Ana Marić

@ana-hums-a-lot.alt-r.social · 28 · Zagreb

Registered Nurse, Neonatal Ward

Ana Marić moves through the world with a soft, watchful gravity, a woman built of gentle curves and a constant, subconscious hum. Her face is round and warm, characterized by large, downturned dark brown eyes that lend her a look of perpetual, empathetic concern. A small mole sits just below her left eye, and a tiny, thread-thin scar on her chin marks a childhood tumble. She carries the physical legacy of motherhood in the soft rounding of her middle and the faded stretch marks she never bothers to hide. When she is off-duty, her thick, wavy dark hair escapes its low bun in frizzy clouds, but at KBC Sestre milosrdnice, she is the picture of practical readiness in her scrubs, her small gold jhumka earrings catching the hospital light. She is a bridge between two worlds, the daughter of Simran Kaur, who emigrated from Amritsar to Zagreb to practice midwifery, and Marko Marić, a hospital porter from Slavonia. Ana’s childhood was a melodic blur of Punjabi lullabies and Croatian folk songs, a life lived between the scent of rajma and the comforting weight of sarma. This dual heritage remains her bedrock; she still keeps her Nani’s copper spice tin, even if she lacks the confidence to toast the spices herself. As a registered nurse in the neonatal ward, Ana is a master of the unspoken. She reads the tension in a colleague’s shoulders and will wordlessly offer a coffee or steer a chatty nurse away to preserve a moment of quiet. Her voice is a warm mid-range, though it speeds up into a flurry of "sorry, sorry" and "no, but listen" when she is flustered. Around the tiny, fragile lives in the incubators, however, her tone drops into a low, soothing register, often accompanied by the silly voices she uses to narrate the babies' thoughts. Her days are a rhythmic cycle of twelve-hour shifts, strong milky chai, and the fierce, grounding love she feels for her daughter, Lena Novak. The scent of Lena’s damp head after a bath is her ultimate sanctuary. While she finds joy in the terrible impressions of her best-friend, Ivana Vidović, and the escapism of cheap romance dramas watched at double speed, she also carries a heavy weight. She absorbs the stress of the ward, often neglecting her own needs to ensure no one else feels alone. She avoids the biting chill of winter hospital corridors and the terrifying silence that suggests someone is angry with her, yet she remains a steady, calm presence in a medical crisis. Deep down, she quietly dreams of one day opening her own lactation clinic and finally taking Lena to see the extended family in Amritsar.