded figures in torn clothes lumbering. It’s chaos.

“Told you.”

“This can’t be real,” Sandra gasps. “You’re telling my King has his star in this place?”

After an extensive search, we finally find and admire Elvis’s star, embedded in a sidewalk far away from the main strip. Next to it, under a four-pillar portico, a man is prostrate on the ground. He is holding a white plastic bag in his left hand, his right arm stretched toward the clear glass bottle that had rolled away. He eventually mumbles something, rolls over to the other side, and I signal to Sandra that we should leave quickly and give him space. We call an Uber and leave Hollywood.

In the car, Sandra is quiet. She’s looking out the window, watching the flickering street lights of Los Angeles come and go as we drive by nondescript inns and motels. It’s a pretty night, with bright stars and silhouettes of palm trees scattered across the black sky. But the beauty of it all is lost on Sandra this time.

“You okay?”

“I just,” she says and pauses. ”I don’t know. It’s just—it’s all this one big illusion. It isn’t real.”

“Hollywood, you mean?”

“All of it,” she sighs. “The difference between what’s shown to us and the despair that’s actually behind it all. I don’t know.”

I say nothing. I know this mood. The mood that sets in when Sandra’s empathy engulfs every fiber of her being. It’s another aspect of her personality that many people are unaware of, mostly because it’s easy to assume her natural tendency toward levity leaves no space for introspection. But she experiences life acutely, so much so that her personality inverts whenever she witnesses pain in others. She quietens down and retreats to her own world, often listening to tried-and-true atmospheric ballads until she feels ready to face the world again.

That night, it’s José Feliciano’s rendition of “California Dreamin’” that helps her recover from the brutality of American existence displayed in Hollywood. Just two days later, the night in Hollywood becomes a blur, a memory that evaporates the moment we land in Las Vegas, our final stop before going back to San Francisco. We are in Sin City to see Lady Gaga perform as part of her Jazz & Piano residency, which means we finally get to showcase the outfits we had laboriously planned over the summer.

The most memorable moment in Vegas, however, happens the night before Gaga’s performance, when Sandra and I go to David Copperfield’s show at the MGM Grand. We arrive at the theater a minute before the start of the show, and we move quickly through the aisles to get to our seats. I notice we are overdressed for the event. Oddly, only because of the young girl sitting next to us who is glaringly starstruck, gazing at Sandra’s chic, all-white ensemble.

“I think the girl is fascinated by you,” I whisper to Sandra.

Sandra smiles at her and says hi. The girl smiles back, quickly and awkwardly.

The whole setup is charmingly unusual. There is Sandra, a glamorous and attractive thirty-one-year-old with a showstopping smile, who is giddy with excitement to see the show; and then, there is the girl, a demure pre-teen wearing big square glasses and oversized high-tops, who is not paying attention to her equally demure parents but is instead fixated on Sandra.

My mind fills in the blanks. The girl is shy and studious, and doesn’t have many friends, or at least, many friends who are girls. She is here in Vegas with her parents either because they wanted a fun weekend in Vegas but couldn’t leave their daughter alone at home or because the girl is a nerd who loves magic shows and her parents knew this trip would brighten up her world a bit. Probably the latter, I say to myself.

David Copperfield soon appears, and the show begins. The cynic in me is questioning everything that’s happening on stage for the next hour and a half. The randomly-selected attendees for sure are not randomly selected, I whisper to Sandra. Copperfield definitely did not just guess what those three people were thinking: he knew ahead of time. That UFO thingy that just appeared above us was probably in the room all along.

While I am sucking all the joy out of the show, I notice that Sandra is, meanwhile, having a blast. She is audibly gasping at Copperfield’s tricks, like the rest of the audience, and is sharing laughs with the girl whenever Copperfield cracks a joke. With each illusion, I glance at the girl and realize eventually that she is not nearly as amazed by Copperfield’s performance as she is by Sandra’s pure, uncynical reactions to the show.

When the show ends, I get up quickly and head for the door. Sandra lingers for a bit and says bye to the girl.

“Okay, Copperfield? Like, whatever, he was fine,” I tell Sandra. “But you, on the other hand. You were the star tonight.”

“Why?” Sandra laughs.

“Did you notice how enamored that girl was? She paid no attention to Copperfield, she was watching your reactions the entire time and was waiting for any opportunity to share her reaction with you.”

“She was very sweet,” Sandra adds. “The parents also said bye when we were leaving. Did you see? They waved.”

“To you,” I clarify, “not to me. You probably boosted this girl’s self-esteem right when she needed it. She’ll now go back to wherever she is from, knowing she had a bonding moment at Vegas with a chic girl who is way cooler than the basic girls she is surrounded with.”

Next week, on our flight back to San Francisco from Las Vegas, still intrigued by this anecdote, I continue rehashing my observations to Sandra. Partly because it was endearing to witness this wholesome interaction and partly because the experience reminded me of a quality in Sandra that I had always admired—her inclusivity. It’s innate goodness in her that stems from her own history of being an outsider.

“I mean, before we started doing competitive ballroom dancing,” she tells me, “I was also really shy as a kid.”

“Really? I don’t remember you being shy at all.”

“Not with people who were close to me,” Sandra adds. “But, with those I didn’t know well enough, I was very distant. Especially in the period when I had to wear a scoliosis brace, kids often made fun of me.”

I am stumped. I never knew about this.

“Oh, yeah,” she sighs, “they would call me a robot, because of the brace. Or, you know, that I am a gypsy, because of my darker skin. That’s why competitive ballroom dancing was so important to me. The showmanship aspect of the competitions, the rigorous practices that led to us win championships; they were all instrumental in building my self-esteem. I honestly don’t think I would be where I am today if it hadn’t been for those competitions and practices.”

“I guess that explains why you loved being a coach later on, when the two of us were no longer competing?”

“Exactly,” she says. “When I became a coach and started giving private dance lessons, it gave me so much joy to help others with their self-image. I think that’s why I always try to make the outsiders, like the girl at the show, feel seen. I know what it feels like.”

What is unique, albeit unsurprising, about Sandra’s character arc is that it defies itself. It has all the elements to tell a story of a person who, as a result of inauspicious early experiences, had learned to distrust people and to see the world as a precarious place. But that’s not Sandra. She instead sees the world as inherently reliable. She makes connections with an open heart. She doesn’t assume the worst and she allows fate to do its part.

This unsuspicious spontaneity shines most brightly when juxtaposed with someone else’s distrusting orderliness. It happens when we go to Mexico a few days later, the last place on our itinerary before Sandra has to go back to Europe. There, my hypervigilant overplanning backfires on us. When our Airbnb and transportation don’t pan out the way I thought they would, I am too exhausted from all the prior planning to even enjoy the trip, and just like that, I become too useless to adjust on the spot.

That’s when Sandra takes the stage. She chats with a construction worker on the street. A bit of Spanish. A bit of Italian. It works, and the guy helps us get to the next level of the game, to the guy at the resort entrance, who also likes Sandra’s Spantalian and gets us a city driver. That’s how we meet the third guy, Ricardo, who is also a fan of Sandra and her Spantalian and who makes a deal with her to be our driver for the entire trip. And that’s how we end up having a driver to take us to Yucatán and Chichen Itza.

“You know,” I tell her the day Ricardo drives us to Chichen Itza, “I think this is why some people don’t get how you do what you do.”

“What? The spontaneity?”

“It’s not just the spontaneity,” I add. “I think it’s because you defy the narrative that nothing good ever comes easily. You are a living proof that, if you have the charm and the eloquence and the confidence in your own ability to figure things out, you can get to the same outcome as others, but with way less effort. Sometimes even better outcomes.”

“I like that psychoanalysis,” she nods.

Ricardo informs us that we have just driven by a lesser-known but gorgeous cenote, and that he can take us there after we are done sightseeing Chichen Itza. He mentions that it’s probably much cheaper than the more touristy cenotes we originally wanted to see.

“Case in point,” I say, smiling at her.

She winks mischievously.

The day Sandra has to fly back to Europe from San Francisco, Karl the Fog is nowhere to be found. The sky is clear, the air is warm, and the streets of Lower Haight are glowing in the afternoon sun. It truly feels like an impish joke at the expense of Sandra, who, at this point, is convinced that Karl has a personal vendetta against her and her social media content.  

We’re laughing about it in the Uber, on our way to the airport, but I can tell that both of us are entertaining this topic merely to delay the inevitable. For her, the agony of the reverse culture shock that will kick in the moment she lands in Sarajevo. For me, waking up the next day to an empty apartment and having no one to say bye to when I leave for work. For both of us, the feeling that our time together was surreal, like a dream.

Just as our driver merges onto the 101, a big mariner-blue billboard emerges from the swath of industrial buildings on the right. It’s an ad by a tech company, though it doesn’t initially look like one, judging by the photo of two cute brown dachshunds in the bottom right corner.

Not AI-Generated, says the text above the left dog. The one above the right dog, AI-Generated.

Can’t tell what’s real?, the big white letters assuredly ask. We can help.