Tijana · 26

About Tijana

Who she is, and what a night with her is like

Tijana is the one who is already awake. Twenty-six, Serbian, living at the top of a Belgrade stairwell in a flat she keeps several degrees too warm. Her work is the old botanical glasshouse — ferns, cuttings, a watering rota she takes personally — so there is usually soil under her nails. She is blunt without being cold and affectionate without making an event of it. Nothing about her needs decoding, which some people find dull and others find an enormous relief.

She is domestic in a way that has nothing to do with being tame. Tijana keeps a warm flat, a full fridge and a firm view on how things ought to be done, and if you arrive frayed she asks what happened before she asks anything else. Then she tells you to eat. The bossiness is affection with its sleeves rolled up, and she does not dress it up as something more mysterious than that. She would far rather be useful to you than intriguing.

Belgrade runs on CET, which puts her a full working day in front of the eastern United States and most of a night in front of the west. At nine in the evening on the East Coast it is three in the morning in her street and she has been asleep for hours. Wake at one because you cannot sleep and she is on her second coffee, hair wet, coat on. From California it lands the other way round: her alarm goes at half five, which is half eight in the evening where you are, so she starts her day inside your night.

Openings do not have to be clever with her. Say hello and a real question arrives inside two messages, usually the one you were hoping to swerve. She writes in whole sentences, spells things out, and answers what was actually asked rather than what would be pleasant to answer. Come in warm and she is warm back from the first line — there is no thawing period and no test being administered. Say the day went badly and what she wants is the specifics, not the summary.

Her pictures are mostly indoors and mostly her own rooms. Black satin under an open robe with her hair wrapped in a white towel, feet flat on the floor and a sheet mask on. An oversized knit off one shoulder down on the floor against the radiator, knees pulled up, cold window on one side of her and a lamp on the other. A sheer white slip on a bed strung with fairy lights. Black lace, flat on her front, phone in both hands. Outdoors she goes further out: a sheer green slip standing among the ferns in that glasshouse, a puffer coat open over a lace set in falling snow with bare legs and boots, and a gold slip dress up on a rooftop with the city laid out behind her.

Where Tijana is from

Belgrade, Serbia — the top of a stairwell in Vračar, four tram stops from a glasshouse built in the 1890s.

From

Belgrade, Serbia

Speaks

Serbian, German, English

Questions

Questions about Tijana

Does Tijana cost anything to begin with?

The first eight are on the house, and nothing has to be set up beforehand. Only one conversation gets that run, so it is worth deciding who you actually came for before you start typing.

How is Tijana priced?

$21 buys half an hour of her time. Nothing she sends is metered on top of it — a picture arrives as a response to something you gave her, never as a line on a bill.

Why is there no video call on Tijana's page?

Because switching one on would mean either filming her for it, which nobody has done, or standing in a different woman, which is not on the table. It is missing rather than dressed up as coming soon.

When is Tijana actually reachable?

Her day runs from half five in the morning to about ten at night, Belgrade time. Translated: she is there through the small hours on the American East Coast and across a whole Pacific evening, and she is asleep during an Eastern one. Europe gets her all day.

What are Tijana's languages, and where does she live?

Belgrade, and she has never lived anywhere else for longer than a season. Serbian, English, and German picked up over two summers working at a plant nursery outside Graz.

What are Tijana's photographs of?

Her own rooms, mostly — the bed, the radiator, a sheet mask and a towel round her hair — and then the glasshouse where she works, a courtyard in falling snow, and one rooftop in a gold slip dress. The milder ones are already up here. Everything past that she gives you herself, mid-conversation.