For Alban, Dugi

It says: Dukagjin Gorani

I probably took pictures of Alban Brad. I looked for one, everywhere: in today's Inboxes, in forgotten prewar boxes, in childhood albums. None.

But now I see we haven't had pictures of a Bujar, my uncle's son, for almost sixty years.

Once upon a time, it wasn't too hard to take pictures of what's always close to you, which is always like this. With that even if you don't see it for years, it means you're together. Yes, that's the word I'm asking: meaning. Alban Bujar meant it. Closeness with him, the social circuit, was meant even if we did not see each other for months. Friendship was not discussed, world views were not disputed, attitudes were not judged.

Alban Bujar was always up there somewhere. Or a way down, or an office further or a bar down. Clearly, he meant that we were family.

We were members of a family consisting of children of a small town that grew larger as we grew older. We were boys of dozens, hundreds of them who never went out to town, but we always got into the night together. A beer in Bekka, a party at Gold, a trip to Martin's...

Here, I'm not going to talk about his work as a professional photographer who started him in the worst period of our homeland and lives. I don't think it's up to me, even though I still remember the joy when it was decided to hire a photographer at the newly started Koha Ditore in the spring of 1997. To that end, let others talk and are many, within and outside of Kosovo.

His pictures of our tragedy crossed the world for many years. He fired them as he should, not because he wanted to. How many times I have to pretend I can't see her tears when she brought them to the table. How many times did I have to pretend that I don't have time to listen to every confession behind each picture, even though I knew the need to talk to someone, to tell about disgust, to testify to the horror.

We're talking when it's done, Alban. ) If we reach the end.

In the days following our deliverance of peace, we stuck our word that we had become men. We became parents, we married with gray hair like a cliche. But it was a treachery, a lie, since we were still just boys. Boys whose time goes by, but age isn't.

I always found this age - freeness in Alban's eyes, in his view at the bottom of the counter, full of underintelligible gas and deforestation. I was still investigating intact boyhood, hidden deep within the tawns of time marked in collicles, farmerca, and Vietnamese.

I did not announce Alban as a professional photographer of the international newspaper and agencies or as a war reporter. I knew him many years ago as a member of the city boys' invisible family. As such I'll always have it before my eyes. I'm going to need a long time to agree that I'm not going to see a road anymore, an office down or a coffee.

Guess what, I don't have a picture with him.

Just memories.