There is something I have only recently begun to understand about being the first generation.

You are never entirely alone.

Not even when you are sitting at the kitchen table at eleven at night, drinking coffee that has been reheated twice, staring at a blank document and wondering if you have completely lost your mind.

Especially then.

Because somewhere behind you are people who never had the choices you have.

And somewhere ahead of you are people who don’t exist yet.

And somehow, without asking for the job, you are standing in the middle.

I used to think my life belonged to me.

This seemed reasonable.

It was, after all, my life.

My mistakes. My bills. My bad decisions. My unfinished books. My increasingly questionable relationship with caffeine. My tendency to start projects at midnight because apparently 11:47 p.m. is when my brain suddenly decides it has something important to say.

But lately I’ve started to feel that my life is more like a house with several generations standing quietly inside it.

Some of them came before me.

Some of them haven’t arrived yet.

And I am the one currently holding the keys.

I don’t know when this realization happened.

Maybe it was gradual.

Maybe it happened the first time I saw my name printed somewhere and thought about the people whose names I inherited.

Maybe it happened when I started writing seriously about family, language, memory, Serbia, America, women, ghosts, the things we carry.

Or maybe it happened much earlier, without my knowing it.

Because immigrants understand something about time that people don’t always talk about.

You don’t just move across geography.
You move across generations.
Someone gets on a ship.
Someone crosses a border.
Someone learns a new language.
Someone changes a name, or teaches a child how to pronounce the old one correctly.
Someone works a job they don’t love.
Someone saves money.

Someone doesn’t get to become what they might have been.

And then eventually there is a child who grows up in the new place and has enough distance from the original journey to ask:

What am I supposed to do with all of this?

I used to think the answer was simply to be successful.

Get educated.
Work.
Pay your bills.
Be respectable.
Don’t embarrass anyone.
Have a reasonably clean house.
Maybe own a nice coat.

The usual immigrant fantasy.

But that isn’t enough for me anymore.

I don’t just want to have lived.
I want to have left something behind.

Not because I think I am particularly important.
Quite the opposite.

I know how quickly a person disappears.
We like to imagine that if we love someone enough, they remain.
But people disappear all the time.

First from the room.
Then from photographs.
Then from conversations.
Then from the memories of people who knew them.
And eventually someone has to look at an old name and wonder:

Who was that?
What did she think about?
What did she love?
Was she happy?
Was she afraid?
Did she make anything?
Did she laugh?
Did she have a strange sense of humor?

Did she ever sit alone in a café and write things down because she couldn’t stand the thought of all those thoughts disappearing?

I want to answer yes.

I was here.
I noticed.
I tried.
I made something.
Maybe that’s all a legacy really is.
Evidence.
Not monuments.
Not statues.
Not streets named after you.
Just little pieces of proof.
A book.
An essay.
A photograph.

A recipe written in handwriting that eventually becomes difficult to decipher.
A story someone tells at a kitchen table.
A name printed on a page.
A sentence that survives you.
I think about my ancestors sometimes when I am writing.
Not in some grand, cinematic way.
I don’t hear violins.

Nobody appears in a doorway wearing nineteenth-century clothing.

Mostly I am just sitting there in sweatpants.

But I think about them.

I think about what they couldn’t have imagined.

Could they have imagined me?
A woman sitting in America with a laptop, writing about them?

Could they have imagined that some future relative would know their names because I decided not to let them disappear?

I hope so.

And then I think about the other direction.
The people who will come after me.

I don’t know their names.

I don’t know where they’ll live.

I don’t know whether they’ll be writers or doctors or mechanics or artists or people who have absolutely no interest in any of this.

Maybe one of them will roll their eyes when they hear my name.

Honestly, fair.

I probably would too.

But I hope someday one of them finds something I wrote.

Maybe they’ll be cleaning out a box.
Maybe they’ll be looking through an old family archive.
Maybe they’ll search my name because they’re curious about where we came from.

And there I will be.

A little book.
A strange essay.
A paragraph about Serbia.
Something about my grandmother.
Something about a ghost.

Something about a woman trying to understand what it means to belong to two places at once.

And they’ll know:

Someone in our family was here.
Someone cared enough to write it down.
That matters to me more than I expected.

Because I don’t want to live only for the version of me who exists today.

She is important, of course.
I want her to be happy.
I want her to drink good coffee.
I want her to travel.
I want her to fall in love.
I want her to make mistakes without turning every mistake into a moral crisis.
I want her to have ridiculous conversations and laugh so hard she can’t breathe.
I want her to buy perfume simply because she likes the bottle.
I want her to sit somewhere beautiful and think, for once, nothing at all.

But I also want to live for the woman who will exist after me.

The one who hasn’t been born.
The one who may someday inherit my name.
Or my stories.
Or my stubbornness.
Or my tendency to overthink absolutely everything.
I want to give her something.
I want her to inherit more than photographs of people she never knew.
I want her to inherit evidence that someone before her tried to make meaning out of being alive.

Maybe that’s why I care so much about getting published.

It isn’t really about having my name in magazines.

Not entirely.

Of course it feels wonderful.

I am human.

I enjoy seeing my name in print.
I will absolutely take a screenshot.
I will probably send it to someone with far too many exclamation points.

But underneath the excitement is something quieter.

I am building a little archive.
Piece by piece.
Publication by publication.
Story by story.

I am putting breadcrumbs down through time.

Here.
This was me.
This is what I saw.
This is what I remembered.
This is what I loved.
This is what I couldn’t explain.
This is what our family carried.
This is what I carried.
And this is what I decided not to drop.

Maybe that’s what it means to be the first generation.

You are both the continuation and the beginning.

You inherit a story you didn’t write.

Then, if you’re lucky, you get to add a chapter.

I don’t need the chapter to be extraordinary.

I don’t need to become famous.

I don’t need anyone to build a statue.
I just want the story to continue.
I want my ancestors to have somewhere to go when someone remembers them.
And I want my future descendants to have somewhere to find me.

So yes.
I am living for more than just me.
I’m living for the people behind me who made it possible for me to be here.

And for the people ahead of me who will never know how many small decisions had to happen before they existed.

That feels like a strange responsibility.
But it also feels like a gift.

Because maybe a life becomes meaningful not when it belongs entirely to you—
but when you understand that, for a little while,
you are holding it for everyone.

Milanka Sulejić
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