ABSTRACT SQUARE

 

PĂTRĂȚICA ABSTRACTĂ

Miriam Tkee

 

 

 

 

 

 

He who had a bright and happy childhood

 has gathered an inexhaustible treasure in

 which comfort is found even in the most

 painful moments of life."

 

Wilhelm Wundt

 

 

 

Looking for Nioka -

could this be my childhood name?

Are books dangerous things? By reading the right book, life can change, it can become light. Its ideas can open green meadows, where you reach serenity. By reading a toxic book, life can become ruin. The ideas in the book curl up, a knot of twisted snakes, in the mind of the Reader... The spirits of the books spread through the vertebrae, you give up being a slave, they run away in your fingers, they infect your heart or raise it to the sky, they call for revolution, the letters end up screaming like an angry crowd, crucifying, unslaving the soul, unchaining thoughts.

Wonderful things, books...

I have loved words since childhood. I have kept a few books from that period, like precious talismans, with little annotations in the margins and folded pages, even though I made a mistake writing on their pages. I smile every time I leaf through them. At night I would adjust the wick of the lamp and read, there was no electricity.

As a young woman, I went through periods when I couldn't find my words. I spoke little, read little, lived in a hurry. I was in balance as long as I lived my routine. Everything that appeared new and disturbed the clear line I was walking on created chaos. I avoided change. Words had begun to bend over the lapel of fantasy. I gathered them around my ankles to keep me warm in times of solitude, but they chained me, subdued me, then abandoned me.

I found them at a crossroads in my story, I was superficial, tactless, sentimental. And then came that day when everything burned down.

When suffering exceeds the limit, and the clouds piled up in the sky of being break violently, as if you had held your soul's breath for an entire season, writing a book is a good therapy. You enter the story little by little, you transpose fragments of life into it, you break away from your own life, in the solitude of writing. When you can't find the right words, you will blame someone, you will argue with the sky, that it is raining heavily and darkly, that the wood is wet and you cannot light a fire to warm your shriveled heart. And then, you bring a little sunshine into the story, the beneficent light. And the rays of joy that have gathered at the corner of your eye open to the world, become the emblem of happiness. Nothing can touch you, you are the character of your own stories.

Trauma, fear, are places where you can manifest your creativity. Fear is not fertile but dries up, shaking from the very foundation your confidence in the positive development of things. If something is crushing you, you have to use the disturbance, somehow. You may not get rid of it, but if you step away a little, you can learn that lesson for which you can be grateful in years to come.

Some fears are good, they help you stay safe, keep what is alive in you, while others tend to prevent you from trying something new, from believing in yourself, from becoming. While it protects you, the fear of change keeps you away from adventure. You miss out on the wonderful opportunity to meet new or different people. Where do you find the balance between good fears and bad fears?

You can create prisons of your fears, but you will find yourself trapped inside, trying to improve them...

Hold on tightly to the thread that touches your temple, you don't know where you'll end up. Look, there's a light there, do you see it? Follow it, let it guide you. Have faith and don't abandon the dream. There will be enough who will oppose, criticize, see the potential but discourage creation, and appreciation will arouse resentment.

Creation means passion, a vision shared with love for the story. However, being creative does not mean being wise or kind to others…

The words began to fall when I became more cheerful. When my soul is gloomy, love and music keep me in balance. Any form of suffering keeps me away from writing. Time must pass, I must distance myself a little. It is touching the way the words seem to comfort me, they are gentle, without letting themselves be seduced into a story. They are not my enemies. However, it is as if they are waiting for me to have a lively spirit again, to come to life.

The written word and the spoken word evoke different emotions. To portray or create events, come from my life or from the life of my dreams – the imagination. When the written word under the impulse of the imagination gains strength, the depth of emotion touches the eyelids of the eye that looks into itself, which opens, with impatience and curiosity, to the story. It describes and evokes light, invents nostalgia and love, but also renders darkness, celebrating, beyond all, life.

Who am I writing for, why? Not just for myself…

Every time I published a text, a piece of my heart was there. I wanted to know your opinion and I was happy when I found that some of you appreciate what I transmit. The rushing, living imagination is a magical vehicle, between the sinful earth and a star soul. I would not dance this dance, if it did not encourage me, it is beyond the will, it is love . The crystallization of some experiences from there, from the secret life of the soul, intensifies the involvement.

I may be a foolish child with this, but I only vaguely penetrate the area filled with miasma, social rot and destruction. I am certainly not writing a commercial book. I am writing about childhood, becoming, life, light, love!

Despite the fact that thousands of poets and writers publish in Romania ("there are almost more writers than readers"), someone can always emerge to deal with topics that have not yet been written about, or to take a different approach.

The place where my imagination plays is an abstract square , it's more than geometry, it's a metaphor.

The earth writes sonnets with grass on the hills, the soul of Poetry lives its existence in bare feet, under the storms of my childhood, pushes deep the acorn of my being, abundantly fertilized with love of life, into the fairy tale realm, which is the abstract Square . This poem of my soul could sprout among resistant weeds. Clouds of seeds (of mystery) could bring rain of doubts, but the words will hum hymns with lips pressed as for kisses. Words loved by readers.

The end of a book is bittersweet, joy, nostalgia on the way out, with all the corners torn apart (prayer rugs for shared emotions). Stories don't write themselves, but there are writers who declare: "this book writes itself!" There must be something fabulous about this kind of book, a reader in the stars of words.

So much anticipation of what's to come, at first, until, one day, something familiar, a memory, a longing, begins to stir... All it takes is one word, one sentence.

I am here, thinking of you, Reader, and I am also there, as you read my story.

Your childhood vision will narrow, spaces will become smaller, the sky - higher and how rarely you will look at it, compared to then! Of course, you will blame time, on tall buildings, which limit your ability to see the azure. Take a fragment of sky from the years of innocence and do not lose it. There is condensed the essence of your being, which you baptize with the name Love. Give up vain escapades of the mind, wake up to words and write...

The computer writes with virtual fingers, compressing memories into an abstract square that pirouettes on a stage of simplicity, emotion, and fragile dances between heaven and earth.

The light changes - a blue light, to reflect the storyteller's point of view.

 

 Mir

 

 

 

The Song of the Ielas

It was late in my father's life when I was born. To him I was a potential screamer in diapers, a bit uninspired, because I wasn't born a boy. I liked my mother's voice immediately. I heard the telepathic neighing of the stallions in the Auriga Constellation, I was home.

"Sing, write poems," whispered the Ursitoarele. History belongs to poets!"

But I didn't care about poems. I was sleepy about aquatic life. My new life resembled a ragged spiral, a bridge between parallel lives. An unexpected kiss on the face, a caress with trembling fingers, on the hair stuck to my head.

"   I missed you!" my mother said, like a secret, in my ear.

-   We need to give him a name, dad was grumpy.

"Let's call her Maria," said the midwife Marița, who had helped with the birth.

And so I became a loving man, in my heart, a bohemian, a minstrel.

I was born in Cătun, a village on a flat land, not very fertile, but with gentle lines, with valleys, the ravines where all kinds of flowers and herbs grew, in the last house from the field, surrounded by cherry trees. It was the end of a rainy September, some time before the snow cracked the frosty windows of the day, over the Romanian Plain. A late hour, towards midnight. Midwife Mariţa saved my little life. It had been a pelvic pregnancy, and my mother, exhausted, thought she saw a purple angel in the flickering light of the lamp.

"'Ilie, heat the water!'' the midwife was authoritative, but the father was angry, he had wanted a boy. He stood motionless under the young bushes, who knows what thoughts the disappointment of being the father of a girl again gave him...

"'God performed a miracle, they could both die. Come quickly with warm water, you will have a boy, God willing."

Three days after the birth, through the open gates the Ursitoarele came to determine my fate. Everyone in the house lay on their right side, to remember what they had dreamed. The cheerful fire nymphs drew burning paths on the night meadow and wrote poems, and the Tudora tussah sang in Bulgarian the ancient song of birth:

This child will have graceful days,

a gentle enchantment,

will live with a pure heart,

will grow up healthy and loved,

will give joy,

will float with the leaves,

will fly with the birds,

there will be wonder and intelligence,

His faith in good will shape his destiny.

Mother's dream that night was strange, she was dancing with the elves Catarina, Zalina and Marina, fairy-like, fascinating maidens with bells at their feet, on a meadow with small, yellow flowers, at a crossroads.

"I'm surprised they didn't take you to the Călmăţui swamp," my father commented, mockingly, on my mother's dream. "You're not even born well, you're already burning with dancing."

- Shut up, sinner! God has destined a good fate for the child.

I grew up believing that the divine will was decisive, while we had to be good and follow the laws of Heaven. It amazed me, however, to see some old churchwomen falling into the abyss of evil. My mother would only say: ''God is up there and sees.'' It scared me a little to think that I was not alone when I was alone, but how much comfort this belief brought me when some trouble fell on my head, far from home and alone.

When the bristles were covered in snow and my little babbling called out with outstretched hands, my father held me in his arms for the first time. He smiled, my mother told me. His handsome, rough face became bright when he smiled.

 

 

Dawn of life

Now, when I write, I realize that the poems written by them couldn't stay polite.

It pours into me like the dawns on the Tudora hedge, on dewy mornings.

When I woke up in the pious woman's house, I would go out onto the porch and run to the curtain at dawn, break a tiny trumpet and inhale the lilac flower with my nose, then enter the summer kitchen, holding my breath, and let the flower fall into her lap.

She hugged me lovingly, poking me with her good woman's mustache.

I loved her.

She would call me to her house on long winter evenings to keep them from getting dirty .

I was greeted by the smell of sawdust because he sometimes heated the house with a small, lion-footed stove, and the dim light of the lamp and the sour smell of roasted yams were familiar to me. He read to me from the Bible until late, and I was convinced that they were stories.

We ate boiled corn kernels with walnuts and honey at her place. She had a clay pot set in the stove , in which she baked quinces and apples.

She braided my pigtails while singing a Slavic song that I didn't understand, but which came from the beginning of my time.

He translated for me, reciting as he did at church, with reverence, rarely, and the words painted the destiny of a small being.

 

A little girl was stirring up heaven in a sun

I was a spoiled child.

After playing with other children and no longer finding joy in their company, I would take bread crumbs and hide in the garden full of herbs and flowers.

I was looking at the sky and the blinding sun, closing my left eye, and the sky mixed with the rays, creating other lights and other skies.

I was surrounded by giant plants, I was the master of the earth animated by all kinds of creatures, whose lives I watched insatiably and forgot about everything.

I fed the little creatures and wove wreaths of purple flowers, with long, thin stems, for my mother.

I would startle when I heard his voice calling out to me: "Where is my Maria?"

I was silent with my heart pounding, creating suspense.

Mom was silent for a while, mom was so happy to have a baby elf...

A baby elf is easy to love (forgive me for bringing tears to my eyes).

"Where is my Maria?" he shouted again.

And, thinking that they would be worried if I didn't show up, I would reply: " Here they are !"

No, I wasn't too wrong.

Back then, I didn't know that several Seas with even more hats were sleeping soundly inside me...

 

 

Nioka

It's a distant memory, one of the few I have from the early years of my childhood. I was a little girl with brown curls, chubby cheeks that easily flared with emotion, and eyes, eyes that were like liquid cinnamon, with the gaze of a toddler always on edge.

I was inseparable from Nioka, a Creole doll with large, golden earrings.

A dry summer, with dry soil and dust covering the roads. Children played in the dirt, leaving energetic footprints in the fine dust.

It was a time when farmers would pull bean plants from huge fields, spread them on plastic sheets and beat them with pitchforks. They would then wait for a day when the wind would pick up and, in the evening, they would winnow the beans. My father took me in his wheelbarrow - it was a very good means of transport at that time. I liked to ride in the wheelbarrow.

It was a lively place. The women were active while the men rolled cigarettes from shredded tobacco wrapped in newspaper, or some bitter Mărăşească. They were the ones who hurried the women. I watched the oval, restless berries fall with a noise and sneeze when the white flakes, flying towards the field, carried by the wind, settled on my face and in my hair, as the wind played in a spiral.

My father moved away a little, and in the short time between his departure and his return, a horse escaped from its tether, the peasant, cursing under his breath, struck it cruelly, and the horse, in revolt, touched the handmaiden with its hooves, which fell over me. The violence of the blow, the numbness that followed, the screams of the women, and my father's worried eyes bent over my frightened eyes, all of this transported me into a world as light as a feather, in which I was a spectator. I don't think it lasted more than a minute, but it seemed like an immense time to me. I vaguely saw a crowd of people around me and felt warm blood dripping down my chin. A woman bandaged me with her scarf. My father took me in his arms with love and care, moments that I cherished, because he so rarely showed his tenderness towards me. "'Don't cry,' he said, and I didn't cry so as not to worry my mother, although I suspected something bad had happened to me. He sat me down in the wheelbarrow, where I crouched down to escape the curious glances from the gates and behind the fences. Anyway, by noon the community was already informed, and the incident turned into a comical mess: two men were fighting over a horse, which one had lost and the other had found in the meadow in his yard, the horse got scared by my Creole doll, which was bewitched, and rushed at me, overturning the wheelbarrow.

At home, my mother, who, when she was in pain, would press her small fist on her chest, welcomed me with her kind smile, a tender consolation after the emotions and fear she had endured.

I had just lost all my baby teeth, from the bottom... When I found out I let out a scream that had nothing to do with the pain. ''The kids are going to call me a clumsy one'' . ''Of course they're going to call you a clumsy one ,'' my mother said, but you're a beautiful clumsy one. I'm growing up fast, you'll see.''

I don't know how she did it, but she transformed into a story, in her humorous way and with the tenderness that characterized her, something that had reached the edge of the tragic. She always seemed happy, in her younger years. That's how she appears in my memories...

I looked in the mirror for a long time, trying to fake a smile, my lips pressed into a sad line, a hypocritical and bitter smile, crying softly. I had not only lost my teeth but also my chocolate doll. My father went back for it, but he couldn't find it.

For a long time I imagined Nioka lying on the bleached earth, her ebony hands reaching up to the sky, among the ragged grasses of the hill by the stables. I wanted to believe that someone had found her, that another little girl was enjoying my lost doll. My heart sank at the thought of Nioka being left in the heat and cold, in a sordid field.

 

 

 

 

seizures

I grew up with seizures that occurred during sleep and I don't understand why I had them, maybe it was fear of the old woman who burst into our yard one evening, looking like a witch with a menacing broomstick and a headscarf wrapped like a giant snail on her white, unwise head   .

I would wake up shaking, I would feel myself becoming crumbly, the wear and tear and splinters in my mind would grow tired of the spasms. I would start fumbling for my mother's bag of sugar, hanging on the hanger, because the sugar would drive away my fear, I would curl up in a nest of darkness, under the table, and the circles under my eyes have not disappeared since then. People would see me for the second day in a clear light, their smiles were polite, they hid pity, I would forget that at night I would be absorbed again into the heart of fear.

- Will I have to take small, white pills?

"No, only sick people get buttons ," my mother said, smiling. "You're just scared of something. I'll take you to church."

The rituals of blessing the garments and a lock of hair and the incantations of the cough Fros a did not yield results. Priest Gheorghe told my mother to change my place.

I was separated from my family and spent a few years growing up in Bădulești, a village in Argeș, where my mother and father, my maternal grandparents, lived. The little house with a porch, covered with slate [1] , behind which the Doamnei River flowed, had only one room, a large bed, and a small bench [2] on which my father used to sit while smoking his pipe in front of the fire, during the long winter days.

In the spring, a raspberry bush and a rose bush would bloom in front of the window, and in the summer, my friend Cornel and I would pick apples from the yard of Mrs. Stelica, silky, sweet, and as big as a zucchini, like no other in the world. My father wove a wreath for me from ears of wheat and sânzien flowers. I would sleep with it under my pillow.

- It has healing power, he told me in secret.

I marveled at the Fire of Sumedru, a ritual that took place on the eve of the feast of Saint Demetrius, through the lighting, by the children of the village, of a towering tree specially chosen by the brave men, from the forest, a vertical torch at dusk, covered with pine needles, around which they danced, as an expression of joy. They would cheer and shout: Come to the Fire of Sumedru !

My father encouraged me to throw into the fire, to burn on the funeral pyre, all the anxieties and fear of the old witch from Cătun, which kept me away from my family. My mother was a fickle woman, with whom I would wander around the surroundings, on the way to Uncle Nicu. My father, a sly, small man, resembling Chaplin, with a cane in one hand because he had been in the war, was like a quiver of stories. He had a little basket with which he would walk around the countryside and sell eclairs, ciubuc, alvită, and meringues. I was still afraid of the dark and of the noises at night, but winter caught me fearless and optimistic: the convulsions disappeared as mysteriously as they had come....

My father whispered in my ear: fear burned in the Fire of Sumedru!

After I healed, because I had been considered a child sick with fright, I was rich in colors and the horizon was no longer so far away.

In the Călmățui Valley, Sumedru's Fire was lit by the village boys on the hills. It was a ceremonial that celebrated the fertility of the land at the end of the agricultural year, and to drive away evil spirits, in which all the locals participated. They gathered around the fire, the men drank brandy, smoked and talked about the harvest. The children stoked the fire with sticks, and the women shared hot pretzels, nuts and doughnuts, talking about faith and superstitions, saying snoavé.

The celebration of the End of the Harvest ended the week in which the villagers were preparing for the Easter fast dedicated to the beginning of agricultural work. The fire was also lit on the hill, with the purpose of driving away winter and calling for spring. The young men of the village would rebuke, through shouts that echoed across the village, the overly pretentious girls who, at a certain age , were unmarried, making joking references to the reasons why they had remained unmarried.

"What's wrong, Big, what's up? Barză's girls have a cabbage growing in a vase and all the boys are running to pick it for them!"

The ladies were not amused or upset. They were hiding: they were to be married and no one had taken them until they shouted.

The Monday after Lent was a holiday - no work was done. The next day, people ate chickens and drank cabbage juice.

The feast of Saint Toader was coming up. In popular belief, Saint Toader's horses guarded the sun from fleeing to the north, and the earth from being engulfed by darkness.

From Angela's memories:

"On the evening of Sân Toader, the boys would carol to the girls, wishing them long and healthy hair, like the tails of mares. The maidens would wash their hair with water in which they boiled tall grass picked at dawn while singing, believing that, after washing their heads with the enchanted water, their braids would grow long and silky.

The next day, the horses were taken out of the stables, groomed, fed, and taken for a walk by the boys. Grooming [3] the horses was a beautiful custom, an occasion for the farmers to get together and plan the work of the land.”

                                                        

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I am the girl next to Criș…

Teacher Iordache had a rather unusual way of making us cram words, numbers, calculations into our unusual pumpkins with the teaching - an emblem: the holy wooden ruler.

Among my classmates was Pipilea, a kind-hearted but helpless child. He lived with his large family, his parents and a bunch of younger siblings, in a small house made of earth, without a fence, in the clearing near the school. He made great efforts to be presentable, he came to school clean. The teacher assigned him, one by one, to the classroom benches, as all the children avoided him. My turn came. I got along well with Pipilea, he was a respectful child and I liked him.

I helped him with his lessons and sometimes protected him from the class's bullies, because he was shy. Often, a naughty boy from behind would nudge my poor classmate who was writing side by side with me, and his elbow would bounce off, so that the nib of my pen would make holes in the notebook, happily splashing ink across half the page. I would tremble with anger, injustice always made me shudder.

My mother was no small surprise when, one winter, I brought lice and scabies into our family. This was a big secret, although lice and scabies had settled in many other families. Gas and a fine-toothed bone comb got rid of the lice, and a decoction of dried tobacco leaves and an ointment with lard and sulfur cured the scabies.

Our teacher was young and I think she was a little emotional. We respected her for her knowledge and authority and loved her for the dedication with which she opened up a new horizon for us.

At the celebration that followed the completion of the first year of school, a dance program was organized, in which only little girls participated, dressed in white dresses with red polka dots, small, buttoned, with red cords, narrow in the front, which ended at the ends with huge ribbons, tied in large bows.

We formed various little circles that spun in motion, singing in our squeaky voices:

"I am the little girl next to Criș, next to Criș, next to Criș,/With the dress in small dots, in small dots, in small dots,/Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, how small I am,/Among the mountains, among the valleys, I always wander."

At rehearsals I was stumbling and distracted, I couldn't keep up. I was excluded from the dance group, my first failure. I watched from the sidelines the wonders next to Criș who were twirling their dresses in small dots, a little envious that they were the stars of the celebration, and I wasn't.

But I set out to learn to dance. I was so persistent that in the fourth grade, together with Lucică, I even played the main role in a short adaptation of ''Şatra'' at the celebration. I collected all the silver coins wearing the face of King Mihai of my grandmother, Ioana Olteanca, my mother made me a shiny necklace and braided my pigtails with silver coins, I was all just a bell.

 

 

 

 

The snail of an imaginary violin

The flame of an attachment that will always accompany me!

In winter, at lunchtime, I had returned from school. A ballad was whispering on the radio in the light thinned by falling snow.

My mother liked Ciprian Porumbescu.

An open notebook, lined with a wooden ruler, the hastily thrown pen, which had left an ink stain.

A caress slid over my curly hair, and round, smiling eyes turned to the wooden pencil case with painted cherries; it was my mother.

I cupped my hand so she wouldn't see the ink stain, she laughed, a big laugh, just like I'm laughing now...

Mom knew everything.

- We make the stain disappear with bread crumbs.

I stepped back in my dream, one step to the left, to let my father pass, who only glanced at my notebook, one step to the right, closer to my mother's heart.

Me, part of them, them, part of me.

- You seem to want to win some prize... he winked at me slyly.

- He'll take first prize!

Mother was convinced that there was no more intelligent child in the entire Hamlet.

I think of them who found life in heaven and rest on earth, how lucky I was that they accompanied me part of the way.

Now the earth spins without a part of me.

"Nature gave you: cultivate what you have"

When I finished fourth grade, I prayed that I would have good teachers in middle school as well.

My prayers would have invented God if He did not exist, in order to receive and fulfill Them.

Yes, I had good teachers, I learned what competition is.

The biology teacher was on a high register in terms of temperament.

One Friday evening he announced to us that he wanted us to draw plants, birds, insects, and animals on large cardboard boards to be displayed in the biology classroom.

I was supposed to draw the cobra, the chiseled killer, surrounded by plants.

I didn't have any cardboard so I drew on a sheet of paper from my sketchbook.

Dad sanded two beams, varnished them, and the board was ready.

It seems like nothing ever happens on Sunday in the country, that it's just a time to wait for the next week, but I had tried to draw a cobra, which was no small feat.

On Monday, I handed over the wonderful reptile hidden among the toad-green bushes mixed with shades of raw green and even some brown twigs.

I was shocked when the teacher tore up the work in a few seconds. She compared my miserable drawing with the successful drawings of other classmates, which had been made by anyone but them. I cried and, in my mind, I composed a list of reproaches for her.

Crying and sad, I headed home.

It was a cold and stormy winter, without snow.

On my way home, on winter evenings, the frost and the stars accompanied me on the winding road, I walked for a few kilometers, in the dark.

The geography teacher, Anişoara Marin, who shared the same route with me, was moved by my plight on her way home.

She took my hand, and the next day she invited me to her house and drew me a spectacular cobra.

I watched her sharpen her colored pencils,   she had beautiful hands and wore a blouse that said Kinshasa, the capital of an African state, knitted by her herself.

For her gesture of kindness, I included her among the people I think of fondly.

At the end of eighth grade, Anişoara Marin wrote on my ribbon: "Nature gave you: cultivate what you have."

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In the swing

I liked to go outside on summer nights when the house was asleep.

Sometimes I would wear a blue satin dress that looked like a bell, with dragonflies embroidered on the skirt, that I had received from a relative in Bucharest - it had probably belonged to a dancer. We would dance under the stars to music that only I could hear.

My spirit was flying high, towards an indefinite horizon, but I imagined a multitude of lights sent by my mind, in a life that was to be mine.

I had confidence in the future.

In the swing between the hedges, a girl was dreaming with her eyes open, just preparing to expand her horizons; my little world had become too small.

"Travel Diary", a book in which descriptions of places were accompanied by images, made me dream of wandering the world, sending travel tickets in time.

My greatest aspiration as a child was to become important enough to visit Venice and Paris.

Such trips were just fantasies for a child like me.

 

 

Velvet Soul

I was born and I was a gift.

As a child and as playful as a kid, I was a radiant start to life for my parents.

I didn't have to beg for attention - I was me, and that was enough for people to notice me, to smile at me.

I was quite quiet in my childhood, docile, thoughtful, cheerful.

In middle school, the girls were insecure, indecisive.

They pretended to be bigger, to impose rules, and smaller, more childish than they were, to attract sympathy when they fought.

Competing with one of them toughened me up from a young age.

I still remember her now, she was a thin and perfectionist girl.

He never lacked anything, not even supplies or a starched collar.

She had a bushy, red ponytail that swayed down her back like a fiery wave.

An intelligent and very ambitious child.

I don't know how she managed not to be spontaneous!

But it attracted the intriguing little things like a magnet, which made extracurricular life meaningful - the little revenges, the little churches...

How they made me suffer sometimes!

During breaks I was alone.

I woke up with Jana.

What a beautiful and gentle soul Jana had...

In the evening I cried, pulling the pillow closer.

I write all this and smile a little bitterly.

As a teenager, it was impossible for me to live in the shadows and I did some pretty strange things to keep people with red pigtails at bay.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Burdened dreams

The caress on my head, the wrapping with the blanket that he pulled up to under my chin, the squeezing of my chubby nose between his fingers, the pampered laugh, the pinching of the reckless foot with which I kicked the air, the stories – what beautiful memories.

My mother read all the books she could get from the library, she was intelligent and witty, and she attracted younger people like a magnet, who gathered at our gate on clear, warm evenings.

He had an open laugh, and in his heart, kindness and compassion.

With her small, hard-working hands, she wanted to embrace the world of her children, in their embrace.

A quick-witted Argeșian woman who put passion into what she did.

How sweet her presence was!

Mothers are always there when you need them.

He didn't leave until I had domesticated the rules of adult life. 

It was my little universe, the only one I knew.

I left my modest family as a child, with the self-confidence of a peasant who wants to settle "in the city", with a great desire to become, but I forgot to learn to swim, and the waters of life, with currents, with tributaries, sometimes muddy, are traps for the innocent.

This made things go wrong many times.

Effort and ambition were my allies, but life's trials often distanced me from the wonder that was laughing in my soul.

Every time I found it, I had the illusion that I was drawing paths to immortality.  

In the soul from where the child left, when it cries, the sky rises higher and higher, while the clouds fall heavily on the backs of dreams.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The crazy storm

When there was a drought or flood, my mother used to say that God was angry with people. When I asked: with us, the children? "No, never with children." But aren't children people? "They're angels"...

I remember a dry summer, the earth was burning, dry. As children, we would perform rain rituals in the fields on holidays, magical incantations that would lure the sky: the Paparudele Dance .

From the memories of Professor Peșu, Geo, Angela, Rada, Jeni and me:

The Paparude Dance was a ritual that included making clay Paparude, two figures depicting the Rain Mother and the Sun Father , made from wet earth.

The Mother of Rain and the Father of Sun were wrapped in a white cloth, offered by a pregnant woman. The Paparudele (children, representing innocence, purity, with their bodies covered with bodhi leaves), danced on the streets of the village, and the Clay Paparudele were carried throughout the ceremony. After the dance, the participants in the ritual – the Paparudele and the locals accompanying the convoy, went to a well on the outskirts of the village, with water consecrated by the village priest, watered the Clay Paparudele and placed flowers at the base of the well.

The convoy then went to other nearby fountains, and the Paparudele were abundantly watered with water, while they sang:

"Relative Paparuda"

"Come and get us wet"...

The ritual ended with the burial of the Clay Paparudes .

The burial site was chosen carefully, it had to be protected, so that no one with bad intentions would discover it, because the effects of the ritual and incantations would be nullified and the rain would be delayed.

The field that yearned for rain was the best place for burial.

The parrots were wailing, and their incantations were transmitted to the entire convoy:

"Mother of Rain is risen /

Sorii's father died /

Give us, Lord, the keys /

Let's Unlock the Rains /

Since when has it stopped raining?

The whole earth has dried up /

It dried and cracked /

"Since when has there been no rain"...

During this time, the ritual was also supported by a service held in the church by the village priest, as well as the prayers of the parishioners present at the service.

If the drought stubbornly persisted, children would resort to another custom to invoke rain: mamaiana .

The enchanted clay doll was taken to the White Spring and left to float on a bed of flowers with candles.

Sometimes the sky would turn cold and it would start to rain, after a torturous drought.

We were squealing with joy, convinced that we had created the miracle.

One evening, after such a ritual, on St. Elijah's Day, the wind arose, breaking trees and tearing off roofs.

The next day we learned that the oak forest where, according to the elders, Tudor and his pandora had found shelter was engulfed in fire.

Nature had been wailing all night, and the fire had torn apart the entrails of the forest, fanned by the wind, fierce, provoking wails, destroying nests.

Of the towering trees, only stumps remained with tortured arms twisted in a silent prayer to the sky, with amputated fingers.

The sky was blue and, as if guilty, it had lowered, embracing the bitter field.

When the storm comes and uproots the towering trees, laying them to the ground, when the fire burns arrogantly high in the sky, devastating the forest, the sap-filled trees that the devastation ignored remain behind.

Beyond the forest, among the hare's-shadow bushes, a few young storms were silhouetted against the sky. The fire had not reached there.

From the next day on, the air became still.

Only when the wind turned from the forest did it bring an air of burning, smoking wood.

 

 

 

 

These beings called children and the choices they make

Around noon, a downpour began. First, large, sparse drops, then it intensified. We were on the road, playing. Mother had gone to the mill to grind wheat. All the children were taken home by their parents, only we remained outside. The rains, with thunder and lightning, when mother was with us, were so different from the rains without mother...

Geo, the older sister, was afraid to take us home, the street was full of mud and the distance from the road was huge for the dwarfs. She took my brother and me by the hands and we set off in the direction of the mill, on the road. I can imagine three children whipped by the wind and rain. When we reached the last house from the poplars, Geo saw my mother, at the bend at the bridge over the stream, running and shouting to knock on Licuci's gate. The good people sheltered us, and my mother arrived in a heartbeat. The Călmăţuiu stream swelled and burst its banks, the bridge was swept away by the waters shortly after my mother crossed to Cătun...

Large stones fell from the ragged sky, ice crystals whipped everything, rattling and bending roofs and tractor bodies, and trees bent to the ground with their branches tripped and broken, lying on the ground. Lightning threw lights over the gloomy streets of the village, and old and lonely people became smaller in their houses, with each clap of thunder, praying to God. Our poor Hamlet had become a frightened place.

Why didn't we go home, where we could have been safe, waiting for our mother? Paradoxically, the child at that time made a good decision. The rain had dislodged several tiles from the roof of our house and a   piece of the ceiling had collapsed into the hall.

The heavenly tears lasted a day and a night, the rain seemed to have set its time in advance, without rest. Everything was spinning out of control, rolling like a domino... It rained and rained, floods everywhere, the village of Stejaru was swallowed by the waters. One of the young storms was struck, burning like a torch, under the flood.

We were sheltered in the attics and the animals had found shelter in the hall. The parents held their fists clenched, shaking them at the cursed clouds that had destroyed their efforts and shattered their dreams. They were still sending their eyes and souls to the sky, praying to God to keep us alive. We were feeding on nuts and slices of dried apples strung together and hanging from the beams.

The tormenting noises of the night, the cries of birds and animals, as well as the cries of homeless and useless people, leaked from the darkness, like small needles. Babies were crying, their screams were heard louder when the wind blew on the waters, they must be cats , we tried to believe.

Hope for tomorrow lurked within us, a good moment to surface.

When the rain stopped, it was as if the destructive whirlwind itself had stopped. We looked out with our faces pressed against the cold window glass, our eyes on the rushing waters and our souls cowering in pity for the goats that could not be saved...

Stale, sweet smells filled the air, the water receded as if at a call from the depths of the earth, leaving behind the scattered remains of life, animals and birds clinging to trees or to whatever dam the flood flow had broken against. The house nestled in a peaceful hollow. A frozen silence, except for the crickets in the attic. What did they care?

When the ground shook again, we didn't notice the devastation anymore, we were happy to have our games back. We made miniature pies out of lumps of earth, which we smashed hard against the high-voltage poles, and they would pop, a small explosion of mud and children's laughter. The game was called "pişcotul".

Unleashed nature, going from drought to floods!

I did not think then that Romania would become, in my mature years, a place of play between nature and man, in a bewildering alternation of deforestation, drought and floods, destroying human destinies and causing the earth to collapse in on itself.

 

 

 

Swamp

The calm river flows gently and, before kissing the Suhaia River, it collects ash and slag, remnants of the nomads who sit near the arches of the gray huts, around the fire, on piles of frozen earth covered with hay.

They hold clay bowls of steaming polenta and roasted chicken legs in their hands, showing off the night's loot, when chickens clucked from the householder's yards.

Lined up along the water are islands formed from debris and the corpses of sheep killed by the plague, which grow among the large teeth of amputated poplars, collapsed in the swamps.

Underground monsters suck the sap from the roots, then retreat into the depths, seeking peace.

How do you deal with death, earth?

 

 

 

 

Calmatuiu Stream

During my childhood, it was a stream of murky water, the color of mud.

At the entrance to Călmăţuiu de Sus, a pond had formed, the favorite place of frogs and birds.

The ragged banks were guarded by reeds, and the willows with their roots stuck under the bank tilted their hairs to kiss the water when it rained more and the stream swelled. I liked to look at the water and at the birds that, in the blink of an eye, would dive down and touch the water and you would no longer see them, quickly cross the road, then fly into the lonely poplars on the side of the road – there were 31 of them at that time.

The frog's silk swayed, moved by the thread of the White Spring that came from the gardens.

At Izvorul Alb, the waters of the dead were "unleashed".

The notched raboj was cut into pieces and thrown into the small well.

Two candles were placed crosswise on a pole [4], lit at both ends, then it was left to float on the thread leading into the stream.

Traveling lights…

We spent a lot of time by the water, until the mosquitoes, little bloodthirsty helicopters, settled on our skin, stinging us mercilessly.

Through the curtain of memories, I can hear the laughter of children who bathed in Călmățui in the summer and then went to steal cherries.

In the evening, we would descend Valea Păduceluului towards the Hamlet shrouded in calm, kicking up clouds of dust and having fun from one end of the wide street to the other.

We chased away mosquitoes by lighting tall fires in the clearing between Dură and Birbiș, from corn stalks and twigs, on the embers of which we roasted corn. The sweet and milky juice, the smoke and the joy of being a child…

When sleep would sneak up on us, we had the impression that the moon was also going to sleep with us.

I wonder... where did the light that fell over the stream come from, even at dusk?

Where did the peace and security of each day come from, because I was missing a lot!

I lived blessed days under the clear gaze of the childhood sky, because... because I didn't miss myself. 

Just because I'm writing all this doesn't mean I'm a child anymore, and Călmățuiul is no longer the stream it once was.

The willows are still there, as are a few poplars. 

The plum orchard by the stream has thinned out, and the poplars are getting rarer.

The collective's gardens and vineyards have disappeared, with the wonderful blanc grapes (pineapple, delavara), băicoi, algeriana, roșioara, 1001, tereăza, tâța-cocii, arbecel, tâștăioaș, zaibăr alba and negru...

The fountains with scales have disappeared, only the small ponds remain, like dried eyes under the brow of the hills, like the fountain at Boscu, in Crîngeni...

"These fountains created by man in the middle of the Romanian Plain, either for the soul of a dead person, or out of people's need to have fresh water when they were working in the fields, or for watering animals, seemed to establish a balance of man in the Universe; the earth, from its depths, offered him water - the source of life, and the balance of the fountain connected him to the cosmos, urging him as if to look at the sky, to aspire to the heights, to fly!" (Prof. Maria Peșu)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

earthquake

Atlas, with his back bent and his heart enlarged by the longing for harmony, shrugs his shoulders, while the Equator goes crazy, like a ribbon in love...

People fall from their beds of love, of longing, of suffering, onto the cold floor of an opaque midnight, they look into each other's eyes carefully, realizing that it can be so little. That only the end of all things brings them closer...

 

March 4, 1977

" Language, tongue [5] , and you're out of gas!"

"I put it on and you burned it."

It was getting dark.

Mom blew into the glass bottle to steam it up, then, with the tip of the spindle wrapped in newspaper, she cleaned it.

"Spark" had the right paper for cleaning the bottle. He rounded the white cotton wick with scissors, with parallel stripes in the middle, so that it wouldn't burn at the corner and smoke the bottle , he wiped the cap, turned on the gas and lit the wick with a match.

I loved the moment the matchstick was lit, the crackle and the little explosion on the reddish sulfur dial.

The smell of burning sulfur didn't bother me because, usually, the lighting of the match announced the preparation of food or the banishment of the darkness I feared so much.

This ritual made the poor light clearer.

I was reading when the roar filled the house.

The glass of the tongue fell, burning my bare foot.

I reached out to secure it better, but it got worse and worse, the house groaned and the run outside was confusing, we were bumping into door frames.

Chickens were flying through the trees, dogs were howling, my brother was crying.

The earth was shaking violently.

Mother gathered us tightly in the arches of her arms, whispering "it's an earthquake."

We were afraid and cold.

I thought that the earth was cold too, that's why it trembled with a serious tremor that seemed to never end.

I didn't realize the horror of that phenomenon, as I stood glued to the ground that was revolting like a large, enraged animal, somehow waiting for it to calm its spasms.

It was, after all, the same land on which we always played and which gave us food and on which the house now seemed to be nestled among the swaying trees with chickens all around.

I looked at the sky, which seemed to be swaying too, dark, with distant stars.

The mother was praying, a mother's prayer for her children, praying for life, for mercy.

I didn't think that thousands of people were dying in those moments.

We were safe and after a while we returned to the ruined but still warm house.

I stayed up most of the night, watching them sleep. My brother sobbed, hugging his mother's chest.

I looked now at the dark windows, now at the light of the lamp : its flame burned softly. How well this painting resembled life!

I didn't cry, but I understood, making the association with the other disasters that had befallen the place, that we are nothing more than children of nature, subject to its movements.

I had a hard time falling asleep, a tormenting sleep. In the morning I saw destroyed chimneys on the older houses, and from my mother I learned how much death lay beyond the small settlement, caused by the earthquake. With wide, questioning eyes I looked at the sky, where dangers usually came from, then I realized that I was living between two   dangers, two wonders: the sky and the earth. Life was shaping up as an adventure full of the unpredictable.

 

Wanderer on the Hill - At Páducel

The joyful core of the sky flees to sleep, the moon rises.

The moon bunny and the moon man also appear, waving at us.

Dad knew how to decipher the meandering paths left by animals, to follow the tracks left by rabbits in the fields.

He would take Bobică, an old dog with whom my father seemed to understand each other by sight, take the bag of turnips, cross the club between his right shoulder blade and the crook of his left elbow, and begin his wandering. The branches of each tree were gnawed, and at its base, colorful berries, rabbit droppings, showed the trail of the long-eared fugitive.

Dad loved bunnies very much. He had a bag of turnips, because he didn't hunt them, but left them turnips in specific places for them to nibble on.

His only concern was that the little ones wouldn't be caught by crows or dogs. He would leave a few turnips and move on. He loved the field, it always seemed to me that he could read the sky and the earth. He could guess the channels made by moles, he knew all the nests in the trees or bushes.

Once, he brought home some white bunnies. He had found the mother bunny torn apart. The little ones were shivering, their hearts beating. Dad fed them and talked to them, and we petted them, imagining they were kittens.

In the winter, the house was full of children, bunnies, and bunny poop. They had become friendly, but they didn't hesitate to escape when someone forgot (or intentionally left) the cage door open. He was worried.

''Poor them''...

He set traps for rats, which in the Teleorman area are called gherlani , prepared a killer cocktail - green of Paris , which he spread with a vermorel [6] .

I would then find them dreaming with their bellies facing the sky. They were cunning and would dig canals that my father would flood, watching them escape (and we would laugh – the Gherlans couldn't swim!).

In my childish mind, the association of poison with Paris, the city of love, was strange. The green of Paris was toxic, while the dream of seeing Paris was sweet and impossible. 

Bobică was also our guide when we walked with the goats on the stubble.

We used the straw bales expelled by the Glories to make wonderful shelters, where we read, slept, or sheltered from the rain.

The goats were moving away, looking for tender lamb.

Bobică seemed to be sleeping, like us, but when the horns got too far away, the furry one would make a running arc and bring them close to the tree.

The only hell that wouldn't leave my side was Floricica. She was my little sisilika , she followed me like a puppy, she drank water from the cup of my palms.

When I dozed off, she would nibble on my dress, sniff my hair like a small, stubborn puddle, do somersault around me, poke me with her antler buds, then, because I wasn't paying attention to her, she would sit at my feet and doze off too.

The smile that now surfaces in memories is a fragment of a message that will never be erased.

Dad wanted to have his children close by, but we didn't love the land like he did, we didn't stay there.

My parents are now stars so distant that I can no longer locate them in the sky of my life.

There is a heaven there from where the souls of our parents watch over us with love, sometimes appearing in dreams...

 

After the rabbits

Autumn, wind.

The trees were swaying, the leaves were falling, making yellow, orange carpets, there was a white sky, there were birds like little arrows, the wind was blowing, the leaves were flying.

These images from an autumn day, so full of life, before the last leaves fell, were completed with an adventurous trio: Bobică exploring the hill with me and my father, who was carrying me on his shoulders.

Bobică was poisoned the following night.

I cried a lot, as did my brothers.

"It's just a dog," other children said.

To me, he seemed like a little brother.

It seemed to me that my heart stopped for a moment when I buried him in the clearing at the end of the vineyard. I knew that he would be, forever, far from me.

I remember that day well...

After the funeral, we went to the road.

Solomon sold pistachio ice cream in tiny cones.

I was sad and the ice cream was melting.

On the same day, Marian, the child of some neighbors, died before our eyes, by asphyxiation - a pain that never goes away in a mother's soul.

I learned something about the extinction of life, about absence and longing, about the finality of death, and I vaguely understood, from the burning I felt in my soul, that life can be a cruel thing, after the loss of someone dear.

To make him your ally, to tame him...

 

With mornings in mind

Summer days started at 4 a.m. for parents. They would fill their jugs with water and head to the school .

As I write this, I can hear the creaking of oxcarts, their words lost in the night, the barking of dogs, the crowing of roosters. I can smell the crackling cigarettes [7] made from bits of newspaper and shredded tobacco, stuck together with saliva and breath, I can hear the dry coughs of men and their hoarse, slightly cracked voices.

I felt a pang in my heart every time my mother left in the morning.

The work of the land was hard and degrading and remunerated only in a few meager tithes of agricultural produce. At noon, when the heat was scorching , it was the most unbearable. They returned late, after sunset, a man and a few women in each cart.

The carts creaked heavily on the street, their words were lost, leaning against the hooves, along with the empty jugs, only the barking of the dogs was the same, like a bell announcing that the parents were returning from the hill . 

While our parents were away, we took care of the household, fed the animals and birds, then left with the goats on the stubble.

In the hot summers, we would give the goats to the shepherds. We had no more milk or cheese, but we were spared the drudgery of guarding the horns.

The girls were busy with something very serious back then: they were making dowries . We sewed mysterious flowers on nylon with golden silk or on linen with cotton threads in a gradient, patterns from ancestors known to our mothers, napkins and tablecloths.

Outraged that a barbaric custom was keeping me on the road, I would sneak away to read, overcome by the longing for stories.

"I fell asleep," I would say, when I had to file a dowry report at the end of the week.

In the warm seasons, in the evenings, we would go steal cherries, plump plums, grafted grapes, corn for baking, pumpkins, sunflower pies, and whatever else could be stolen from the fields.

For a long time I associated the beginning of autumn with the stringing and weaving of tobacco leaves. The tender, bright green, transparent leaves were strung on string with sticks, they cracked slightly when pierced, a milky juice came out, it was a real talent not to break the leaf, to stick the stick exactly in the middle of the stem. Our fingers turned black with a sticky and bitter substance, and green lice swarmed us.

For puppetry, we were required to be selective, to appreciate the size and quality of the leaves, and only after rainy days when the leaves were damp and could be easily smoothed, did our fingers flatten them, forming puppets that we tied with elastic strips of cloth.

The bales were taken to the CAP, and the pay was somewhat more generous. The men of the community had tobacco for the whole winter for the croșneag .

Warm and tender memories come back to my mind. Every child born in Valea Călmățuiului comes with his memories, they flash like fireflies, at night, on the bank of the stream...

From the memories of Julia Nemo:

"The best corn was the stolen one. I remember that once I had stolen something from the field and the guard was Mărin Jilavu. I don't know where he came from, but he scared me and I ran like a mad rabbit. I threw what I had stolen on the road..."

From the memories of Nana Duval:

"The best baked corn we ate was when we went to the boiler to make brandy, baked on embers with plum flavor."

The brandy cauldron was an important place for the community.

It was an autumn ritual.

The men would meet and discuss the harvests, taste brandy sipping from a jug , get dizzy, become voluble, then peck under the moon.

Brandy vapors floated in the air, and the geese and ducks floating on the stream made amorous sounds.

" There was a lot of commotion at the tobacco puppetry and the wool spinning. Our mothers would gather around them, we would mess them up more, but they didn't get upset. All summer we would wander around strange places, for example we would go to see the tadpoles in the pond."

Memories shared by Mari Manafu:

"Although they were in trouble, they didn't seem sad to me. They made jokes, sang, taught us games or cracked sweet apricot pits for us. They would take out an earthenware cup filled with wine, another with water (what a smell the water had!) and talk, tell stories in peace, in the dim light [8] , without hurrying, even though they had been awake since 5 in the morning and had worked all day.

They took time to socialize , they weren't pessimistic about tomorrow.

They praised their animals, the hens that laid healthy eggs.

With the cats by our side, we didn't stray from the path . We weren't attracted by the TV, nor by the world beyond the village. We were there. Safe...

We stole pumpkins from vineyards, plums from Stăncești, walnuts from Uncle Ilie Dogaru's bed, mulberries and apricots from Breazu, and cherries from Balta Sărată.

Real, lived stories are simple, they know no obsolescence, no forgetting; they are in the beating of my heart."

From the memories of Sorinel Sandu:

"As a child, I dug at the roots of many trees, from where I could see - I had the impression that I could see - flames coming out.

My mother had told me that there were hidden treasures there - the Mahmuds and the Roosters...

We made bows with arrows with tin tips and shot them over the houses to kill old woman Leana and midwife Dița, then we ran into the willows."

The people from back then have left and the children have grown up, but the Teleorman spirit continues to have something alive, adventurous.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Cloud clusters

I think back to the little room from my childhood, lit by a single lamp on nights with desperate storms when the sky, cut by lightning, sank lower and lower, through the storms.

When I was a child, my father would predict the weather just by touching the windows of the sky with his kind eyes, with eyebrows like shivering eaves.

The rains, in the early years of my childhood, seemed quick and short-lived.

Then a gentle sun rose.

How happy my parents were after long periods of drought, when the sky became cloudy and set near the tops of the hills towards Zavera, heralding rain!

Later, when I grew up, the rains seemed long to me, falling like a curtain of darkness over the earth and over the broken wings of their illusions that tomorrow would be better.

Our little home was rocked by gusts of wind coming from over the hills.

We were impatiently waiting to go outside, to splash barefoot in the puddles formed by the tractor tires [9] .

I would pick green apples from the garden, sweet and sour, and read.

I didn't know any other life than that, I felt safe.

On moonlit evenings the earth was bathed in a white light.

I would go outside and run to the moon.

On rainy nights, I was no longer up there, but dripping, as rain does.

I know that memories don't bring back the sunrises where childhood was indulged, but these words are loaded with longing.

Although I don't love the rain, these words pull a latch from the door of a hidden pain.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The snows of childhood

My childhood home was on the edge of the Hamlet, but the mud and the wind blowing from the hills, which my mother called the Empty Bag, made it seem like it was located on the edge of the world.

In that place, my mother, who had grown up among the gentle hills of Argeș, felt like a stranger.

When winter came, the snow painted the landscape in pure white.

The garden was a wonder, covered in lace from the overnight frost.

The house seemed to be swaying its eaves under the snow, with its chimney blackened by soot and its shingles missing, and above it the birds were screaming in flight.

The snow was forming huge drifts.

The snowy shadows of the dragons of the omen near the gate fell over the groves.

For a dwarf, all snows are high.

First, a fine layer was laid, on which you could see the prints of the claws of birds - roosters - larger, hens - smaller, the tracks of geese, with the harmonica between their fingers and, very rarely, the dog's paw pads, until it got warmer or it snowed again and they disappeared.

The icicles on the eaves resembled shards of glass, and I marveled as they melted, as if crying, then fell, crystalline projectiles in the clear winter light.

I liked to press my rubber boots against the ice covering the water holes, slowly at first, watching as the shiny layer cracked and arrows ran away, crackling, then the water gushed out.

The yard was covered with twigs, straw, and bird droppings under the layer of ice.

Only the narrow path leading to the fountain was strewn with trembling tassels falling from the branches of the brushwood.

In the evenings we ate scovergi , flatbreads baked on the stove or on a board placed over coals, which we called cococi or asmă, unleavened bread, called in Bulgarian pita presna , with goat cheese.

I would sneak outside unnoticed, grab a fluffy ball, slip snow cocoons into my brothers' pajamas, then hide behind the stove.

There were screams, laughter, and gentle reprimands from her mother. Her house was full of goblins .

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Childhood home

I had left a house where the laughter of children, the songs of the mother, and her sighs had made it a sad place in waiting.

The white walls and especially the ceiling had small relief designs inlaid in them, created by fragments of fallen plaster, which had faded over time.

I used to watch them in the evenings, while my thoughts ran far away.

One of the drawings closely resembled a swordfish, another a giant pear, and at the base of the bulb, next to each other, an iceberg and a girl's profile.

I remember them so well that I could reconstruct them, draw them, especially since now the house is only in my memory.

My father rarely came home, he worked in Bucharest.

I didn't care if my parents still loved each other.

I knew only one kind of love, for my family, and the variations from animosity to anger that I sometimes noticed between my mother and father, the silences that fell, aroused insecurity in me.

I vaguely felt that they would have been better off living separate lives.

But, as is often the case, the breakup is just an imagined moment, in any case in a time other than the present.

Those who have several children and have built a house with great effort find it easier to live in a familiar disaster than a life in which the unforeseen sends out its unseen tentacles.

So we remained a family.

We children loved our father in the silent way he loved us.

He didn't know how to show his love other than by making sure we didn't lack the things absolutely necessary for life, books.

"Don't steal, don't lie, don't talk nonsense, don't be the first to jump into a fight, don't get into trouble, don't make us laugh"... this was the code of my father's upbringing, whom the people in the village nicknamed Ilie Olteanu.

He had a worry in his eyes that rarely left him, just as much joy in life sparkled in his mother's eyes.

Sometimes, after heated discussions with my father, the lights in my mother's eyes would go out.

I would hear her crying, I would run to her.

She stroked our naughty childish heads with so much love, which I now perceive as a velvety taste, a kind of comfort that died with her.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

snuggery

"And it perished as the good news perishes"

In the winters we lived in the little room that was warmer.

When we were left alone at home on days when my mother went to the market, we would play, the stove was warm.

I felt isolated from the world, I was anxiously awaiting his return.

Bobică could be heard barking, then whining in a way that defined the mother's proximity to home. It was as if I saw her at the window with the blooming mallows, with her turquoise or red scarf, with lamé [10] , blushing from the frost, I heard her asking from outside: "What are my children doing?"

Only then did he enter the room.

The rustle of unwrapped packages, this is mine, this is mine , my mother was laughing and hugging us.

On sleet days, I would come home from school swimming in puddles.

Mom would give us dry socks and towels to dry our hair, because a hat would always slip off.

He was wiping our noses.

The stove was roaring.

She would neatly arrange the socks, scarves, and gloves, knitted by herself from colored wool, around the stove, and prepare the table.

We were devouring with gusto, she was looking at us and smiling. "Do you like it?" "Do you want more?" These were questions that I answered by handing out the clay bowls again...

Her heart was growing inside her , she had some strong bones, when the children ate it was a sign of health...

My whole childhood I had wet feet during the winters, the rubber boots didn't last, but during the game, who cared?

My mother would clean them of the mud (a sticky, black mud that seemed to stick to your soul ), wash them, and dry them on the stove. In the mornings, we would put on warm socks and start over. 

When I was growing up and going to the derdeluş, La Păducel , we would arrive in the evenings tired but happy.

We were blowing steam out of our nostrils and gushing water out of our mouths, we thought we were dragons.

The cold was invading the house, along with us, which, I don't know how, gave the house a special scent, an energy...

The house smelled of burnt wood, warm bread and quince, that familiar smell of your parents' home that you don't find anywhere else. I don't know how the mother managed to be so patient with three children and remain cheerful.

In the evenings, we listened to radio drama or stories on the radio, while my mother spun, wove rugs, mats, and towels. My mother knew all the stories, she knew the lines in advance… I liked The Dawn Treader the most.

Seeing that I like to read, my father gave me a storybook for Christmas. I used to read the Ispires stories to my mother, and the words in the book were almost perfect, I liked the letters more than the numbers. I liked the letter "g" the most, whose appearance resembled a small, hurried ant. My admiration for letters faded when the sentences were too long, they bored me.

"Only fools get bored," my mother would tell me, laughing. "I think you're just sleepy."

I laughed too, yawned, read another line, and stopped.

Whatever my mother said, I couldn't continue. The hidden meaning of the words was starting to ironically sting the characters in the story. The chaos that the battles between princes and dragons created in my mind robbed me of the joy of reading – I rejected violence. I preferred my mother to read String Your Pearls to me .

Her voice dripped like honey:

"A coal and an ember says, boys, says."

After a while I fell asleep happily.

 

 

The captive reindeer

One winter day, sitting on my old wooden school bench, carved with the initials of students from previous years, I was amazed to see a reindeer in the schoolyard, walking towards the playground.

It was snowing and the swings were covered with snow.

I wasn't the only one captivated by that apparition: all the children ran to the windows, clapping and giggling, much to the displeasure of the teachers who didn't understand all that commotion, for the simple reason that the reindeer wasn't visible to the adults.

What was a reindeer doing in our schoolyard?

Some children speculated that he got lost when Santa Claus came with gifts, but we all knew that Santa Claus was none other than the postman who wore cotton wool instead of a beard, wore a red cape and helmet, and made his voice deeper to seem old and wise.

No, there was nothing magical about the reindeer's appearance.

Others suggested that the reindeer be taken to the zoo, that meant captivity, and all the children rejected the idea.

We approached him – he was friendly, we talked to him   , he seemed to understand us, then we took him to the gym where we painted him green, to match the background.

Suddenly, all the children became very passionate about sports...

I fed him dry grass, eugenia, and chocolate.

Sometimes he would go outside and look at the sky, go on the swings, walk around unhindered.

The swings moved behind him, and the teachers could no longer control the children, whose eyes remained fixed outside for minutes on end.

The reindeer stayed in our school until Epiphany, then disappeared...

We missed him, but reindeer are meant to live free.

Maybe Santa Claus existed, after all?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Time, an invention of adults

As a small being that I was, time was something immense, passing slowly during school and annoyingly quickly during vacations.

When the warm weather came, I didn't feel like studying.

I would come back from school and take refuge in the gazebo in the vineyard.

I was sleeping there in my suspended house.

In the evening I would quickly glance through the books, how quickly I learned!

I was living in the heart of days, a fairy tale.

Now, when time seems to have narrowed, I live more in the shadow of the days, without being sheltered from the spontaneity that animated my childhood.

And I realize that some things always accompany us, even if everything passes.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bicycle

Do you still remember the lacey thrill when you raise your hands as the bike flies across the asphalt, and the wind plays in your hair, reliving all the times?

A whirlwind of excitement and fear, of control and confidence in the direction, the dance of the handlebars, the forward movement, you are free, free, free and flying!

I wasn't even 10 years old, but I had learned to pedal on an adult bicycle, which had a very tall frame.

Being a tiny creature, I could only pedal by twisting my right leg under the frame. Delighted as I was, I didn't see her.

The jumping stone…

It would go far, right?

The right foot slipped off the pedal, the ankle was injured by the unforgiving steel bar, and the pedals continued to spin, as did the front wheel.

The shock made me not feel the pain.

I was ashamed of the other children, who laughed at me, cruel and careless, glad that they weren't on the ground, in the dust.

More than the condition of my injured, bleeding ankle, I was worried about what the children thought of me.

The moment passed quickly, although tears were waiting to flow down my cheeks.

I stood up strong, smiled and said to the closest child: what, you little rascal, you've never fallen?

A hug, a few words of comfort, an improvised bandage, my mother was there for me.

Life was beautiful again.

When we slip off the pedals, when we crash, when we crash, it's a blessing to have someone there for us.

May He heal our wounds and tell us that He loves us!

When I was growing up, I worked on the farm for an entire summer, waking up at 4 in the morning, drinking water heated by the heat, with bloody fingers and the sun on my head, and I bought a frameless bicycle with my own money.

Nowadays…

Like it or not, the world focuses on physical beauty, not that the spiritual beauty you happen to have doesn't matter.

A few extra pounds don't matter when you're happy.

But how hard it is not to be happy because of a few extra pounds, when people reject you, and the secret lover of your heart doesn't notice you.

Things are bad, very bad, but there is a solution: riding a bike.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And I was looking for rose hips

The sun is burning and the thought of you is burning, the sky is high, far away, beyond the peaks, it has taken the rain with it, the earth is lamenting.

I braided my worries and sent them a package, in the future.

Soon they will be splashing with angels in celestial waters.

The swallow brings dewdrops to the nest on the doorstep.

I go out the gate and my fragile shadow falls on the walnut trunk on which our memories stand, leg over leg, with rosehip beads and nose in the wind.

I look at us – those from back then – you ride your bike on the road, I'm chasing rose hips, following you.

I look again: I smile at you, you approach and, I don't know how, but you sneak your eyes under my linen blouse, a thief of caresses that I jokingly run away from.

In the rose garden, you draw a circle around us, the herbs cast love spells and the wind, stirred up out of nowhere, tangles rosehip twigs and brambles in my hair.

It rained and the apple tree branches hung over the fences, we plucked apples that had turned yellow in flight, but had an intense sweet-sour green taste.

We listen to the bell in the gray tower of Băsești, it struggles chaotically, tomorrow is Saint Mary. Tomorrow is also the day you leave, and the days that will come without you are sandy, pointless days that will stumble before sunset.

You walk away and leave with the moon behind you.

Words have narrowed the distance to the first love of adolescence that breathes in the White Spring, in the Calmățui Stream and in the storm forest.

The rose hips are gone, and the park is overgrown with weeds.

I can guess where the circle is.

A circle in a deaf story, from which the synchronization was missing. And this is not even a memory, it is just a small thought, long hidden in the thousand-eyed lair of the imagination...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Holy Romanian Language

I was a happy child and my imagination was limitless.

I lived the challenge of competition, I had good teachers and the result was that, at the time of separation from my family, I possessed a treasure: self-confidence.

I would soon find out that there were very few people anyone could rely on.

Mr. Alexandru Ghergu, professor of Romanian language and literature, instilled in me a love for literature, for poetry, for the holy Romanian language.

He wasn't tall, but he was a completely magnetic creature.

He urged us to learn: "Put your hand on the book, little children" - we laughed, ostentatiously touching the books on the desks, he was amused too.

"Learn, so you can get out of this mess " (the sticky mud).

When he spoke, in a sonorous, pleasant voice, about Eminescu, he was transfigured.

He cleared his voice, spoke again, looked somewhere above our heads, as if the spirit of the great poet was there.

During breaks, he would approach us, caress our heads, push aside the bangs on some girl's forehead, saying: "Leave your forehead free, little children... Let it be high, serene, Eminescu-like"! He also founded a literary circle called Young Hopes , where children presented their literary creations. He sometimes invited poets, writers and epigrammers from the capital, who participated in our meetings. Thus, I had the joy of meeting at that young age the poet Pavel Lică, originally from Crîngeni, and the epigrammer George Zarafu.

After I graduated from high school, Professor Ghergu gave me books and told me: "The way you have been educated so far will be reflected in the years to come."

We corresponded for a while through letters, even after he retired.

One winter I received a letter with an ink drawing of a winter landscape, accompanied by holiday wishes, and after that the letters stopped.

He passed away so young!

I keep the memory and I don't forget one of the great teacher's sayings: "Always remember who you are."

And, as time passed, I became , without forgetting that I was a child of the Calmățuiului Valley, of parental gentleness, of play, of school, of brown-eyed rose hips , but no, not a poor child, as the locals used to think about families with many children.

Think pink!

Humans are polygamous beings but they maintain, in the eyes of the world, monogamy: they marry, they cheat, they lie.

They divorce, they remarry.

They long for the warm nest of the family when they are rejected, and after they feel refreshed, they again seek confirmations outside the nest - more innocent or more daring.

Indrea and Zapel had known each other since adolescence.

They had loved the same girl, Roza, but she had fallen in love with Gabicu, the balloon seller. When they saw him coming from afar, pedaling on a red bicycle, surrounded by flashing balloons, the children would greet him noisily.

Sometimes, when the wind started to blow, Gabicu would throw his bicycle into the ditch, let the balloons fly into the Hawthorn Valley, whistle in a certain way, then spread out his suman under the leafy bush heavy with white hawthorn flowers, waiting for Roza.

She came in a heartbeat, red-cheeked and palpitating, shivering like the voice of a blackbird.

Roza and Gabicu got married and loved each other for another year.

Then Acadela, a lollipop seller, appeared in Cătun.

Gabicu fell in love, but Acadela didn't find him suitable.

Roza had heard that a marriage is harmonious if you close one eye.

A year is a long enough time to be deceived by dreams.

But because Roza had heard that love lasts 3 years, she decided to keep that eye closed for 3 years, not so much out of love, but for the sake of theory.

There was intense traffic in Gabicu's heart and thus, under the hawthorn bushes, Miren, the icon seller, Carin, the lace seller, and Erin, the planer seller, wandered .

When he left her for Lizi, a sliver seller, Roza whined and vowed to hate him forever and left for the city , throwing her wedding ring into an abandoned well.

Indrea and Zapel secretly enjoyed this failure.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

"Drink, and the devil will do the rest" [11] …

The hamlet enjoyed its joys, shared its news, spun its gossip, and seethed with its enmities to the rhythm of the gentle summer rain.

A little bit of a scolding would refresh them.

The village madman haunted the night, naked, with his hat tilted over one ear and instead of a belt, a tobacco thread , armed with a demonic laser, dancing the foxtrot, seeking to bring down alien trees with ivory leaves and roots twisting into the sky; a suicide – a fragile young man from Călmăţuiu hugged a train…

A crime of passion has terrified the Mad Forest [12] .

The newspaper "Involuntary Detective" reported, expanding the story:

"A woman in Zlatco's Puppet Master [13] was murdered by her lover. They used to meet secretly in an abandoned house near the mill, drinking and making love. There was no future for them, and when she met a man who truly loved her, she told him: don't come anymore because I'm getting married. He asked her for one last night of love, as a sign of goodbye. With a song stuck in her head, she walked aimlessly along a path of violence, with a heavy gait, in which the power soaked in the habit of striking of her ancestors quivered.

The roar of his heart surrounded his eyes with bloodshot veins.

Blind, encouraging thoughts urged him on, rustling with accomplice.

He wanted to humiliate, to be asked for forgiveness, to be ruthless.

To savor the spine-chilling moment of a woman rejecting him.

He would have destroyed the man who had chosen her, who was better than him and, worst of all, whom she loved but considered innocent.

He scratched the door, as he usually did, and she opened it.

She looked at him with guilty eyes, slightly misty from tears and wine.

They made love, then the axe blade struck with thirst.

Chloe, a child from the Tecuci Creek Valley, made a shocking revelation to us:

After he cut that woman's throat, I went with some kids from the street to see - no one stopped us - and it was a scene straight out of a horror movie. He had cut her throat and her head was hanging over the edge of the bed in a pool of blood. He may be able to forget what he did, but I will never forget."

Some crimes committed in the Mad Forest had the bad habit of being perfect crimes.

However, this crime was solved, the man confessed and atoned.

The community in Zlatco's Puppet House knew him as a good, respectful, protective man.

And yet, that man of brotherly kindness was capable of committing something so cruel.

Inside, there are little monsters that are easy to tame or big, evil monsters that are impossible to control, and arguments, frustration, suffering, and alcohol keep them in check.

The first time I heard about people killing was when a woman from somewhere killed her babies so she could be free to live her love life with her lover while her husband worked on the Arabs' wells.

A ballad was then born, telling various stories about the unworthy mother's deed.

I felt sorry for the children, I had started to look closely at the mothers who were beating their children, and my heart was emptying of something good, trusting.

We realize that the being who gives life to babies can, equally, snatch them from life.

 

 

 

 

 

 

rose

Summer had come and the hum of the Hamlet had begun again.

One afternoon, while we were dozing off by the fences, with the hours melting away under the eyelids of the day, in Valea Păducelui we heard the snoring of an engine.

A screeching of wheels, stones bouncing furiously.

Roza driving a pink BMW had come home.

She had long, pink nails, blonde hair, and slender, tanned legs, barely covered by her pink dress.

The neckline allowed the volutes to boldly pierce the gazes of the curious onlookers.

Roza had become a model, presenting the creations of Nora Kamerling, the wife of a pedophile baron from Constanta.

Meanwhile, Indrea had died of longing.

Zapel, ruddy and chubby, had become a businessman in the countryside.

When he saw her he suddenly became silent, an unnatural reaction for him, who was so talkative. The rebellious tuft of hair on his head trembled with a faded emotion.

Thoughts were revolting, anxiety clashed with the impulse to flee.

She was frighteningly beautiful!

And he still loved her.

The hamlet was filled with an energy unknown until then, except for the effervescence experienced by the community, one night, during my childhood, when Bocioacă's granddaughter descended from the sky in a helicopter that landed in the clearing between Dură and Birbiş.

Roza walked towards Zapel with gazelle steps, lightly touched his earlobe with her long nails, whispered something, making him blush, and left, leaving the murmur of the crowd behind.

He then turned towards Valea Páducelului.

The hawthorn bush trembled.

Gabicu had returned.

Balloons floated, sparkling in the sun.

Roza flinched, smiling at a distant memory.

Gabicu was in all places at once, he loved women, he loved them all.

From the crowd, the Dwarf Pancioaca [14] , stroking his rough mustache, from which a mole was peeping, shouted:

"It's good that you got rid of him, Rozico! The puslamaua hasn't changed its habits."

Roza laughed for a long time, making the hawthorn flowers giggle mischievously, the trees bend, and the air vibrate.

Unearthly sounds seemed to be coming from the sky, like an echo.

The entire Hamlet celebrated Roza's joy.

Let the wine flow!

The Bacchic debauchery was at home.

He started, whispering: Gabicu… Gabicu Ubicuu…

 

 

 

 

 

The Blue Man

It was a teenage summer day .

I had drunk cold water from the White Spring and was waiting for Kat in the clearing near the poplars, at the foot of the plum orchard , to go up the hills and pick immortelle.

Kat was from Sighişoara but spent her summer holidays with her grandmother who lived on the school street. She was a slender girl, with short, ash-blond hair, a strange beauty, betraying her Saxon roots. Intelligent and a little mischievous, she used to tease me because I wasted precious time sewing intricate patterns on tablecloths, towels and cushions, as dowries , but also because it had entered my head that beyond the horizon of the small community there was nothing as interesting as our monotonous life.

I, the common sense of the earth, started to become restless, rebellious, an aspect that didn't escape my mother's notice.

I was so happy with Kat's presence that I ignored my mother's good advice to sew and decreed that I would never get married.

We were restless, we played all day long. We roamed the hills with her and explored the hollows of the trees, some of which were so large that we hid in them, as if in a den.

We climbed trees, stole cherries and plump plums, collected guinea fowl eggs from the nests at SMA, which I knew about from my father, and made omelettes.

On nights when there were weddings in the hamlet, we would take advantage of our parents' absence and sleep outside, in the shade between the bushes, where my father had built a bed.

We talked and laughed while we watched the stars, until morning, to catch God when he dimmed the light, until the stars completely dimmed and disappeared.

I was from Capella , while she, born in winter, was from Orion .

We never managed to catch the stars dozing. Their lights always mixed with the dew, the coolness, the morning.

We would fall asleep waiting and wake up when the sun rose, and Kat would run home, right to school, so her grandmother wouldn't find out about our adventure.

With my eyes on the stars, I imagined I was a star cat , dodging intergalactic raptors.

I was near the White Spring, waiting for Kat, who was late.

Beyond the gardens, in the distance, on the hill towards the cemetery, the sound of a motorcycle could be heard.

A cloud of worries like a halo.

After a while, a small blue creature appeared, a little boy.

His movements were like a dance and he wanted and didn't want to come to the gardens. How do I know this? Because I was 16, with a vivid imagination and I couldn't help but imagine all sorts of things about everything I saw. He had left behind a girlfriend, maybe - and I kept thinking: she had fallen in love with someone else, he still longed for her...

When the blue man crossed the rather precarious plateau over the stream, he staggered. I was preparing to laugh, in case he got his nice jeans wet in the muddy water. He had a motorcycle helmet in his hand. 

Before his appearance, I had smiled at the sky and the water where the green ducklings were splashing.

The appearance of an unknown boy in a place where everyone knew everyone was disturbing.

When he got closer, we saw that he was older than us, he was cute, with green, somewhat sad eyes.

He looked around, it seemed to me that he was looking at me, but in fact, he was looking with an electrified gaze over my head, where he had fixed a point in the distance.

The meeting didn't impress him too much.

I was a fragile, shy teenager who was intimidated by an older boy. She glanced at me again, this time she seemed to find me somewhat cute, because she smiled. Silly me, I smiled back.  

- I'm looking for the Livestock Farm, he told me.

"He's on the other side of the stream, and I made a circle toward the hills, my back to the blinding sun." He waved to me and headed for his motorcycle. I turned after him, following him until the dust cloud thinned.

- Aha! A boy has sparked your fantasies...

I was really scared. Kat had appeared out of nowhere.

- You got me.

- Where's your icy sex appeal , little one? 

I blushed and laughed. 

- Did you see how cute he is?

I was getting ready to get rid of the blush on my cheeks that the amazing meeting had brought me when the boy returned, his motorcycle roaring.

- My name is Vlad.

And what dimples he made when he smiled. And it seemed to me that he came closer this time, looking at Kat with interest.

- I'm Mir, she's Kat.

- Cat, you mean cat?

- No, Kat, from Katlin. Mir is a cat, a star cat, Kat left the house, giggling.

- MirKat [15] . The community is safe with you, he said with undisguised irony, smiling wonderfully.

I was smiling too, not knowing the hidden meaning of this hybrid name, invented by him.

Kat seemed absent-minded, exactly the attitude a girl should have when she feels a boy prefers her.

After a quick assessment, looking for anything feline or stellar in my little being, the blue man shifted his gaze to Kat, and then I was gone.

There were no more gardens, no more hills, no more White Spring. I don't know how it happened, but there were only the two of them, Kat and the blue man.

I was watching them as they looked at each other.

Kat didn't even blink, even though we often had competitions with her and she always blinked first.

I think they looked at each other for more than 10 seconds without either saying anything. He was the first to break this prolonged eye contact.

- MirKat , maybe I'll see you tonight on the road, she said, as if caressing my friend's face, also glancing at me.

He then set off down the road towards the stables, leaving behind winding wisps of smoke and dust.

-   You like it, Stellaro, and Kat took my hand,
pulling me towards the Russian [16] field surrounded by lilac glades, with immortelle.

"But he likes you," I teased.

Blue people fall in love with telluric girls and remain an enigma to cosmic ones, but no boy in the world was more important than our friendship.

Beyond the hills I completely forgot about the blue man ...

I would remember this meeting years later, like a story about running away from home.

Kat fell in love. Not with Vlad, but with Sebastian, Vlad's friend, a handsome and mysterious aviator from Bucharest, who had inherited her grandmother's house and was spending his vacation in our land.

We met Vlad and his friend in the rosehip park and stood on the ditch until the moon went into the clouds and it started to rain.

Vlad led me almost to the house. From behind the hedges, my father was watching... But his daughter was safe.

Where before she was always with me, after Sebastian's appearance, Kat found the village to be a boring place and nature to be fascinating.

He would wake up early in the morning and head over the hills carrying a backpack to Magura Zaverei, where he would meet Sebastian.

I could hear the roar of the motorcycle as they headed towards the forest.

One day I was at the top of La Păducel hill, the goats were grazing on our meadow, I was reading.

I heard a girl giggle.

In Dorache's field, the ears of corn moved mysteriously around an eye of living love.

It could be none other than Kat, the lover with bare breasts, which the man covered with poppies and cornflowers.

For Kat, teenage summer became summer in love .

One evening he came to the gate with his eyes filled with tears.

I asked her why she was crying, she didn't answer, but started crying pitifully.

I took her hand and walked onto the soccer field, followed by Lessie, a fluffy dog.

She sat on the grass, crouched.

Lessie was whimpering, as if she felt the girl's pain, and she was looking at us with those human eyes, with dog-like care, searching in our eyes for an unseen attacker to protect us from.

"She's gone," she said, shaken by spasms of crying. "She's gone tonight, suddenly and permanently."

I didn't understand anything.

"Did you break up?" I asked.

- I'll tell you tomorrow.

That's how Kat was.

- Did you fight? Tell me now.

She wiped her tears and looked at me. Kat was a beautiful girl with green eyes and ash-blond hair, she didn't look like any girl in the land.

Crying had turned her eyes gray, so deep had the sadness nestled in her soul.

- Are you upset that you broke up suddenly? Would you have preferred a slow breakup, like day and night?

- Ah... your wonderful philosophical torments... You don't understand, we didn't argue. He told me not to wait for him anymore and flew away.

Of course, flying was something Sebastian was very good at, he was an aviator.

I held her in my arms like a little sister.

I drove her to the road, watched her until she disappeared into the yard.

The next day we resumed our walks towards the Russian border.

- I cried until I fell asleep. Around 5 in the morning I heard the sound of a motorcycle, I went outside barefoot and ran down the road like a madwoman. I stood at the gate until morning. I had dew on my eyelashes and tears and a heart of stone , as my grandmother says... It started beating wildly when he crossed back to Roșiori, stopped and came to me. He told me that he was going to write to me, to justify himself.

Kat had so many words to say, so many feelings to explore, she who had previously mocked the idea of ​​love.

He spoke and plucked the lilac petals of the immortelle, as if he were expelling demons from a body full of sins.

- He has a relationship with a girl from Bucharest. She called him yesterday and told him she was pregnant. And you know, the worst part is not that he will be the father of her child. In the whirlwind of passion, I neglected…

"You... and you?" I shouted, as if a child were something terrifying. You told him, didn't you?"

- I didn't get to tell him, he left so quickly. He didn't kiss me, he didn't even touch me, and he didn't say goodbye like men in this area usually do when they take their leave. How can I tell him now? I'm thinking about not telling him, why would he care what I'm going through? But I'm going to need help. Maybe you have a midwife around here. I can't go home pregnant, my father would be devastated, and my mother...

Yes, for an abandoned girl, a child was something terrifying .

For Kat, a soul eager for life who loved light and zigzags so much, the fact that she had thrown herself into this complicated story did not mean an insurmountable obstacle.

It was far too early for an adventure with diapers and bottles, but the solution he was thinking of was a thin line towards the tragic.

You fell in love and it seems to you that you have discovered a wonderful way to run to the moon and drip like rain, as it used to happen to me in my childhood - pure joy.

The chains with which love binds you to a soulmate should not be ghosts, nor regrets, but threads of light.

This Lilliputian train that is your love story is about to derail into the crater of smoking, useless objects when you love and are no longer loved.

You wait for him, while you drink tea with bated breath, but he doesn't come.

He won't come again.

Now that the desire has subsided, it has become invisible and you don't even get a chaste kiss and a goodbye.

The god of hate is spiritually impotent, you must learn the lesson of forgiveness, abandoned girl...

 

 

 

 

 

Diaper with love

To be a woman...

Few are those who go beyond the surface and look beyond the shell.

Sebastian hadn't passed.

He had loved Kat very much, but he had left her.

One summer evening, before the end of the vacation, he had written to her and they had met in Roșiori. Sheltered under a gazebo for a short while, after holding her tightly, as when you say goodbye forever, he had told her that he was going to marry the girl from Bucharest and had moved away, as if the closeness had burned him.

Kat didn't stop him.

For a long time she still heard the sound of his footsteps on the rain-soaked, steaming alley that was filled with pigeons, until he was lost in the distance.

He had planted a new life in her and left her with a longing for love.

The future had in store for him amazing life surprises, in which he would find himself. A child...

- See, he looked for you, so he loves you! It would be better if you got married, I had found the saving idea.

- He loved me as a lover, but some stories last less than others. Marriage complicates things even more, Stellaro. Anyway, he didn't ask me out… Only in novels and movies do marriages happen after a summer of passion.

- In this area, having a child is a common reason for marriage. You can leave it if you don't like the marriage.  

- You talk too much, silly child… Ask your mother tomorrow if she knows any embryo killers.

The way Kat spoke gave me goosebumps.

As much as she had been in love all summer, she was determined to reach the edges of fatality.

I didn't dare tell my mother.

I thought every night about how to help her, but I was a child myself.

And Kat cried every night, crying heartbreakingly from longing, worry, and longing.

Autumn had come.

The fate of the enigmatic creature living in my friend's abdomen seemed to be heading towards imminent death!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Delusional images

It's winter and it's snowing in big flakes.

I swim in loose pajamas, I watch from the bed through the window as the snow settles on the trees, as it puts caps on the electricity poles and hats on the cars in the parking lot.

The sparrows dart through the air and sit on the windowsill, feeding on the crumbs that I took care to put out for the little ones.

I hear the tinkling of wind chimes, the sound seems to come from far away, from a place where my memories are drowsy.

It's not easy for me to move from one season of life to another, but I'm going to do it, I'm not in a hurry.

There were a few "midwives" in the village who gave injections, assisted in childbirth, or "pulled" women (I never understood why, after an induced abortion, women said they "pulled themselves").

There were also women with a "light hand" who straightened bones and set dislocated limbs... Others cast spells, driving away evil spirits.

There were also those who had tied themselves forever to the "iacacui" (the devil) and who cast spells for marriage, for breaking marriages, for bringing adulterous men home from their mistresses' beds, or for   punishment and revenge.

The mother didn't even want to hear about the abortion challenge.

Now that an adult knew what Kat was going through, she was afraid her grandmother would find out.

But her mother urged her to contact Sebastian and her parents.

Kat refused, she was restless, thoughtful.

Delirious images raced across his retina.

- I can't look for him, he's getting ready for the wedding with his chosen one. I'd rather look for a way to die. Should I choose a train that rushes at me? Should I go to the mountains and let myself fall into the void?

I was getting more and more afraid as she said words that referred to death, but she was my friend and I had to be brave, to encourage her.

- It's not fair to limit your life and see only darkness. You loved and were loved, you were happy, but your story ended with him leaving for a girl he loved before you. Besides the fact that he has no idea that you are pregnant.

I rejected violence and the way my imagination mutilated his body or drained it of life made me shudder.

In the first nights after Sebastian left, Kat had nightmares, she would wake up at night, cry, then fall into a sleep from which she wouldn't wake up until the evening, afraid of facing reality again.

Autumn was approaching, and melancholy and tolerance of abandonment made her gentle.

She missed him, a longing numbed by the thought that he might come back.

That small, secret voice that I called my "guardian angel" whispered to me that my friend would pull through somehow.

I was talking to him, he was looking at me, but the game of listening was tiring.

The revolt had taken a crazy trajectory, and her soul had found a hiding place, however far away.

She was no longer the Kat from the beginning of the summer, restless and carefree.

One morning I found her at the gate.

Lessie hadn't barked, she had curled up at her feet.

- You woke up early. Look, I'm leaving. Tușa Rădița from Roșiori knows, she realized by the swollen abdomen. She gave me money and sent me to her daughter in Bucharest, who is a nurse. She knows some doctors...

With sleep-bleeding eyes, I could still see her tears. She left for the bus stop.

"When are you coming back?" I asked with a shiver of terrifying lucidity, as it could be the last time I would look at my friend.

"I'm writing to you!" he said and ran towards the road. 

Dear Mir, Verișoara in Bucharest was nowhere to be found. No one lived at the address I had received from the Rădița family.

Earlier, I was walking down the streets, wandering around, and I thought I saw him.

I refuse to hate him, even though images of him chaining up another girl run through my mind and hell breaks loose in my heart, making me unrecognizable.

I'm still undecided what to do, whether to stay in my life or look for a train, an abyss, sinful suicidal thoughts, whatever you call them.

In Cișmigiu, I saw couples in love, pregnant women, women with babies, and for the first time I touched my abdomen with my palm, and the way I felt afterwards led me to make a decision.

I'm not going back to the Hamlet.

I have to face my fear and shame and go home.

I know my parents will be devastated, but I have nowhere to go for help in this city. Most of us have nowhere to go.

I'll be a teenage mother, I'll go to high school and college at night.

My heart aches, but it was such a beautiful summer!

It's wonderful to fall in love.

Don't run away from love just because I was abandoned!

What happened to me happened to many other girls, some luckier than me.

In the end, Sebastian was just a scorching lover, a   passerby in my life who left a mark.  

Please don't worry, as you usually do.

I'll write to you again as soon as I get home.

Your reckless friend, Kat.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tragic embryo

Last night, when I wrote about Kat, feelings and thoughts were moving inside me, I felt like I was living between two worlds.

My woman's soul had laid on the floor, from where it looked into the eyes of adolescent turmoil.

They would have poked each other like mischievous goats, but they didn't touch.

That was my longing for me, for me and Kat.

Today I must quickly move, in my story, over a time whose retelling awakens in me that flow of painful memories, stirs up emotions and makes me have a lump in my throat.

 

Sighisoara.

The dignified beauty of the medieval buildings, the monuments, the artistic richness, the color of this fortress, the music, the life that unfolded in the streets, all seemed like wonders to Kat.

He had arrived home...

- But I see that your vacation in Cătun suited you, no joke! her mother teased her, as soon as she opened the door. You look like a stuffed duck. Did you bring anything from the country? Some eggs, some nuts, some fried patiences?

- Mom, we need to talk.

- I don't have time right now. The house is a mess, take care of it a little. I haven't had time... I never have...

Her mother was a hairdresser.

She always looked impeccable, bleached hair, long nails, bright smile.

She was beautiful, didn't show her age, and had a lover, Rudy, the militiaman.

- Mom, I'm pregnant, Kat told her, and the woman pulled the handle, slammed the door and approached with a monstrous mask instead of a face.

- I thought you said you were pregnant!

- I thought about killing myself, but then...

- Aha. And what did you think, that you would cause us great suffering if you killed yourself, didn't you? But you thought wrong and he pushed her hard, and Kat fell to the floor.

- I need your help, mom.

The girl's soul was also down, bitter.

- I'll help you, how can I not help you? You'll have an abortion, but you won't bear fruit for me! Why doesn't he marry you? Or don't you know whose it is?

Hearing the screams from the hallway, her father came with his hands outstretched in bewilderment.

- Edith, what is it, dear?...

Catching sight of Kat, he smiled, moving closer to hug her.

- Hug her like this, just be careful not to let her stab you with the fetus she has in her belly or vomit on your shoulder, because you stink!

"What are you saying?… Is it true? Are you pregnant?" her father asked through the fumes of alcohol.

Kat was crying, slumped against the wall, sobbing.

He touched the cord of the lamp on the dresser with his elbow, which fell over, breaking with a noise.

Her mother was adamant.

- Pick up the pieces, clean up, then move on.

- Please help me, please, please!... I'm scared!

- When you messed up, it wasn't your fault. Now get your asses kicked!

The woman left, slamming the door. She returned a minute later, looking at her husband with a murderous look, shaking the keys and speaking in a low, hissing voice:

- You wanted her to know her roots, you sent her to your mother, because she was safe, she aped him. And now she's coming to you with her belly in her mouth. Give her money - your money, she specified. When I come back tonight, I won't see her here anymore... Look for Mrs. Agnes's phone number in the address book, call her and send the innocent young lady a package , the woman emphasized the words ironically.

Mrs. Agnes was associated with a nurse who specialized in clandestine abortions.

Kat's mother had been his client.

Her father was retreating, muttering in his stammering way.

He gave him money, his salary for a month.

- Dad, dad!... what if I die?

- Come on, eat something, we'll figure it out...

The phone rang from the living room.

- Did your mother know about you having a heart attack? Her hands were shaking. Radita called me, she admitted her to Roșiori.

- Heart attack? Kat screamed. No, she didn't know... Poor mother !

- I have to go to the train station. Come with me, so your mother won't find you when she comes.

But Kat chose to stay in Sighișoara, too tired after the trip and eager to get rid of the pregnancy, so she could resume her normal life, school, friendships... As if things could still be like before!

Mrs. Agnes, a petite and fickle woman, finding out what trouble Kat was in, called Mrs. Marta, a specialist in "illicit acts."

The murderous ritual was excruciating.

A small tube inserted into the cervix, through which the midwife slipped a cocktail of saline and alcohol to the little being.

Kat felt the burn of alcohol in her abdomen and an icy cold in her soul.

She went through terrible torment trying to get rid of the pregnancy and desperately calling out for Sebastian, with sweat on her face and neck, with the cold, getting colder, enveloping her from all sides and with revolt shaking toxically in her thoughts, while her abdomen was torn apart by pain.

She remained in the room writhing, crying into her pillow and wondering what other degrading things she would have to experience to be master of her life again.

"Don't cry, my dear," Mrs. Agnes encouraged her. "You will spread your legs many times for pleasure after you are free from this burden."

How could he have anticipated future pleasures? Was the love of the summer worth the suffering he was enduring now, with longing in his chest and that hose through which he was sending death into his body? The tragic embryo was going to perish the next day.

He fell asleep. He didn't feel any pain, just numbness. The burning persisted...

He got up and went out into the kitchen, where it smelled of lovage, Mrs. Agnes was preparing soup.

She put the steaming soup in a bowl, but when she was about to sit down, a sharp pain made her wince.

- Stay lying down, my dear. I'll call Marta right away.

There was a storm outside. The rain was beating against the window, thunder and lightning were flashing. He felt sick and shivered from the cold.

He moved with difficulty, pulled the blanket over his feet, then one of the women administered a sedative to him.

He fell asleep, caressing the wounded Moghaldea from her fear of life.

A song he used to sing in fifth grade came to mind:

Rain, Rain,

Go away;

Come again,

April Fool's Day.

- He'd better sleep, said Mrs. Marta. We'll give him another dose tomorrow morning. Did he give you the money?

Mrs. Agnes stood up and took the blue papers out of her purse.

- She didn't have any more, her parents chased her away. Sterilize the syringe well tomorrow morning.

- Don't worry, none of my hands died.

When Kat woke up, her thirst was burning.

No one to give him a cup of water.

When she went with him to the cabin in the heart of the forest, he used to ask her: "Do you want water, coffee or something?" he would smile in his slightly distant way and pull her close, kissing her, until they slipped into their fantasy world.

"Or something else"... How could her soul smile at this memory, at such moments, despite the ordeal her body was going through?

She touched her abdomen. The little life that had pulsed there, beneath her heart as a beloved but abandoned girl, was extinguished.

He got up to go to the kitchen but felt a tearing in his abdomen, then slipped into a blue hum.

Rain, Rain,

Go away...

Voices came from all directions, drawing her into a network of twisted passages, but they did not make her decide to kneel.

He was moving forward...

The only thing visible was a brown skull surrounded by candles, on a golden pedestal. It looked like one of those places of silence and peace, of keeping secrets, where the litany has full power.

A handful of snakes in the shadows were pushing her back, they weren't snakes, they were doubts.

She looked over her shoulder... So much beauty! A gentle voice, resembling her grandmother's, spoke to her:

- You are here for a reason. 

- A reason... a reason...

Her lips whispered: Sebastian… Sebastian … even before they left her mind, as she soared into the world she had barely stepped into, with cold eyes, with her breath blazing, with the howl of the wind roaring in her thoughts.

You see a portal, accelerate and fly into another dimension, you enter an area from which, most likely, you can no longer return. The resistance force to sliding into nothingness diminishes. And you disappeared who knows where! To hear that high, beautiful, sad sound, the Choir of Angels, to touch abysses of light that will cure you of the illusion of life. But the portal was like a spring. The faster it became, to pass and break away, the more life, tightly gripped by it, stuck it to the ground.

The destroyed embryo could not be expelled.

For Kat, more hours of agony followed.

Screaming for help...

- Oh, God, Help me! Mother, mother, where are you? Someone help me!... Help me, good people!... Don't let me die!... I only loved, I didn't kill anyone. Mrs. Agnes... Mrs. Marta... I beg you, take me to the hospital.!.. Oh, God, I have done a great sin!... Oh, God, my child, my child!... Forgive me, God!

And the two women would give him sleeping pills, then whisper in low voices in the kitchen. Finally they called Edith.

"Criminals!" she screamed, then called Rescue and the Militia.

Aware that they would clog the prison, they confessed. But Kat's life could not be saved: infection, sepsis , death .

Rain, Rain…

Memory brings to the surface of my consciousness those memories that take me to the land where a fragment of a soul full of clearings remained, where Kat existed and enjoyed life.

When I learned about this tragedy, I had left my hometown and enrolled in a high school in the capital.

The day Kat died, her grandmother also died.

 

 

 

Sequences from an imaginary life…

I so wanted Kat to survive, and for her destiny to come full circle, grabbing life with both hands, with vigorous fingers!

So much so that I made up this story.

But how do I make her live?

I don't have this power.

No matter how hard I try, my story leads Kat down the relentless path of non-being.

Not before giving birth to a miracle.

You, the Reader, will understand...

 

Tired and disappointed, Kat went to the North Train Station, bought a ticket to Roșiori de Vede, and returned to Cătun to say goodbye to her grandmother and me.

It dropped in rate.

The customers at the cooperative came outside, curious to see who was coming from Russia [17] .

The cooperative was an important place for locals during our childhood.

At a time when there was no electricity in the Hamlet, people received rations of oil and lamp gas.

Uncle Tudor, the salesman at the cooperative, was pouring gas through a metal funnel into canisters, his hands were oily, and the puddles around him had small oil spots that sparkled like rainbows.

People were looking at Kat with curiosity, and the women on the road wanted to know everything: "Where have you been? What's it like in Bucharest? What to do there? Did you take the metro? What did you take?"... and the like.

He walked up the hill to school.

The house was not yet in sight.

How strongly he had become attached to this place!...

From behind, the clatter of the hooves of a horse and cart could be heard, and he retreated to the plateau.

A scream was heard.

How violently his heart lurched!

Sebastian jumped up briskly, smiled meaninglessly and seemed embarrassed.

From the cart, the forester grinned under his shaggy mustache, waved his hand, and left with a shrill whistle, to the cadence of his hooves whose echo seemed to be heard on the other side of the village.

My mother had told me what a woman goes through when she has an induced abortion.

I had waited several times with anxiety and tears in my eyes for her to return from Roșiori, after miscarriages because she didn't want to have any more children.

"And if I don't come back, you take care of each other, be united."

I ruled out the idea that my mother could have lost her life because another life within her was being annihilated.

She was religious, but she couldn't afford to have more than three children.

He went to church, fasted, received communion, and confessed, so that these "mortal" sins would be forgiven.

I asked her if she could avoid such situations.

She couldn't... A married woman goes through this too.

In this land, few couples probably used contraceptive methods.

In families where love had been replaced by politeness, wives were not in danger of having children or abortions, the bed was cold, and their men marveled at the white thighs of other women, willing to be affectionate, who knew how to make them happy and who, most often, did not work in a collective, did not have rough hands, smelled of perfume and cared for their skin with Doina milk.

However, on the verge of turning 40, when Dr. Sotirescu refused to operate on her for another abortion, the mother had another child.

She was whining, considered herself old, and definitely didn't have the patience to start over with taking care of a baby.

"I'll raise him," I offered, excited that I would have a new toy.

- What do you know about raising a child, my Maria?

- I'll take care of him, you'll see, I promised, assuming his care and love for life.

That's how Nana was born.

He had oriental eyes and a goatee, the family emblem.

I loved her from the first moment.

I rocked her to my chest, fed her, changed her diapers, sang to her, and when she grew up I taught her everything I... was .

Kat came to me in the evening, Lessie didn't bark, but she whined with joy.

I got out quickly, the bike wheels still moving.

With what emotion I held her in my little arms.

I looked at her abdomen, waiting for confirmation that she had lost the pregnancy, although I doubted it because she didn't seem weak or down, like my mother did after every abortion.

- It's still here, she smiled, touching her abdomen. Tușa Rădița sent me to an address where no one answered. Or, maybe they got scared in the meantime and preferred not to help me anymore. I slept in the Gara de Nord and started my journey here.

- Sebastian looked for you right after you left. I ran to Rădița's house, asked her for her daughter's phone number, but I couldn't find her at home, she was away in Beciu.

- See how things happen? Kat said, smiling. One day, just one day. And I was gone... And maybe, what would have happened to me, would have brought death to me. Who arranges such a turn of events?

- Mom says it's God.

- Your mother is right, Stella. Come to Páducel, on the hill we are closer to God.

He picked up the bike and leaned it against the wall.

"Why don't you invite me to the mountains, we'd be even closer," I teased her and ran towards the hill, laughing, holding hands.

Lessie followed us grinning, her tail curled up.

We were still children, still innocent!

In Cătun there was a belief that once a girl makes love to a boy, she ceases to be pure.

My vision of life, love, friendship, was forming.

- They are simple people, Kat said. That's

 what their ancestors said, but things will

 change here too. They marry for life, even

 though they have nothing in common and

 spend their lives making each other

 miserable. The men drink, curse at them or

 hit them in front of the children, and they endure and stay and give everyone the impression that they are doing well. Why shouldn't they? They are in the world, they have children, they have a purpose. Some marriages in the Hamlet are very similar to the teams . Harnessed in the harness of obligations, they are bound by habit and the desire to move on, to keep what they have and even to do more if they can, through honest work or through thefts from the Colectiv. They prefer an unhappy life to embarrassing themselves by letting their screams be heard. I cry silently, women who have run away from home hide at night in their cowl of cobs, beaten and chased away by their crazy husbands, and during the day they go to the witches to cast spells for harmony in the family.

Lessie jerked and ran into the field. I got up, she had seen a rabbit and was running, lazy... I called her, I ran after her. I hated to see a torn bunny. Lessie was obedient and faithful, I yelled at her and she turned. The dog then sat down at my feet, dissatisfied, looking at us with human eyes.

- Leave the bunnies alone, if you don't want to join the club of those abandoned by Mir, Kat aped to Lessie.

Hearing the name of her little owner, the dog pricked up one ear, which she then left limp.

He didn't have to fight dragons or bark at any uninvited guests, just look at these two girls, bewildered by life.

Lessie took a nap.

One of the girls, we won't say which one, had a sleepy voice...

- Love is not just a meadow for lovers' fantasies, Kat spoke again... Sin is in thought. Love does not defile, even if it happens before or outside of marriage. When it is mutual it is heaven, but when you love and are not loved, hell breaks loose. 

She told me about her meeting with the aviator.

- He got out of the carriage, came to my side but everyone was looking at us. He told me he was waiting for me at Magura Zaverei. I took my bike and flew away happily… He was waiting for me under the storm. How much peace this meeting gave me! I closed my eyes to keep from crying. My fingers became eyes, I felt like a warm glow the space between what I couldn't see and his trembling. He was caressing me, let me love you , in the end, all the secrets start to burn the tips of my fingers. When he found out I was carrying his child, he scolded me, guiltily:

- I didn't know, you didn't say anything.

- When are you getting married?

- There will be no more wedding. She lied to me, she wasn't pregnant. We broke up. I love you, don't you understand?

He appeared there on the road, to prevent a drama and Kat from passing away. A month later, Kat and Sebastian got married, and she transferred to a high school in Bucharest, to study at night.

 

My dear Mir,

There are still a few months until the deadline.

I look like a giant turd, but a happy turd.

Sebastian and I love each other and we do well in our little household.

Our home is the most beautiful place in the universe, because this is where my love lives. The restless being that grows inside me makes me cry and laugh.

It nudges in a gentle or playful way, as if it were teaching us a secret alphabet, establishing a connection, playing with us.

I'm sure many boys at high school in Bucharest will like you.

I can't wait to see you again, to tell me how many hearts you've broken.

Your happy-go-lucky friend,

Kat.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

High school students from Mihai Bravu

The "Mihai Bravu" High School in Bucharest was the only one that accepted to enroll students from the province without the approval of the county education inspectorates.

It was understandable, he trained workers - turners, plumbers, electricians, foundries - for the factories and construction sites of the homeland.

The dormitory was full of noisy girls and boys.

At the opening of the school year, we were greeted by the technical director, Gogea.

His body looks like a bean stalk that still bears the bean that feeds the plant: with its neck twisted to one side, resting on one shoulder – in a tormenting way.

But he had a special gift for convincing us that high school years shouldn't be "wasted" by escaping from the dormitory to go to the Cenacle Flacăra, he would threaten us with expulsion.

This didn't stop us, we just got more cunning.

I was tricking Murgă, the night teacher, by making arrangements with the girls downstairs.

One or another of them had a fever , there was a commotion, while we climbed out the windows and escaped.

I lived in the dorm with a bunch of girls, in room 39, a double room.

A buzzing sound with a Moldovan accent kept ringing in my ears.

I didn't understand how I had ended up there.

In the hustle and bustle of the days, meeting so many new people, I stopped worrying about my friend, Kat.

On March 1st, he visited me at high school.

It came with snowdrops and we walked through narrow streets, towards the Gloria cinema, under the bluish tremor of spring, by the light of the lanterns.

We had so much to say!

She was happy.

Rain was born on a splendid April day.

Beautiful and noisy, a wonder.

But Kat...

Kat died giving birth to the little one.

Kat wasn't just a girl, she was a girl as big as a world, a world that was emptied of life, and this is just a story I made up, because the past cannot be changed.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Blind Pianist

I used to visit Bella's uncle, Zeno, with her.

A blind pianist who wasn't always blind.

He described to us the colors of his childhood and how he imagined notes as colors.

His white eyes were smiling.

The piano chords could be heard from the street.

He sang us Chopin's Nocturne and told us about the love between Chopin and the impetuous George Sand.

As he told the story, he became more animated, a bizarre smile spread across his face, and his notes became bolder.

I imagined two beautiful lovers, he - fragile, she - unpredictable, and I secretly hoped that the story would end miserably, to give myself a reason to become a little sad and then try to change the ending when I got home, in my maiden bed.

Chopin, sick with tuberculosis, the stormy George who, from the pages of Zeno's magazines, seemed not to have been a beauty, and their resounding breakup created tangles to be unraveled in secret. Zeno had a funny neighbor - she was a ballerina and her name was Oxana.

He sent glances at Perugia as if from beyond the world.

She visited him in the evenings, he played the piano for her, sometimes she cried softly.

She was in love with a man who didn't love her.

"He flew straight into my heart and doesn't want to leave ," Oxana lamented. S

She was our childhood, she ruffled our hair and predicted amazing love stories for us. She danced to Zeno's music - she had a purple dress, which fell fluidly on her body, a twig, grace and flight.

She would stop singing and I would describe her as she looked, disheveled, with bright eyes, with lively hair, like an extension of the dance - it had become a game for us.

He showed us albums, old magazines.

Who did he resemble?

I pointed to a creature wrapped in a cocoon-like shroud, in a wild movement. Isadora Duncan.

She retaliated, niet, niet and broke away, twisting in the air with gazelle legs, between confusion and grace, a lightning spiral, then she stopped, leafed through the magazines and stopped at Maia Plisetskaya.

Zeno then told us about the love between Isadora and Esenin, about the tragedy of their lives. Oxana told us about Maya Plisetskaya, the Russian ballerina who also went through tragedy, whose theatrical and sensual style of dancing conquered the world.

This is how I learned, before listening to them on the radio or reading them, love stories from all times.

I returned home thoughtful, happy, and a little in love with love.

A thought would come swirling and leave quietly, I needed a nudge.

I shared it with Zeno, to create something beautiful, lasting, something that doesn't exist yet.

Everything in its own time, child, don't rush to grow up, he said.

On a blue winter morning, crossing the city with the rumble of frozen trams, blowing white clouds of warm air, we arrived at Zeno, where Bella had moved.

The piano sighed, the fingers fell limp, listless.

Instead of his usual cheerfulness, he greeted me with a sadness that felt like the end of the world: Oxana committed suicide.

She, so full of beauty, whose vitality was like a triumph, and whose smile an unspeakable spell?

And now... a memory gone into nothingness, resigned?

In the spring I visited him again.

Above the piano is an altar with flickering lights and a naive drawing of a dragonfly ballerina.

Lily pads, everywhere.

The piano fell silent, only his soft voice spoke of a girl who had ravaged his soul and then left.

He had started to forget things, and most of all he was afraid of forgetting her.

- Children, if you ever want to create something that conveys emotion, close your eyes! Outline the dream, feel the horizons of your creation! Embellish it with life, send a living flow from your heart and make it live! Then show it to the world! The light in it will make other lights rise. To look at people from close up or from afar if you can, to look at them from inside their hearts, but also from the outside! To feel the urge to offer sympathy in their place, your sympathy, then, like a recoil, to withdraw it, a game, a beginning of chaos.

When I left it was night.

The distant sky seemed painted with small celestial creatures: the Moon, the stars, and Orion, the constellation of evenings in... January.

To be alone in the cold moonlight and realize that there is something beyond everything that has no boundaries.

I haven't seen Zeno again, but since then, when I want to write, I close my eyes first.

Then...

 

We leave behind what awaits us

I hadn't broken any hearts, but a miracle had sprouted in my soul...

He was handsome, mysterious, with soft, gray eyes, and he didn't really pay attention to me.

I knew quite a few girls who, I don't know how they did it, but they became friends very quickly with the boys they liked, in no time !

However, it wasn't easy for me to get close to Blu.

One evening I was invited to a party held in the Automation room.

Fane, the boys' teacher, also participated.

He would betray Zița with a more impetuous student.

I danced with Blu, I danced only once, and the thrill of closeness was unlike anything I had known before.

A world from another world, where a love was budding...

We started walking, making circles around the high school.

Icicles were falling, and when I slipped, he held my hand.

But Blu wanted to be conquered, and I was shy, so with the melting of the ice, our walks stopped.

 

 

 

rose

Innocence has a unique, rare, gentle scent.

The smell of human decay is present in all textures of skin, fabrics, past and future .

The mornings began with the squeaky voice of a rabid teacher, Madame Bulubenki, whom we nicknamed Burla.

The small and raisin Bessarabian girl knocked with her key on the locker room at 5:30: "Wake up, girls."

A dwarf nightmare, dressed in black, with dental plaque that looked like it would erupt in revolt when it got angry.

However, the little lady didn't scare me as much as Madame Murgă, the night teacher.

Strong, chubby, with permanent hair, a gorgeous mustache, and although she was no more than 30 years old, she dressed in gray clothes to appear thinner.

One evening, during a round of the reading room, her football-like legs stopped behind my chair.

I was writing my sad emotions in my journal.

Blu liked Trandafira and there was nothing to be done.

The creepy creature snatched my diary, I ran after it and shot as hard as I could, in vain.

She called me into her office, read the written lines with emphasis, then tore the notebook and threw the fragments of paper on the floor.

I rushed to gather them, to reconstruct the diary, but it stopped me.

“It's too early to dream about love like in novels,” she told me and pushed me firmly towards the door, convinced that she had taught me an important lesson.

I returned to the room humiliated and pressed myself against the window.

The window was my favorite place to cry. There weren't many places to cry without someone seeing you and then reporting you.

That night I talked to Cioruța. She was a mysterious girl, brunette with green eyes, with a look that always seemed liquid, distant. She had a mole on her left cheek, and when she laughed she made adorable dimples. A beautiful and intelligent gypsy girl, for whom the bears had plotted a tragic fate.

With our noses pressed against the window, we talked about love, pure love and betrayed love.

She talked and cried, she had been through love, and the burning and desolation had left painful marks on my little friend.

He was just telling me that all the honey of male gestures has sex as its sole purpose, when Blu and Trandafira appeared in the yard, returning from the city.

I was looking at their silhouettes, they came closer and he kissed her. I was jealous of the girl, I would have killed all my illusions to be in her place.

There was also Madam Ziţa, the day teacher. Beautiful, elegant, with a huge braided ponytail, red-haired, very fashionable , who was in love with Fane, the boys' teacher.

He would turn a blind eye to our little teenage quirks and give us nice lectures on moral topics, at least once a month.

When Blu left, he gave me a photo that I always looked at in the innocent way of my adolescence.

The emotion that inspired me is now vague, but the memory of this love will always accompany me, no matter what!

"A burning firefly...

Look! I wanted to shout"...

I was shy and a little scared by the crowd on the streets, in the trams, in the metro. I visited with a colleague, a lady of about 35 years old, her name was Adela. She was brunette, beautiful, with hypnotic eyes and loved a firefly . This is how she pampered her lover, David, who had rented a room in her apartment.

Adela had an older husband, a major in the army, and two children who had painted the walls, sometimes showing talent in harmonizing different forms, and her mother was indulgent with them, suggesting that it was a form of expression of emotions and freedom. Her husband, dry and bald, was apathetic. He turned a blind eye to the idyll that was unfolding in his house. The woman was impetuous, no question. Her kitchen looked disastrous, there was a saucepan of wilted cabbage on the stove. Cockroaches were swarming everywhere. The sour smell and cigarette smoke stung the breath. She made coffee (a bit of a nuisance, right?) and started talking to us. She would have committed suicide if the firefly hadn't appeared in her house and in her life. Books scattered on the sofa, the typewriter on the bedside table. She was bohemian, fiery, indifferent to the needs of her small family. But she cared more about David than her family. Sometimes she wrote sad poems in which the thorns of the roses painfully scratched her arteries and the poison came from the leakage of the blue gaze of the firefly that was leaving her. That kind of love had been an escape for her from the loveless story that was her family life. From her I heard this sparkling haiku, whose author is unknown to me: “ A burning firefly… Look! I wanted to shout. But I was alone .” This meeting made a strong impression on me.

I saw Adela again after many years. She had grown old, she was still beautiful but her eyes were dull. She made an effort to remember who I was. She invited me to the Dragonfly Cafe, she liked to tell stories. She had become a widow and her children had gone to Canada. 

"Are you still in love with the firefly ?" I asked her, amused.

- David! You know, he died 20 years ago.

I shivered. The vibrant voice of my youth told me the story of the firefly's death . 

- David lived with us for a few years, then moved into an attic, near the University. We met every Thursday, Lovejoy fondled me . Time is different now, for me Thursday no longer existed, an unseen force erased from the weekly calendar this day with a sweet core, with the aroma of the weekend. There will always be moments in the world baptized with names of joy and expectation for lovers who meet on certain days.

He began to cry. He continued in a low, slightly hoarse voice that was very reminiscent of old age.

- No, I can't control my emotions. When someone experiences moments like those - like the Thursday before the autumn equinox, their mind stays on the place where the horror unfolded. I was watching him from the attic window where we were secretly making love, he was walking on the zebra crossing and looking at me, we shook hands, then something happened, in the blink of an eye he was gone, a car erased the entire image. I started writing him letters, but do angels receive letters? Letters from the mind are more beautiful... Did I bore you?

He didn't wait for my answer.

- I have to tell someone this and I have no one left. When you've lost someone who gave meaning to life and you know something that no one else knows, who witnesses a tragic sequence of moments, how they looked, waving, then, just a hunched and destroyed body, with crushed and faceless hands, that separates you from life or leaves you to live a life without life. I haven't prayed anymore, but if I had to, I would only ask this: give me, God, Thursdays back!…

We broke up and we both knew we would never see each other again.

The good lady and lucidity did not have a very good relationship.

Fireflies…

Lights that go out by searching for the brilliance of other lights. The sublime of the firefly is the search for light, since it does not have the power to generate it... And the discreet charm of its tragedy is that it either finds it, or confuses it and it is fatal to it, but I have also seen happy fireflies.

 

Cioruta, jade eyes

We only care about the evils of the world as news, because they don't affect us directly.

When frantic seconds flow through us, we forget about everything that has tested us, this is the gift that God has given us, a kind of rebirth. A light mixed with hope.

Stop me from making you suffer, body!

 

Vacation without Kat!

We were retracing our routes with Lessie, the places seemed dry, the wheat was no longer full of poppies and cornflowers, the stars, at night, no longer played with my eyes.

I read all the books my mother had borrowed from the library.

She would go to the Russian garden with me, I wouldn't pick immortelle anymore, I would just look at them.

I was sitting with my head in my mother's lap while she told me stories about "the heart" and "the Hamlet" and played with my hair.

When I returned to Bucharest, my colleagues told me that Cioruța, like my friend Kat, died as a result of an induced abortion.

Before her imminent death from septicemia, she had swallowed poison, as a last spasm of manifesting the will of a destroyed being.

She did not seek help from a doctor, she died alone, in agony.

Before she was buried in a village in Moldova, someone called us to the vigil.

The life had left her, and the deformed creature lying in the coffin bore no resemblance to the graceful girl I knew.

They had crudely applied her makeup: bright, sloppy carmine that failed to cover the craters formed by death on her rigid lips, strident blue on her eyelids.

Her eyes had died anyway much later than the time her soul had begun to struggle in the suffering of a degrading existence.

A few months after Cioruța's death, another girl, Iuliana, a victim of clandestine abortion, was found in a pool of blood in the bathroom of the high school's girls' dormitory, after standing under the hot water jet.

The principal called a picket in the schoolyard to support the idea of ​​chastity in high school. The murmur among the students turned into a riot when Burlă proposed that all the students undergo gynecological examinations the next day.

A twelfth grade student came out into the square and asked:

- Why can't women freely choose to abandon an unwanted pregnancy?

- Because it's a shame, someone said...

- Interruption of pregnancy is against the law, stated Director Voiculescu.

"My mother died last week from an abortion! It's a criminal law!" the brave girl cried.

At that moment she was pulled, pushed, and snatched by several mysterious boys, who were not students of the school, and the square closed.

She had criticized "Ceaușescu's pro-natalist policy," but because the student was an Olympian in chemistry, the high school administration intervened, attributing extenuating circumstances to her: she was depressed after losing her mother.

She was transferred to another high school...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A time of incompletion

Autumn had come.

The tragedy of Cioruța's death made the beginning of autumn sad despite the warm sun that enveloped the city every day.

Until one beautiful September day when I met love at the Roman Arena.

I spotted him right away, he was dancing on the dance floor with a brunette. He looked a lot like Blu.

- Years, look!...

My friend followed my gaze, took my hand, and we headed towards sector H, because that was the only way we would have passed him.

I was limping. I had a small accident at the Girueta Factory, a bushing had fallen on my left leg.

My leg was like a well-leavened bun, and my classmates were making fun of my awkwardness, imitating the technology teacher, who would show us a piece of metal and wave it in front of each of us: "that's a bushing, my little one"!

The teacher had a lot of malicious thoughts, no matter how nice he was. In his youth he had been a boxer and had killed an opponent during a match; many said he was crazy, but he was a good teacher.

When I reached the bottom of the stairs to sector H, the boy looked at me.

I was looking intensely, from above, at Duran-Duran 's blue blouse, at his hair and... he turned and looked at me.

I was so shocked that I looked down: gray steps, seed shells, a pale leg, scratches from the key on the plastic of the seats...

I recorded the sequence of images but was deaf to my friend's whispers.

"He's coming towards us."

A nudge woke me from my reverie. I looked at her, not understanding.

"Năuco, he's two steps away from you, don't look."

I looked, how else, just for a second.

"Maybe he's coming to you," I said.

My friend laughed. Her faded jeans and white espadrilles stopped next to me.

I stood up and looked at him boldly. He was tall, handsome, with blue eyes, sensual lips. He held out his hand: "Do you dance?"

I put my fingers in his palm, but I refused to dance. "I had an accident" - and showed him the bun. He continued to hold my hand.  

- I'm Dandu. Should I stay?

- Stay. I am Mir.

During the movie Amsterdam Pursuit that was playing on the giant screen at the Arena, my left shoulder was gripped - I will never forget the thrill !

The heavy, vivid scent of the desire to cling to him like a presence, like a gentle fire, made me dizzy.

As if he heard my thoughts, he gently hugged me close to him.

It started to rain. Autumn rain, autumn emotion in ochre and saffron, golden, delicious, whistling words from an old parchment.

- Will I see you tomorrow?

- That would be a nice gift. I'm turning 19 tomorrow.

When I got home, everything calmed down inside me until only the gaze remained.

My eyes watched the silence that spread across the alley as he walked away.

            Love, a miracle since the beginning of time.

Brown-eyed trouble

I stayed up late that night.

The spires of the reseau glowed in the darkness, I was talking to Ani, talking about emotions.

"I feel like I've met true love!" I exclaimed.

- You have no way of knowing, Mir. You are innocent and shy, you have not yet experienced any story with tumultuous gestures, but it is possible that with this boy you will discover that your nature hides great storms. You should know that he noticed you as soon as we entered the Arena.

- Maybe he thought I was someone else too...

- This can't be a coincidence. I feel like an adventurous destiny is being mapped out now.

He was laughing at me.

I reached out and tickled her, to punish her for teasing.

I unplugged the makeshift firewood stove and continued thinking about the meeting with Dandu.

I resumed the dialogue, inventing more inspired words than the ones I had said. Sleep, a good respite, did not wake me up. When I woke up, I was still in love.

In the evening he waited for me at the subway with red roses.

I was dressed in black and white. The way he looked at me – ah, that strange, frantic look from the beginning, when he doesn't know, but wants to discover…

"Are we going for a walk?" he asked me.

- Are you sure you want to invite trouble along for the ride?

- You are not just any trouble, but one with brown eyes who steals anyone's heart.

- We might end up on Capella , my lucky star, I have a cosmic brain.

He ran his index finger along the line of my cheek, then, to smooth things over a bit, because I was blushing, he grabbed my palm in a vigorous shake.

We sat on a bench, near the Gloria Cinema, and ate candies with cherry liqueur.

I was slightly dizzy, from the liquor or the kissing when we broke up.

There was something about him that pursued my soul in a captivating, silky way.

I expected to see him again, to call me, but this did not happen.

I called him a few times, I lost the cards each time, because the coupler invariably answered.

I was discouraged.

At the end of November he replied: "Hi, I'm Mir." "Which Mir?" "Did you forget me?" "Remind me of you." "The Roman Arenas." "Ah... Little Yin and Yang... What would you say if we met tomorrow at the University clock?" "Do I know? Are you sure you'll come?   " "Let your lucky star guide you. (How arrogant!) I'm glad you called, Mir, I had lost your phone number. Dress warmly, it's going to snow tomorrow."

My hands were frozen on the receiver, I heard the clatter of fallen coins like an alarm because, in desperation, I had fed the public phone box with five coins.

When I hung up the phone, I smiled with an open heart: life had acquired a new flavor.

It was my first meeting at the University clock.

 

The University clock is a statue of time. I've been waiting for you for a quarter of an hour, I've become a statue too, only feelings and waiting make me feel warm and patient. A harsh wind pinches my cheeks from the north. Next to me, a blonde girl lights a cigarette. She smokes in the heart of the city waiting for a lover who doesn't come. I don't have gloves, my hands are blue and rough, made of worn velvet, I clench them into fists and blow warm air, like little clouds defying the frost.

You don't come anymore, you don't come anymore… I'd better leave, but I'll stay, maybe you'll come. Not a minute passes and the humiliation of abandonment brings tears to my soul, so I decide to leave. I take the first trolleybus, in which a beggar is sleeping. The sour smell of his clothes makes me get off at Spicul. I walk, the ragged snow gathers next to the buildings, as if guarding itself against foolish steps. I see you and you're not alone. She looks at you, you kiss her. Cismigiul becomes a hostile place, I see you moving along the alleys, she wears red boots, and the fascination between you remains like an extension behind, to torment me. How can this winter be so cruel?

 

I wrote him a letter. I couldn't do it any other way...

 

The thought of you was wonderful, no doubt altered the joy I put into this thought. You told me it would snow, but you never came.

Goodbye, indecisive boy... You are the prisoner of the alleys you walk through Cișmigiu, with a new girl, when you run away from yourself.

 

 

 

 

 

Winter mirage

"Give a man a mask and he will tell you the truth." - Oscar Wilde

Christmas had passed and I went with a group to Călimăneşti to spend New Year's Eve there. I had been to that resort before, but never in winter. I entered the only bookstore in the area. The books were sitting neatly on the shelves, the saleswoman was talking on the phone and I started to browse through a few, until I pulled a volume of Baconsky's poems from the shelf. Winter Mirage .

A boy's voice:

- ''Everything here looks like you. Or maybe I'm looking for similarities to you.'' You don't want to buy this book. I looked at him smiling.

How strange it seemed to me, the smile became emotional...

It was Vlad himself, the blue man from my adolescence.

When I recognized him, I was startled with a joy that came from a long-ago summer...

I asked him if, using his magical powers, he could guess what book I wanted. He then chose the Dictionary of Neologisms and gave it to me.

I left the bookstore with the huge book, chatting happily with a boy with green eyes, me, the loner.

- But for Christmas. It's a book you'll open many times. I want Baconsky.

It was a game, I accepted the gift, anticipating that this meeting wouldn't leave much time for reading.

He was looking at me in a kind of amusement.

- I know I've grown up, I have long hair, but don't you recognize me?

He didn't recognize me, maybe he didn't even remember me.

- Have we met before?

- Long ago, in the Calmau Valley. Do you remember Kat?

- Kat… Of course I remember. Are you the little one by the water?

He looked at me, measuring the 160 cm of my excited body with a malicious smile.

- You've become beautiful. And you say you've grown up?

I laughed, I was starting to like it.

- Did it seem like I liked you when I ran aground on the muddy "estuary" of Călmățuiului?

- That was a long time ago. Anyway, you liked Kat.

- I liked Kat, and she was in love with Sebastian.

- You know, Kat is with the angels now.

- I know, it's a small world... If she had told Sebastian, maybe he wouldn't have married her, but he would have definitely taken care of the child.

- Maybe a girl from our area would have done that, but Kat was not a girl from our area.

- Sebastian wasn't any luckier either. The plane he was piloting crashed in Făgăraș, but I don't think he made it to heaven like your friend.

The evocation made us a little sad, we walked and were silent. Each of us was thinking about the long-ago story between Kat and Sebastian, but, no matter how fascinating others' stories were, ours was brilliant.

The place was full of sunshine, everything was white, the snow was crunching. I was wearing a red hat, I didn't lack anything, I was flushed and happy.

"I remember how you flinched when I caught your eye across the crowd gathered in Valea Păducelui at a wedding," he continued after a pause. "You were a beautiful woman, with curly hair and a nose in the wind. That's when I realized you liked me. But…"

- I was too young, I know...

Monday [18] !

The fiddlers of Coace-Boabe were singing until sweat ran down their faces, and the children were running through the meadow happily.

Sometimes I would watch the musicians, their hands would move deftly, and their grimaces would make them look ridiculous, they were so involved in the musical act, although I knew they didn't care about the peasants' dancing, in that hindered dance except to the extent that they received blue 100-dollar bills. The violinist, with his neck pressed against the greasy violin, his fingers running wildly on the bow, the slightly hunchbacked drummer, playing with miniature golf clubs (which Kat called little bootlegs) on the electrified strings, under which he would put a large handkerchief (I never found out why), and the accordionist with wide sideburns, with his eyes closed, intensely experiencing the music, made a thrilling musical bow while the brown grains on the other side of the accordion (which Kat called watermelon seeds) were pressed by fat fingers, harmonizing. The accordion was my favorite instrument, it made me think of Edith Piaf because my mother had a vinyl record and listened to it on the record player.   

- I wanted to get closer but you disappeared. In the evening I perched on the top of the hill. Your little house among the cherry trees looked like it was drawn by a child's hand. I called out to you, the echo answered me. I kept looking, it was light, I imagined that you didn't want to talk.

- I didn't hear you, the whole street was buzzing with the sounds of the accordion.

He took two pebbles out of his pocket. One had a mask painted on it, symbolizing the Ying-Yang twinning , the other a harlequin.

- They are talismans, I painted them myself. Choose one. I chose the mask.

- Now you have to tell me the truth. Did you really like me?

- Truths are told in the evening...

I wondered what the truths of someone who ignored me as a teenager and who, in a few days, would be just a vacation memory would be of any use.

I wanted to seem unpredictable, but I was definitely vulnerable and predictable.

I promised to see him in the evening. The fatigue of the journey had made me sleepy.

- Tonight, at the cafe. I'm going to wander around a bit.

He left and, looking back after walking away down the alley, he said:

- Santa Claus exists, little one, our meeting proves it!

I waited at the cafe, he didn't come.

I fell asleep confused, leaving the weight of disappointment on the velvety, snow-white shoulders of the night.

I was woken up by screams and noises and went out onto the terrace, someone had had an accident. The midnight was lit by the moon.

My heart shuddered: God, let it not be him, let it not be him, God!...

But I wasn't so lucky.

A little time separates me from the moon. It might as well be an eternity, because I can't go anywhere, the left side of my body is captive, so I focus on my breathing.

It was dusk. I descended into the cave, drawn by a kind of child's cry, which stopped when I entered its dark belly. Near the exit, a block of stone dislodged, hitting my right foot and blocking my right hand in the recess on the narrow wall that I was holding on to for balance. I screamed, screamed in pain and fear, but who would hear me? I pulled in vain, tearing at my wrist, the stone pressed harder. I could see myself a prisoner of the cave, I could see myself lost for days, with a dry throat, I could see myself dying of thirst and being pecked by birds in the spring. But I didn't think about the cold. My feet were frozen, and despair made me cry. I felt a pain that rose to my heart. Only a few minutes had passed, which seemed like an eternity, the hand was frozen, the arm was bruised, the pain in my leg throbbed and tainted every breath. With my free hand I sent the beam of the flashlight into the white immensity. I screamed over and over, someone will find me, I don't want to give up. I laid my head on a pillow of stone and ice. If only I could sleep! But sleep wouldn't come.

Then it occurred to me to pray. I whispered Angel, my soul sobbing. Another jolt, a final stretch, and I pulled the captive hand away. It was no longer a hand, but a bloody mass, I wrapped everything in my scarf and, with my last strength, I crawled through the snow, guided by the white light of the moon and the lights of the hotel. I was finally free! I didn't want to think about what my hand would look like after it healed. My right leg was fractured and aching. Behind me was a purple path. I tried to get up, but the fall made me one with the stones, I crawled again and cried out, then I didn't move anymore. I felt nothing, no pain, no desire to go any further. I was tired.

"Don't stop, don't stop," my angelic thoughts urged me.

"Throw yourself into the abyss, you will be a cripple, a wretch," the devilish thoughts entered the dance.

Finally, the rescuers found me.

I visited him in the hospital only a few days later, it was the last night of the year.

It seemed very serious, he had surgery.

His mother and sister had come, looking devastated and not speaking to me.

He was pale, in pain, his body swollen. He had bandages all over him, but he held out a hand to me.

I looked with fear at all that array of levers and the medicines lined up on the bedside table.

Then I noticed something that seemed to be absent where I imagined his right hand should have been.

I clasped my hands to my chest and closed my eyes. When I opened them, he said to me:

- We know each other so little and you care about me? You have such pain in your eyes. He smiled weakly, but he was in terrible pain. It could be worse… I'm going to need a good prosthesis. It's not over, it's just that my life won't be the same.

He was touching the edges of a dream, that tiny dream that he would try to live a normal life. He was 25 years old and his life had already been touched by pain.

I stayed with him until the vacation was over.

When I left, I left him the address.

I returned home. I found everything almost as I had left it, the books were in their place, the few T-shirts on hangers, one of them hanging pitifully.

I looked in the mirror with an expressionless, childlike face - I hadn't looked at myself in the mirror like that for a few days - and mimicked the gesture of brushing my hair.

But the brush had become tangled in a tuft of blond hair, a sign that the Goldfish had been home.

I could imagine small emotional cataclysms that the blonde experienced during my absence, which took her to areas where she stopped being just a blonde and transformed into a seductive woman, with lazy movements, arousing men.

The glass of the lamp, so beautifully painted in pastel colors, lay broken next to the vase in which the freesias had long since wilted and from which the water had evaporated.

The thin stems, like the yellow flowers, bore witness that my absence had been felt, at least by some flowers that had died of thirst.

Slowly I returned to what I called my life.

Hesitations began to appear in my actions, which before were spontaneous, without fear.

I was thinking about how much a person's days are shaken in a single sequence where they take a wrong step and then...

He wrote me only one letter, after a few months.

The words seemed to decide to leave with him.

"I've tasted both good and bad, but in recent months the reality has been terrifying. When we met in the bookstore, it was like I was seeing you for the first time and I didn't want you to leave."

Although I don't want to relive the past, because then I would have to go through the terrible accident in Călimăneşti again, I'm still glad that I lived long enough to feel you close.

People like me are seen as creatures you avert your gaze from when you see their imperfections.

I started walking again, but my gait is limp.

The pain remained, over time I got used to it.

But I won't stay here long! It's a cruel world, you know?

I would have called you, but precisely because I felt you would have come and maybe stayed, I didn't.

You don't know it, but you have a gift, you turn people's faces towards life.

I wanted you to know that it meant a lot to know you and that, in a way, I'm leaving with you in my thoughts.

 

How far away everything seems to me today and how absurd everything that happened after the meeting in the bookstore, which had filled a time torn apart by time with miraculous energy.

You don't miss something you don't want to remember, so I wasn't missing that vacation, but those moments from the past, which had been mine and a boy who liked Baconsky.

But he missed the present...

 

That's what I thought, but some time ago I found his name on Picasa, I recognized him from the photos - he looked prosperous and happy and lived in Canada.

I sent him a message: "Dear Vlad, do you exist? MirKat."

His dry answer came a few days later: "Dear Kat, not me, I don't exist! But, probably the other one was... Kat."

Time passing by people has a crazy sense of loneliness towards memories...

Talismans

The small objects that appear in our lives borrow some of the energy of life when we favor them.

A shell, a sea devil, a cone, although they are detached from the source of living life, they thrill, because they marked certain moments in time.

There are also unloved things, whose usefulness people do not see or whose true beauty they cannot discover.

Some objects remind us how fleeting life is, and others that the soul is immortal.

We are beings subject to obsolescence, we invented time, but we are not its masters.

Only the soul disregards time and escapes a feeling beyond the flesh when we fall in love.

 

 

 

 

 

 

No sparkle lasts forever!

In the spring, I spotted Dandu on another alley in Moghioroș Park, returning from the tennis courts.

The park had come to life, the sap was pulsing.

Casually and carelessly, I didn't look at him, I knew he was there, that he was passing by, that he was disappearing.

I knew he was looking at me.

Why I was playing this game, I didn't know, but something in me knew, something magnetic, crazy, fearless.

I left the group of friends in the park.

"If it's meant to be, it will be," my mother said.

I didn't believe in destiny, but in choices.

However, that evening, some lines in the Universe vibrated.

At the corner from Tricodava we met again.

We were holding onto the handle of a trolleybus with the doors open, in a bunch of youth and impatience, and we were flying.

We went down to Eroilor and then we talked very little.

He stopped at the ticket booth and asked for a pen.

"I can't let her leave without giving me her phone number," he joked to the saleswoman, suddenly awakened from her slumber by this euphoria.

The woman also handed him a piece of paper, then they both looked at me.

Him, with the pen suspended above the paper, the squirrel-eyed saleswoman stretching out her hands in bewilderment, her chubby palms up, as if she were weighing something: "what are you waiting for, dictate the number"!

I ran down the subway steps.

"What's next? What's next... What if it all ends here?"

When I got home I looked at my eyes in the mirror, my eyes were looking at my lips, they were purple and throbbing.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The road to Capella

As happens in the beginning, the boy was trying to capture my soul and bring it to the verge of flowering.

I was getting drunk with the scent of the brebenei and I was amazed by my power to make him wake up dazed, with me in mind.

A fragment of a blossoming soul followed him everywhere and, somehow, I knew that this meant we would always be together.

What I didn't know was that the soul, without that fragment, becomes a place thirsty for heaven.

Cişmigiu Garden became our meeting place.

We wandered around the city and only then did we carefully observe the old buildings, the monuments, we visited museums and libraries.

We had passed by them and the joys the city offered, like masks worn by a colorful crowd.

My days were sparkling, I was happy that I was born, that I was born a girl, so that I could love him.

There was so much restlessness and so much peace in this new game of the Universe, and my soul longed for the force that had created it.

We laughed a lot at everything.

I was searching within myself for the feeling from the beginning and came across a new variant, there was no less mystery, but more warmth in the hut.

Winter had come and we would meet in a place far from the world, in the heart of the city, an alley covered with glass like stained glass.

"What are you thinking about?" I asked him out of the blue.

- We begin a dance to the edge of the world.

I stood on tiptoe and wrote next to the door frame of an antique shop: I will always love you .

I liked the way he was, the tranquility that surrounded his being, his azure gaze, which turned green or gray when he wasn't serene, the way he spoke.

He didn't rush, he didn't anticipate what I was going to say, he seemed to have time on his side.

Orion had fastened his golden girdle to the sky.

We wandered through the cold but lively city.

Christmas came with its procession of hustle and bustle and with a kind of joy that could be read on people's faces.

The bright stars and the scent of oranges for which people queued for hours made the city seem friendly, and the darkness that fell over the city, tamed by a few dim lanterns, made it look ghostly.

It was snowing softly. The wind-blown snow settled on the edge of the sidewalks, and the ragged snow under the feet of passersby, mixed with mud and slush, gave a pitiful appearance to the alleys.

The Cişmigiu Garden was shrouded in a white shroud. The statues of writers were frozen, with small scrolls covering their heads. Only Eminescu's Spring remained alive.

My boyfriend looked at me silently.

I had read Maitreyi and was talking to her, animatedly, about pantheistic love, so we hugged, together, only because only both of our arms could encompass it, an old plane tree near the Pier, which we would name Ilan.

I don't know if I felt Ilan's soul, but a serene feeling came over me, as if nothing really mattered except us, the tree, and the sky we were breathing.

He looked at me without saying too many words, in his eyes it seemed to me that I read sadness, but at 19 you can't be sad when you're in love.

It was obvious that I had become dear to him, and the flames of my thoughts were turning my cheeks red, like two red apples, for which I blamed the cold outside.

Words and laughter played between us, like elves.

He pretended to give me Capella, my childhood star, but before leaving the park, he solemnly and emotionally gave me a ring embroidered with silver flowers.    

"What does it mean to you?" I asked him.

- An engagement of souls.

My little being didn't know how to decipher the meaning of his gesture, but it was time, hope triumphed, and our happy fingers were touching the bewildering area that pulsed with the future.

When he told me he was going to the army I felt cheated, the time with him wasn't infinite. The story was broken even before it began.

- What are you thinking about?

- I wish I didn't have to leave.

Right after New Year's Eve, he left.

I watched the train start to move away, he stepped back from the window.

The city was different after he left.

How can the presence of a human make an ordinary place seem like a dream space?

 

"Spring has come, Mir!

How much is being offered to us...

The sweetness of the sun's rays that slip through the lace of the spring air of stony cherry blossoms, intertwined with the fragile smile of snowdrops...

And how little we offer...

We can start with a simple one: thank you for existing!

It's spring and I feel this love coming from the bright side of my soul.

We don't know each other well, but you'll understand later... and you'll know what he's capable of.

I miss you, your warm, dreamy eyes, your slightly nostalgic, slightly naughty air."

 

We wrote to each other for a while, then...

I began to think of the Garden as a place full of memories, from another existence, from which he had left and which I myself had abandoned, ceasing to look for the traces of our footsteps, lost in time.

There remained a time of non-completion and, secretly, we were mentally projecting ourselves into a time of chance.

Someday, sometime...

 

 

 

 

 

 

My memories are retro

In the back of my mind I imagine constellations, stars on the horizon under the clothes of memory.

Memories are among us, some are preparing to collapse from the crumbling rocks of time, others continue to sleep beautifully in our hearts.

 

The world evoked in memories is like a garden with a single tree loaded with fruit that I cannot eat.

I stay far from this world, but I peek in, too fascinated to leave.

I see a girl in whom the light awakens, a teenager with a hunched soul, alone in a city.

Until that stranger came, the fugitive from Sânziene's dream, with elements hanging from the corner of his blue eyes, squinting at the words woven with emotion.

That stranger who, when I approached him, pretended not to notice me, although in his mind he was kissing me and guessing the nakedness of my body, just a moment ago.

As I write the words the park begins to tremble, Ilan, the spectral tree shakes its useless fruit earrings.

It has collected many scars on its bark since the boy from the Sânziene dream and I embraced it, like an engagement of souls , one winter...

 Silhouettes of forgotten loves are lost under the small trees, each story is different.

Why everyone chooses to hug this tree, I'll never know.

 

You'll never walk alone!

I was a tardy high school student and I imagined I was living an ordinary day.

That evening I was returning from evening classes at Mihai Bravu High School.

Evening high school exhausted me, because at night I worked in a factory near the Progresul Station, which built cranes for the Russians, on a sleepy, remote-controlled plane.

I wore an orange uniform with a cap and sometimes I would fall asleep sitting on a rock, with my head on my knees.

The craftsman Nenicuță, a benevolent Oltean, was tolerant of the high school students who worked the night shifts, but the craftsman Stoica from Jilava, black, stocky, with a short neck and a lathe through which sounds came out like the hissing of a snake, was a mischievous fellow.

I happily watched my colleagues' jokes, designed to wake me up, as my chisel finished chipping away at the entire surface of the piece of metal clamped between the jaws of the vise.

The mountain girl would make a nest of cotton soaked in diesel fuel, place it under the brim of my cap, and light it.

It was smoldering, I was still sleeping.

They were friendly in a cruel way, these jokes amused them.

The girl from the mountains was a tall and strong Moldovan woman, with a thick ponytail and an olive, insignificant face.

When he stepped on it, the floors groaned.

She didn't like me, so she was waiting for a good moment to punish me for being different from her in a way that aroused her arrogance and malice.

Their silly giggles would wake me up, I would press the stop button on the camera.

"Dream of him," I sometimes heard...

I was laughing too.

How else to fight back when the only ways to deal with cruelty are to be either lenient or cruel?

But that evening something inside me was different. I had received a letter from him.

I was daydreaming and walking towards the tram.

I was thoughtful and fragile, with big eyes and a light gait.

I spied through the streams of footprints on the concrete pavement the amorous oxen-pups, who seemed to dance among the grassy stone islands, with small flowers breathing the summer air. On the underside of the asphalt, creatures of water and darkness walked to and fro.

My colleagues were looking at me, did he write to you?

I was burning with enchantment. It was just a floating day, until...

The tram was approaching. We headed for the refuge. The screeching of wheels. The iron colossus rushed towards us on the pedestrian crossing.

Another car intervened, changing direction, the children were avoided. But not me...

Like a disjointed doll, my body made an arc in the air and I was thrown into the flower beds in the garden of an apartment building.

What a warm light floods me!

It was as if I had two souls, one was joyful, seeking the way to heaven, oblivious to my other soul, bitter, exhausted.

- These are my souls. You can touch them, there is such a thin distance between them that the sad soul seems half-burnt, and the Moon draws all the light of the other soul, with the roar of the ocean.

I lay wounded, surrounded by human wails, my sad soul froze, covered by Capella , my star, which Tudora's cough told me could cause epileptic seizures.

I could hear thoughts screaming that I was in danger, words filled with night.

The feeling that I was going to lose was coiling through my vertebrae, but that wasn't all, the voice of an angel crept past him: don't lose hope !

I don't know how long it lasted.

I was woken up by people's cries, I was uncomfortable with their noise that pulled me out of the world of light that had nestled in my mind.  

"Live", I heard it before, then I don't know what it was...

But the angel whispered words full of light.

At the hospital, with a broken heart, my hair covered in blood and mud, I remained silent and apathetic for a while.

I felt exhausted, like after a fall, as if there was nothing familiar left, nothing that meant anything.

For a while I forgot about the pain and broke away from reality, I was safe, nothing was touching me. It was like flying.

Other times I would cling to myself, my being was endless, and I would fall asleep.

A vision was struggling under my forehead: I was lying in a clearing with the grass crushed by the wheels of the vehicle that had caused the accident, with a daisy chain around my neck, which Dandu had playfully braided for me.

I could hear distant noises and a siren, the edge of the Toad Forest seemed to be trembling.

The taste of blood and the other taste, of life, kept me awake, even though I was sleepy and didn't care about anything.

When I woke up, I realized that time had jumped, I was no longer in the forest, but in the hospital, the white lights of the neon lights made the room look like crepe paper...

I couldn't move, I had fractures and my left jaw was swollen.

Fear began to come towards me with harsh touches of twilight.

I really wish I could take a leap to another time, where everything would be back to how it was before: my heart, my bones, my failed hopes.

The mud dried in my hair because, having no money, the nurses avoided me.

I looked around me with pity.

The neighboring sufferings made my sleep torturous, they were worse than me.

It had been just an ordinary day, but from that evening everything became different because I knew: I was not alone.

God, the entire Universe, had been watching over me.

"You've had your days," my mother told me when she found out (late, very late)...

 

 

 

Blue elves love books

The incident affected me deeply - I started avoiding people.

I experienced moments of loneliness, when it was as if something cold was touching my spirit and dreams, making me start in the night, gripped by panic.

We lived sleepless nights with our eyelids glued to sleep.

I had a hard time falling asleep looking at the square window where the absence of light allowed the moonlight to shine through the branches of the maple trees.

When I closed my eyes, bright dots would run across my retina, I would continue the game until I fell asleep.

In the mornings, in   the mirror that silvered a scarlet wall, I saw the image of a girl whose soul looked at me with eyes of nostalgia, an uneasy sorrow.

I was still me, even if my soul had become a little alienated, I was smiling at the gentle and fearless eyes.

Only the palms trembled slightly, anticipating the moments when they would press the eyelids, like erasing something alive.

I was thinking about you the same way you dream a dream you barely remember, I didn't call you when it was hard for me.

The shadow of the fleeting love lingered, the distance faded into the deep silence of the other night, the night of my soul, which was cold, nailed to the bed, and by so much silence between us. I was a troubled soul. 

If only I had the idea to talk to God!

Although my mother was a woman of faith and read the Bible, to me it all seemed like a legend, a naive need for people to look for something outside themselves that would protect them.

I didn't even call my mother. But Mihaela Ungureanu was close to me.

I wanted to leave that hostile life, I was absent anyway.

I imagined a dimension where I would wrap myself in selfishness, not get attached to people and places, remove fears, and become someone who didn't need comfort.

I became friends with books again.

Time passed and I found a little window of my soul that wanted to open to the world. I stood on tiptoe and cupped my palms above my eyebrows.

I wanted to look beyond the lights that were absorbing my blind soul, a clear projection, not too far away. The more I looked, the wider the window became.

I started my recovery in a physiotherapy clinic and after a while I got up and started walking again.

Sometimes the events in our lives arrange unexpected encounters for us on the paths of life. He walked in front of me, with a slightly hesitant step, he wasn't in a hurry.

The magic of destiny also works in recovery clinics...

I started to smile at the present.

 

 

 

 

 

 

A clown without a goal

After two years...

Vague journeys, imagination, the portal.

It was all so distant, time separated from time, longing magnetized by longing.

 

We were in Cişmigiu, smoking with my mind wandering.

On such a miserable day, that stop was a blessing.

The statues of the writers were friendly, with whitish marks left by birds.

Copper pennies were falling from the branches of the maple trees, and in motion they became ships drifting in the stormy morning air. Vegetal vertigo.

My attention was causing other movements to come to life, independent of their own life.

A parrot, a rainbow lost in the rich foliage, a squirrel crossing the alley.

I liked to watch at alley level: ladies with plump legs, accompanied by pampered pets (nervous little legs, impatient leashes, slightly strangling them, their protests like kittens eager to escape), gentlemen treading solemnly.

Butterflies and flowers, humming, lullabies.

A splendor of wisteria and spring in love.

I walked our alleys , I sat on our bench .

By trying to find a feeling from the past, I was tormenting the present.

My days were holidays when I was loved by him, they were tangled balls of yarn that forgetful, emotion-hungry cats played with when love was a game and a tease.

Even eternity wouldn't be enough for me to open up this heavenly soul from which he had forgotten to leave.

I cried, I laughed, I pretended nothing was happening to me. A clown without a goal.

Nearby, a woman's ironic voice had settled on a man's shoulders, like a puzzlement.

You don't love her anymore, do you ? The man, confused, defended himself.

I didn't say I didn't love her anymore .

I would have recognized this voice out of a thousand voices.

His hesitation put shards of ice in the woman's glassy words.

So, you still love her. The woman stood up, he stood up too.

I choose to be with her. The woman laughed, an unnatural, guttural laugh, an aria that resembled waste and abandonment.

I would say you made the wrong choice, but I can't help but notice that her absence would make you unhappy. I'm going to leave, don't look for me anymore.

The woman walked away slowly, her high heels clicking.

Her perfume was lost on the alley, towards the Bandstand.

He went in the opposite direction.

I was thinking of calling him, touching his shoulder, doing something when he turned and looked over his shoulder. He looked with strange eyes, through me, beyond me, ghostly, then walked away.

I hurriedly left for the kiosk, my thoughts confused.

I had kept some of the love alive inside me, but I had just found out that he was heading towards a woman he had chosen to be with . 

On Regina Elisabeta Boulevard, an ambulance siren could be heard, like a wail in the hot afternoon. People were walking around, no one cared that a life was flickering towards dusk or dying out.

The garden was bustling with life even though a man and a woman had just separated.

Squirrels crossed the alleys, the trees laughed at them with spring-to-summer bark, the woodpeckers were buzzing, and rushing acorns were taking off their little brown hats.

In the Bandstand, I found shells forgotten by a distracted child, vestiges of marine life that dreamed of the Black Sea.

The woman on the bench was there, smoking, beautiful, sad, with a lost look.

He would twist a strand on his finger, he would recover.

She was one of those women who knew the rules of the game...

 

I'm heading towards Stirbei, I hear a liquid song.

Hasty hands fill Lilliputian amphorae with clear spring water. It's not drinkable, you're poisoning yourself - a granny.

We water the dawns, the orange elves respond in chorus. The Pegaeae Naiads [19] gracefully carry ivory cobwebs, with nectar cups.

A little girl dances in the grass, purple swirls, her dress fluttering in the joy of twisting. She breaks free and chases blue butterflies.

He stops, he saw a daisy, a miniature sun. Rays cross it and laugh.

"How magical this moment is!" chirp the sparrows crowded on the branches.

The girl finds blue flying pieces in the grass.

A wing, even a broken one, carries within it the potential beauty and memories of floating.

Unnoticed, I stand on the outskirts of the park, looking at the lush intersection and the game.

The child in me jumps and nudges me.

Purple flux

You are far away, intoxicating and sweet, like the smell of burnt cherry wood.

My soul is a shadow away from you.

 

The moon hangs on the edge of the curtain like a hostage from the hot core of time. I mean the moon falls on my pillow, stunning and bright, I can't sleep, I think about it.

I dial the number I know by heart and he answers. His voice moves me. ''Mir? Which Mir?'' - I know he's smiling, he teased me like that before, pretending not to remember me. I tell him that I miss him and that I'm waiting for him in the Garden, near the Jazz Club. He hesitates, maybe he won't come, but I fly up the stairs, I'm waiting for him anyway. 

I go outside and then run with my mind to the soul of the Ilan tree.

In the street, sparkles on the asphalt, stoic trees, guardians of the city, their leaves quivering in flashes of green darkness.

I walk down the dazzling, bright street. Strangers stare at me.

My hair smells like cinnamon, and my cheeks have the aroma of ripe apples.

The moon looks like a big wheel.

We tend to treat it in a special way, it's the only light that comes from the Universe. It hides the little sneaks from us, when it enters the clouds.

I'm getting hungry, I pretend to cut the moon into slices, with rye crust.

She arches her back and throws paper airplanes at me through the open windows of the sky, the whole meadow is a spectacle with my white elephants [20] , which are getting smaller and smaller, scattering in the wind.

I arrive near the Jazz Club.

Under the trees, bodies in love make love in slow, sensual tones.

Their toes are crossed with longing, they have the whole night to play, the night is theirs...

They don't care about me, like squirrels don't care about pickled peanuts?!

The bass line, the flow of blood, the chirping of crickets and the song of the steppe chicory, in the Garden - the rhythm of the earth.

The moon is big and invites the tides to come along - the rhythm of the sea, something the land lacks.

"Mir, Mir," he whispers.

Well, it came...

Leaning against a stone column, in a khaki sweatshirt, with a red cap with an embroidered cormorant, I'm waiting for us to escape to aquatic worlds.

- What are you thinking about?

- Moonlight falls on your nose in the wind, baby.

We laughed, our questions playful.

- I missed you, but I had lost you. You changed your address and phone number.

- Yes, I've seen my life.

The sight of life was the sand in which I hid my pebbles of hopelessness. I buried them deep, like the seeds of a watermelon, in my childhood.

We remember everything, we talk and laugh, we laugh and talk.

The pleasure of being together again, the game, warm sparks, energy, playfulness. Our lips perform the ritual, the music plays in the Universe, without needing to stop.

"How could we live in the same city and not meet?" he whispers, playing with my hair.

- Like the sun and the moon.

- If the sun and the moon met, instead of looking for each other and spending the day together, what would happen?

- Their love would tear our world in two.

The wind chimes on the club's terrace stir up anxiety beyond emotion.

His warm hip subtly conveys a kind of body conversation. We continue talking...

- And the eyes, still brown? And the laugh, still so crazy?

We part ways after midnight.

His voice, like a breath, moves softly on my lips, and our looks are promises in our eyes: no promises .

I look at the stars and don't dare close my eyelids, even though I know that what is alive beneath them, the dream of dreams, will disappear in the morning anyway. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The exit from the labyrinth was

in his heart.

Let me make you a cocktail:

I love you is mixed with little kisses,

adorned with your good love,

with a touch of sin,

all in one night.

At first clumsily,

then with a thirst for life on your lips

who say nothing new,

so most of the time

I'm silent, I smile and I kiss madly.

I stretch out my palms, trembling,

so that I can once again catch

the scent of hidden love.

But you had left...

 

In love, when it seems like you've experienced everything, you start to withdraw, to run away...

You long for the energy from which the first sequence was born.

A rainy day, another season.

My serenity had turned to cold and my soul had been numbed by illusions.

What had changed?

My boyfriend was distracted, his thoughts carried away. He was smiling aimlessly.

Does another girl disturb him? (the appearance of another woman, an age-old poison that destroys love).

I was oscillating between an impulsive reaction: tell me who it is (don't do that, no) and leaving.

When we leave a love, we return there, to the love that created us.

I left the city and went to Cătun to see my parents.

It was perfect, he didn't ask when I would be back, he kissed me evasively, he was in a hurry.

Among simple people who have no other business than to go through their lives through various stages of evolution, rebellion, injury, healing, life's absurd indifference to life, which is aging and, ultimately, ruin and death, there are also sentimental people.

How strange it seems to me to be one of them and to be convinced that I am realistic and distant!

And how far away from me this moment of sincerity would become.

I decided to let silence fall between us.

After all, it had been a lesson - I deserved it.

Trying to rekindle an old love - an irresistible attraction for a person with low self-esteem , as Psyche would define the reheated soup theory.

I retreated and didn't look back, I didn't want to become a stone wall...

Memories do not replace the present, even though they contain the core of existence. Memories, if they receive energy and strength, transform the present into an unclear and unlived, late time.

Late is something that has never been early or on time. Late is when the windows through which the little sun can penetrate the heart close completely. Late is when illusions begin to trickle down the edges of the soul, while reality darkens the sky of the mind, and the rest of time rolls by carelessly.

 

 

 

 

Today is a fresh canvas

on the easel

I sit in front of an easel and paint the flower in the mother's eyes, their openness to the sacred meaning of life - each color is an emotion. The brush marks to the left of her life pulse with longing for children gone far away . The breeze with memories...

 

Mom has aged a little, but she is still lively. She welcomes the house for Easter, whitewashes it with starched white and sings a romance.

"We keep love in silence,

and how happy I was.."

"Why are you so cheerful?" Dad asks.

- Maybe the children are coming, and he resumes the song from where he left off.

"It had snowed white cherry blossoms,

"Ah, how beautiful it looked on him!"

She looks at her husband, also old, who is carving a piece of wood.

He is sitting on a stool with three dwarf legs, carved by himself (my father had an amazing gift, he used to create chairs, coat hangers, figurines, giant spoons out of wood, which he polished). 

- What are you doing there?

He receives no response, he continues to mumble romances.

After a long silence, he reproaches her:

- You cover the walls too often. One day the whitewash will fall off with the walls.

Mom pretends not to hear him – she's practiced for a long time, docile, she no longer holds a grudge against him for taking her from the picturesque places of the Nandri Valley.

The window sill slides easily, leaving wet marks, the house looks starched, but the next day it will shine white in the sun, surrounded by cherry blossoms.

When he finished whitewashing, he gathered up the newspapers that were protecting the windows and placed the pot of soup on the corner of the stove.

He gathers twigs from the yard and scraps of red animal carcasses and puts them on the fire. He takes the bread out of the crust, covers it with a towel.

"Hey, don't you hear, we're not eating anymore?" Dad asks.

Mom is furious, dad doesn't usually call her by her first name. He defends himself from this "don't you hear me" by making fun of her silly habits.

He goes off and does other small chores around the house, chops sunflower leaves for the ducks, throws a handful of wheat to the older chickens, until the soup is ready to heat up.

When dad returns, still on the stool, still carving, he doesn't mention food anymore.

- Come to dinner, his mother says.

Dad doesn't notice it, but mom is used to it, it was their ritual.

- Are you still messing around with that spoon? I don't know what you're going to do with it.

- I'm giving it as a gift to Periferigerilerimini [22] .

Mom is cheerful, mom laughs, dad hasn't forgotten the stories...

Dad stands up, straightens his shawls, and pulls up a stool next to the round table, on which are two clay bowls of soup, green onions, bacon, goat cheese, and steaming pita bread.

He washes his hands in the fountain and takes a liter of brandy from the sideboard. He pours it into the glasses, takes a sip of brandy, then they both eat in silence.

Mom throws a piece of bread to Lessie, who slowly takes it towards the shed.

The snowdrops are peckish [23] , the donkeys in the meadow bray in spring, and the sky smiles at the fields.   

In the end, the spoon proved useful.

At Christmas, my mother would mix the hams and sausages that had been melted, in pots, on the stovetop.  

 

 

 

Back to the nest

I entered the shade tree between the pear trees, covered with vines, whose sap-filled shoots were launching themselves into the air in confusion.

Careless spirals, which, when I crushed them between my teeth, had a slightly sour taste, like the soursop that my mother used to make a kind of juice to sour soups.

I was expected.

My mother greeted me happy, amazing, and full of life.

A joy of finding and a peace - the child is well, he is back.

She was flushed, as she always was in the warm seasons, with a high forehead and her kind, slightly teary eyes.

It smelled of lovage and baked bread.

He used to imprint on the surface of the bread, a ruddy wheel, the flower-like traces of wild mallow pods.

She was cheerful and the air around her seemed to vibrate.

Dad, with snow-white hair, a little sullen, introverted like a monk, collected in a tiny, dark container the tears that the vine cried when the vines were cut.

He said that liquor makes eyes beautiful and, jokingly, he added "it makes beautiful eyes bright, look at your mother", and my mother waved her hand, as if to say "don't listen to him, he's joking".

The fact that they were teasing each other only showed the current phase of their relationship, troubled by misunderstandings and arguments, when they were young, and the serenity of the family had been shattered.

Then forgiveness, repentance, gentleness intervened.

They had grown old and it no longer mattered what had driven them apart in their youth, because, behold, they had stayed together, for their children, and then, after everyone had left, they had each other.

Before going to bed, he came next to me, sat on the bed, wrapped me up, stroked my head, and hugged me like a baby.

I kicked, I undressed, he tickled me, I laughed.

The aroma of the bread remained in her hair.  

- You are sad, my Maria.

- My beautiful mother...

He kissed me on the forehead and walked away without haste.

He looked once more before closing the door.

How my mother smiled when she looked at me!...

Like no one else in the world.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

People and places

The world of my childhood was made up of people, places, games...

I liked some of the people on the street...

Tușa Tudora was my weakness. Șchiopu's Aunt Mariana, fiery and spiritual, and Racu's Aunt Tudorița, a cheerful young woman who loved children, read the same books as my mother, then told stories and I would absorb their words...

The mysterious passage in Ion by Liviu Rebreanu, in which Ana and Ion made love on the bench, which they talked about in whispers, piqued my curiosity.

"- What are you doing there?"

The troubled voice froze the blood in the lovers' veins. Ana suddenly silenced her sobs, losing herself in the boy's arms..."

In the evenings, Aunt Tudorița would invite the children from the street to the TV, which was connected to a tractor battery. We would binge-watch Poldark, Stan and Bran, Dallas, and Woody cartoons, they were delicious evenings...

We didn't have a television, no tractor battery, and there was no electricity in the village.

Morțun's Tușa Catița made us dresses, she was the village seamstress.

Tușa Constandina was giving birth to twins, she guessed to my mother that I would go to college.

Niculin the blacksmith's Anica Tușa treated us like important little people, I remember... She had an interesting face and was supple.

Places carved by winds and rains, with fields full of grace and beauty, in the warm seasons that sheltered other worlds, small satellites and somewhat distant from each other. They were those families from which love had not fled, in which partners guessed each other's thoughts and completed their words, sometimes answered each other by making ritual gestures with their heads, sometimes like Romanians, sometimes like Bulgarians, and reconfirmed their relationship by loving each other silently, taking care of their children, their households, working diligently and increasing their wealth.

There were also families where the seed of scandal brought by the wind brought forth evil, vigorous weeds, easily stirred up by alcohol, harsh words, and fights, living like this, "without any God," tormenting each other and emotionally abusing their children, men and women who had sworn lifelong loyalty and steadfastness, who did not accumulate anything.

They stayed together, it was easier for them to live in a familiar disaster than to plunge into the unknown.

But life took care to waste them...

"What is brought by the wind is taken by the current"...

I had come to know their voices, their gestures, I knew how they would address me...

When I went to the cooperative and met Aunt Mariana, she would ask me: Where are you going, Mir?

To the cooperative !

What to take?

And once I lost the hundred blue lei. It was snowing, it was stormy, my hand was frozen and the banknote flew away, caught by the wind and carried away by the current.

Aunt Mariana looked for money with me, but I couldn't find her relatives [24] .

But when the wind picked up, a bush rustled and I saw her.

It was easy to spot, everything around was white!

The paper had been propped up [25] between the branches, next to the fence, at Aunt Conina's.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Church

I went in. The light shone in the colors of the stained glass windows and fell in parallel lines on the floor covered with worn carpets.

I was greeted by the smell of incense, melted wax, repentance, and prayer.

"They're afraid of the fire at the bottom of hell," my father laughed at some of the village churchgoers who, after finishing the liturgical ritual, would fall back into their sins: gossip, enmity, lies.

The cages decorated with colorful sprinkles arranged in a cross shape, with thin slices of apple and walnut kernels, brought back memories.

When I was a child, my mother would let me grab at least one candy from the cross when she was preparing the basket.

It was as if a voice in my heart was sweating lacyly, I started to cry.

I always cry when I pray in church...

Prayer and forgiveness are a spiritual capital, and for my soul - an overflow of emotion.

Not because I feel sinful, I don't waste my love.

Wasting tears never helped me.

The fact that I wasn't crying proved to be a powerful weapon, for a while.

Why? I may never know the answer.

I don't fear God, as Tudora's mother used to urge us in our pious childhood.

I love God but not so much as to kill in his name as has often happened on this crazy planet.

The evil that since childhood those around me called the devil (the old women in Cătun considered it a sin to even pronounce the name, so they had baptized him the unclean , the yacacui and spat in his chest, to drive away any vision of evil) dwells in people.

Hell manifests within their universes, which narrow into worlds of darkness.

People are ultimately reduced to beings alone with themselves, gripped by lucidity: that's it, life was one and it was over, that was all and nothing will be repeated.

Church made me think of death, not baptism, not wedding, and not eternal life, and the verses sung made me extremely sad.

The death of the sinful body animated by passion, which carries a grand ego, nourished by vanity, subject to obsolescence...

Without a body, the emotion of the soul cannot be expressed through giving.

Dear people have left our lives for whom we cried with clasped hands in prayer, with tears forming streams on our cheeks, knotting on our chins, we cried, sometimes in vain: "God, why?..." with a feeling of tormented sigh.

And sometimes they were given back to us or left, just a little longer, a delay.

We are brave, as impetuous as we move through the miracle called life.

You can't save the world, you can make choices.

And I prayed for my love.

I cried and prayed, and when I stepped out into the sunshine I was at peace...

Since then, the church has made me think about Life, about Love.

 

With light in the soul

Don't you like your life?

Are you having problems?

Buy a bigger house, get a facelift, a tummy tuck, implants, get a new phone, change your car, your partner...

No matter how well your neighbor is doing, you must do better!

Keep lying to yourself, lying to the molten lava in your soul, that makes you pathetic, but as long as the incandescent core is hard to guess, you will be whoever others want you to be.

You dream of living in a bohemian fantasy, but you find that you have no money.

What's the point of dreaming if you don't have money?

You need money to feel secure, you need money to be happy.

Look at this sky that hangs heavy above your forehead tamed by renunciation, it has the same sound as the echo of oppressive silence in families lacking harmony and love.

Look at it more often, with light in your soul, like the joy of a morning after breakfast, in a happy family, and stay away from grudge-filled creatures who would be able to rob your soul of light.

 

 

 

Who really knows what's best?

If you knew a man's secret thoughts, feelings, fears, weirdest fetishes, or that he was vulnerable, would you still fall in love with him?

 

You are truly with someone you love and you leave carelessly. And you think it's your right to always find them in your life.

It's just a dull wonder. It shines when it ceases to be, when it's too late to re-edit something. When you can't tell it anymore, and in fact, it doesn't even matter anymore.

You just ask for permission to say I'm sorry and receive a smile and a new chance: thank you !

He was going to leave town for a long time. He didn't come, but he called.

- Come with me.

- No, I'm not able to do that.

The change made me confused. Should I quit my job, the city I lived in, and follow him to another city? What if it didn't work out? Every thought I had about us ended with a question mark.

There are many possibilities to not do something you don't want to do.

When you say no , you close the doors, the windows, put locks on them, and turn off the lights of a conversation.

- Why not? I was listening to his voice on the phone. Open syllables...

I didn't answer.

- Why are you silent?

When I'm upset I prefer not to say words.

When I speak, I open a path to my soul.

I was tired and I missed sleeping and dreaming of a girl and a boy exactly like me and him, who didn't need thousands of words to understand each other, but just good, old-fashioned love. 

- It's not a good idea not to talk to me. Talk now, tomorrow it might not come up again.

- "Let's not talk about it anymore"?

- Yes. Let's stop being who we are. Let's be friends, that's all. Just friends.

I didn't believe in friendship between ex-lovers.

- Friends? Simple? What do you mean simple?

- I need you.

That should have finished me off.

This need they have for us!

I have always given the word "need" the cruel connotation of necessity, not of the longing that won't let you live without the love of your life. 

I hung up the phone, grabbed the pillow.

I found my mother in a dream, a soul eager for life.

He urged me to get married, in my dream he was the chosen one.

When I saw or dreamed of my mother, life became lenient with me again.

I had said no, but my heart had said yes.

The next day there was no more talk about it, nor in the following days, because from the next day on he didn't come anymore.

I searched for him in vain...

I was ready to say yes, but I realized it was too late.

The dream didn't take our love to the altar.

I woke up one Monday morning.

I had hallucinatory dreams, to obtain my moonstone, with which to heal the suffering of the world.

He was laughing, he was a dream thief.

The thieves of pain never come in dreams, they lurk at the eaves of doubtful feelings, to tear them apart and turn them into a dazzling, blue fire that reaches to the sky!

I opened the window.

Autumn tapped with clear fingers on the window, stirring the fallen leaves, smelling of wood smoke.

The squirrel in me remembered with a mischievous smile the nuts buried for the winter!

I was looking at the shadows cast across the curtain, it was raining, and the bitter scent of rotten apples on the edge of the fountain lingered in the breath of autumn.

I looked at myself in the oval mirror, the dark circles around my eyes didn't worry me.

We went out into the street, walking non-stop, like people running away from themselves, then we entered the alley where we used to meet when we made love.

Murals on the walls, the inscription I will always love you had been covered by dandelion stars. The memory of the last words of my departed lover made me close my eyes, but I didn't cry.

I accepted his absence as a penance, until one night when I realized how little I really knew about myself...

And in the morning.

The sun burned through the curtains, I woke up alone, except for his image in my eyes.

It was Saturday, how could I have forgotten?

On Saturday mornings he would make omelettes or spaghetti with a sweet and spicy sauce.

When he was there, things mixed, became one.

He called me and said he wanted to see me.

He was smiling at me, he was in a side alley, waiting for me.

I was glad he had come, I was surprised and happy.

I turned to him, he was looking at the gray gravel...

Nair, the little Lebanese girl, was shouting and shouting, in her strange language, wanting to attract attention, running through the parking lot.

Her mother took her hand and then they both sat in the swing between the maple trees, eating golden grapes and talking.

I walked past them, waved to them.

The wind clung to the leaves, to the colors.

Only our eyes touched, my fingers were cold.

- I met someone .

He didn't say "I met someone else ."

That was my luck...

He had met love.

 

 

 

 

 

I miss you.

Words evoking domesticity, which awaken something deep in the male psyche, usually followed by something that is supposed to be a cure for loneliness.

But not from the feeling that the man belongs to the woman melted by longing, but, perhaps, from the urge to protect.

A kind of gratitude: she loves me, she can't live without me.

Why do we feel like we have to prove that we are worthy enough to be liked by others?

We have this need, but the greatness of a feeling does not lie in our ability to make others love us.

It's about giving with all your heart, without expecting anything in return...

When we are grateful for our own good, we do, from time to time, a good deed, a bargain in the name of God's love, for the forgiveness of sins, real or imaginary.

Accepting love is so simple, but it's so hard for us to confess it when we don't know if we will be loved...

A feeling hard to beat.

But there is a crazy relative of it, pride, which prevents us from showing our feelings even when we love and are loved.

 

 

 

 

 

The Roşiori Fair

Summer had passed…

I haven't met him again.

When he didn't want to be found, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't find him.

I left for the Hamlet again.

The fair in Roşiori de Vede is bustling. The tiribombes, the smoking mititei, the cotton candy on a stick, the spiraled ciubuc like the martisor reminded me of my childhood.

This is where we did our shopping in the fall, before school started.

Folk music enlivened the place. Liviu Vasilică and Mărin Cornea, both originally from Valea Călmăţuiului, have songs that touch your heart.

With adolescent Mărin Cornea, his mother had once sung folk songs, on the way to the fields of Merigoala, in the trailer of a tractor that transported the workers from the collective farm.

On an improvised stage, a young actor disguised as a pirate makes bitter reproaches to his beloved:

-   You forgot me, I'm sure you forgot me!

"I haven't forgotten you, how can I forget you? You'd better tell me that I'm beautiful and that you love me," the girl sighed.

- You're ugly, I don't love you anymore.

Insulting is how pirates express their love.

The girl runs to the mirror and touches her face, lifts her chin, pinches her cheeks, lifts her nose in the wind.

Behind her, the pirate draws the cello outline of her body in the air, then brings it to his lips and kisses the three joined fingers (thumb, ring finger, and middle finger), showing his admiration for his lover's body.

The girl sees his gestures in the mirror and runs after him on stage, he tricks her, she slips, her dress rises, exposing her thighs, people laugh. Fairground theater!

After a while, in the guise of Romeo, the same actor appears persuasively. Juliet, in love and bewildered, extends her hands to him:

- Romeo save me from myself!

- It's a love story, baby, just say yes.

More laughter.

During my childhood, at the fairs there was only a puppet show with Mariorica and Vasilache. Invariably, Vasilache, who loved wine and women and made a living from his work, would take a jibe at Mariorica, a worthy mother and exemplary socialist worker, and the audience would laugh, just like now.

Other people's unhappiness is funny.

Let's laugh, "laughter is full of hope"!

I had been watching from afar, since childhood, at a fortune teller who played the flute.

I knew her, her name was Ghizela. She was still beautiful, with blonde braids.

He recognized me: "It's you, Mir"...

He took my left hand and fumbled for mysterious events, while his gaze searched my eyes.

- You did hard work... But why, because you were studying well.

- Come on, tell me, what do you see in your palm?

- What do I see in my palm or what do your eyes say?

- What's wrong with my eyes?

- Your eyes say more. Your eyes are sometimes like a storm, sometimes like a wheat field. 

"And what do you see, rain and storms? Poppies and cornflowers?" I teased her.

He told me life stories through the notes of the flute, reading my future in the tea leaves, in my most hidden desires.

Collect money in a small cup.

He was silent for a while, then took a blade embedded in an ivory sphere from a leather sheath and sliced ​​a pear.

He ate the golden pear, it seemed like he didn't care about me anymore.

I was getting ready to leave when he told me he would be back.

- To whom?

- To his life before. And... don't rush things!

"But I am his life before!" I squirmed, fearless.

"You're already in a hurry!" said the fortune teller, smiling. "Do you want a pear?"

My mind has been spiraling for a long time.

"You want to live everything, everything, fast" (his voice).

 

And, if you want to know the rest of the story...

The next day he looked for me.

Have my prayers reached high spheres and received approval?

I opened the door slowly.

I didn't jump into his arms, I wasn't a pampered cat.

That amused him greatly.

- I want you as you are, little crazy girl, come here quickly!

However, since then I have been living our love without expectations.

Rushing is something I choose to give up.

Carpe diem!

        You don't know what you're missing...

Guguloai

When I was born, birds flew across my retina, not memories from the future.

Even the past didn't bother to rush in, it was sleeping.

Since then, I have been left with a longing to fly.

 

I've often thought that roots have nothing to do with who we are now.

It is not, but it is!

They are related to everything we represent.

Memories inscribed on a child's retina and projected into the adult's soul and imagination influence some decisions.

The movement of things, until they make sense, that's what inspires.

We have strength written into our DNA, some hardships bring us down, others make us strong.

We are a malleable material for time, this "grinder" that grinds our days.

The desert, in life, can appear episodically, intermittently.

Unpredictable, life's journeys can end up in picturesque glades, on mountain peaks, close to the sky, or in a tangle of paths, knots, or crossroads.

We roll within ourselves just as we roll through life, real life, imaginary lives. We are lumps that gather all kinds of experiences in the movement through life, until they become ballast and make the ascent difficult.

Life is a miracle that we enter with screams of revolt, breathing insatiably.

It is nothing more than the road to death, the cruel destiny of the living being...

However, the time until the astral window opens can be a miracle.

Time to live, to spend, not to waste and lament.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Another picture in the album of time

The past is me.

I cannot forget the past – it is enough to look into the mirror of the soul.

 

Two old men lived in the whitewashed house and spoke very little to each other.

They had photos left, gathered together in paintings hung on the walls of their rooms, to soothe their longing for their absent children.

The thought of our pictures, which my mother looked at with love, reminded me of her expression " I miss you so much," which she said while beating her chest slowly but firmly, with her calloused hands clenched into fists.

The confession of a mother who stared at the road for a long time, with the sun in her eyes, to see if her children would appear, after hearing the bus passing from Roşiori.

He remained like that for a while, with a hand resting on his forehead.

I happened to be on the bus and was a little late, buying something from the village cooperative .

When I got home, I would find her with tears in her eyes, with a greenish light in her soul, in the small house from which love had left with us.

Her joy knew no bounds when she saw me.

Her hands... her hands, how they were looking for me!

She no longer had the myopic view of life, but was agile and happy.

Her moods alternated: she was cheerful, she looked at me with lust, and when I left, she relapsed into depression. She was one of those women who make children the only light of their existence.

Barefoot heart, tears

and abstract birds

There was a smiling shadow on the asphalt.

"I'm tired," he told me.

He sat down obediently on the stone slab.

Warm maternal eyes smiled from under the broboad.

 

I lost my mother early, she didn't have time to develop old age problems.

Only after the stroke did he rarely speak and shrug his shoulders.

Life had begun to slip from his eyes.

Her head bowed, her eyes burning with tears, her hands cupping her trembling chin - all of them softened when I got home and comforted her.

The smile that appeared filled her with something alive, she was once again the mother I knew.

Sadness and joy coexist...

I only felt half a child until my father followed suit.

I thought about childhood differently, more through the prism of their stories, than through my vague memories of my first years in the world.

The defense mechanism of life finds strange ways to anesthetize consciousness, to overcome the pain, and memory is a dear seal, cast on the surface of time, after the loss of parental love.

 

 

 

Watchtower

I sit down half a soul away towards the sky and return to the Hamlet.

I lean towards the windowsill of my dear souls, mom and dad, I open the window: how good there is in their souls!

The moon looks into the mirror, fireflies hover over the ground, stealing bits of night, and the steppe reapers make the night put palms of tar in its ears.

What a fuss about chicory!

I fall asleep in the gazebo.

Sleep is sweet, soft and silky, I believe I'm in a lighthouse, from where my eyes see seas paced by imaginary ships...

Darkness treads over immortelle and poppy fields, dragging behind it dear and long-gone shadows.

No, it wasn't a dream, it was just a blind walk on the edge of the path to the dream, a cosmic journey, with swaying echoes.

I woke up with doe eyes, a little teary , the sky was also clearing its gaze, under the clean morning breeze.

A clucking noise came from the coop, the hens' morning laying of eggs.

The cock, cocky, haughty, thrust his chest forward: "they are my lovers" spoke his kingly attitude.

The starlings this morning no longer darken the sky. They are afraid of the gazebo!

 

The gazebo disappeared with the cutting of the vine.

The spring hours unfold now as they did then, lazily, under the blooming cherry trees, among the beds of my mother's lilac carnations, next to the fountain.

Its stones are haunted by the spirit of the apple tree that produced green apples twice a year.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Recovery

Life sends trials that come and go, that's how mistakes, inventions, and great emotional miracles appear.

Then, with the taste of disappointment, the joy of success, or enriched with love, we move on.

A   pure soul will always find the way.

 

I place the clock on the eaves of my soul drunk with longing and wait to catch the silent hour when I return to my childhood.

In the cemetery on the hill, ancestors and heroes sleep soundly, protected by the knotted shroud of mother Geea.

In the grass covering the graves, the flies make small leaps.

I pluck the herbs and crush a sprig of God's wood between my fingers, the scent is raw and sweet.

I light candles and cry next to my parents' bones.

No, they are not in a better world, the earth is not a better place than your family.

I lie on their graves, my eyes on the azure sky between the branches of the bomb.

What a good brandy my father would have made from these bloody berries... Do they know they're so close?

The heat of the earth is responsible for their wandering souls.

I rested my head on the cross, do you hear me? I am here and I love you to the heavens!

I leave them lily of the valley, innocent bells. I love these flowers with the scent of mist and abandonment, I love the way they teach me to spend my being beyond everything that exists in time.

I hug my shoulders in a childlike embrace and leave. To be with the love of life alive again, coiled in brown braids, in eyes like honey, to cling to the hem of the swallow-like dress, dreaming of the Meadowlark...

In the Hawthorn Valley, without hawthorn, the paths of childhood slip through the blooming acacias.

The crows peck at the earrings lost by Gabicu Ubicuu's lovers in the grasses of hidden love.

The brambles shake off their sweet dew and the air shivers and opens the window of a new breath, in the beaks of the paired turtledoves.

I look out from the Valley and see the ghost of a small earthen house, hidden by blooming cherry trees.

At the gate, on the trunk of a small tree, mother and father had placed their vague shadows, a little shy, as if they couldn't find their place. They seemed to have come from afar and were tired, but they were smiling under the pale moon. Father took off his hat, it was beautiful when he smiled. Mother stretched out her gnarled hands and good as bread. She was crying lightly, of joy, of sadness.

The eyelids of the night closed emotions and opened, threshold after threshold, the doors of the small house where my childhood had been spoiled.

At the back door, Lessie, the faithful dog, grinned with happiness. The room was cold as spring. On the shelf, tiny jars with all kinds of seeds, collected by my father. Photos on the walls and macramés woven by my mother in the winters of her youth.

I can still see the yellowish bobbin running among the stretched threads and the mysterious pedals that crossed them, weaving soft and colorful cotton flowers...

A white house where I laughed and cried, with a kit of dreams and poems that I took with me when I left.

I knew I was going far away and wouldn't come back. I wanted to go alone, not have my ankles strangled by imaginary chains (it didn't always work out for me).

Let me not put millstones in my words, but the weight of knowledge and the goodness of my soul.

On the freshly whitewashed ceiling, not a single cobweb swayed its fragility, only the childhood elves giggled.

Mom lights the fire on the stove.

"'You must be hungry, we have Oltenia crayfish . Let's make some tea''."

She moved around the stove, lifting the cast- iron grates [26] and stoking the fire, gestures familiar to a mother who had spent a lot of time cooking dinner, sometimes from very little.

Dad looks at me, blinks: "How about some brandy?"

It was a ritual. I would drink hot brandy with my dad, even though I didn't like it, but it was good, clean , and it made me laugh and talk.

It started to rain, rains of photographs dripped among us, awakened by the cry of the deaf ash trees where blackbirds sing in summer, and time resembles a blackened and hindered autumn, which beckons storms and bitter screams.

In the walnut tree in the garden, the crows move from one foot to the other.

How is Floricica doing, I ask? (my beloved little one).

"She died," replies the father. "She was old."

Time, what is time? Where does it go, when does it go?

We went outside, we stopped, the rain stopped.

We then walked from one end of the garden to the other, crushing the vine spirals between our teeth.

The flower path was open to the fountain, where I had injured my fingers trying to stop the dropped crank one summer.

How the mother had rushed in a heartbeat to Aunt Lisăndrina, the village midwife, to save her injured baby!

The silky pears hung heavy and sweet on the old branches.

Mother's lilac carnations were blooming around the fountain. Summer had come!

Stay with us, dear seasons!

Do not let the Empty Sack [27] blow mercilessly upon our sunny souls of farewell.  

I see them blinking. They are sleeping forever!

I embrace them with my childlike love and watch them perish, silently.

One day, under the grafted mulberry tree, Nana asked me about heaven and earth.

I told him that the horizon is the jagged line where they touch and I pointed to it there, over the hilltop, where there may or may not have once been a hawthorn, on the crest of which my father had planted small trees.

I didn't suspect then that that's where my stories would come from...

Nana would not allow a separation.

He saw love as a whole, a form of magic that reached high and deep.

"I love you as much as heaven and earth," he told me then.

The zenith and nadir vibrated in her love for her younger sister...

I look around: a deserted place, instead of a house!

I look towards Hawthorn Valley: the stumps of the trees that couldn't defend themselves from the fools.

And I wake up from childhood before midnight presses darkness over the Hamlet, the noise of barking dogs and fireflies.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This moment is about to rain...

It's not easy to write about returning home, to write small letters, like Lilliputian footsteps on the spring snows .

 

Today I arrived in my childhood in the evening. My mother had gone out to put away the laundry, a storm had begun with lightning flashes, sneaky flashes from the heavens, on the hilltop, my back tired. With full arms she enters the awning, goes out quickly, closes the gate, puts on the chain, calls Lessie and throws her a piece of polenta. She raised her eyes to the stars and stretched her hand out, the rain had not started. The wind seemed to be a creature that had escaped into the world, a messenger, I saw one of the letters from the RR hanging from the bushes near the fence, it was written with a pen and the letters had become vague, as if time had cried a little over the love in the boy's words: ''Forget that you are so far away and look into my eyes, then ask me anything - I will answer you'' .

 I smiled with the weak smile of the woman in whose soul RR would always remain a beautiful and in love teenager, whom I had loved, whom I had not looked into his eyes very often. I had not asked him everything, but he had nevertheless answered my silent questions, even though he had left, carried away by a train, to another life. I was standing straight, the poplars on the Road were swaying and trembling, and in the yard the dwarf plum trees were shaking, laden with lilac plums, fleshy and sweet, good for jam. Every now and then the pears fell with a noise into the shade. Mother turned on the light, drew the curtains. I was looking at the lighted windows, small windows in the hall - large windows in the middle room.

I sat down on the bench in the shade. Thunder began to thunder, lightning flashed blue over the hill. As a child, they used to scare me, they were terrifying spears that cut through the sky, ready to tear it into strips that would fall on the world. But now no fear had any power over me, I was here, with my mother. The crows had gathered in the walnut tree again, they were croaking boldly. My father went out on the threshold and whistled in a certain way, the crows moved to the high-voltage pole. That was the domain of the woodpeckers (rockets), their squabbles often led to accidental electrocution, after such fights I would find a woodpecker lying with its beak pointed towards the sky - the crows always escaped.

On the table in the shade was an open book. The pages moved, it had a cherry leather cover. I had reached out to look at the title when my mother appeared in the shade, took the book, smoothed the pages and went back into the awning where Lessie was sleeping on the mat in front of the door. The cat crept between our legs - "shit!" (my father shooed her away) but she, scuttled, under the bed. The storm had subsided - it was only drizzling a little, and the sky had cleared. The old house, pressed by time, was torpid. Curious children were peering through the knots in the neighboring fences. The dew of life flickered in their eyes, and when they noticed that I was looking at them, they ran away giggling.

The hamlet became friendly with the night that had called out with a whir and had flashed with menacing eyes. The hens were pecking in the plum trees. My father had fallen asleep with his face to the wall. He was consumed by thoughts, and his body, crushed by silicosis, slept spasmodically. My mother, who wore glasses with high diopters, was reading. The passages from the Bible made her open her heart. She would then fall asleep with her back pressed against my father's. Side by side they walked on the waters of sleep, to the end of the world.

Minds can flee into skyless but mysterious abysses, the suffering of every elderly parent who rarely sees their children can be mourned or kept silent, but they, my parents, remain together in the spirit of the whitewashed house that fell into ruin because, anyway, it would have been decimated by thieves and fools.

The elders of the Hamlet left one by one to choose from the divine crosses.

I watched them with love and gratitude, as they slept in the acacia wood bed made by my father, thanking heaven that these two people met and loved each other.

I left my childhood quietly, leaving the warm hearths asleep and the Hamlet enveloped in the peace of sleep. Even the poplars by the roadside were asleep!

 

So, is that all?

These wounded words echo in the ears of days blinded by the tears of birds without a nest.

 

The last time I saw them together was in the hallway of Floreasca Hospital, both sick - my mother, after a stroke, immobilized in a wheelchair, and my father, suffering, with his lungs poisoned by prolonged inhalation of silica dust in the foundry where he had worked all his life.

They held hands and looked at each other quietly, smiling, without saying much to each other.

When his mother passed away and he was left in the empty house, he said of his mother, with a kind of exaltation: "she was so lively."

He missed her and I believe that, despite all the sad events that marked our childhood, they loved each other.

His death, which occurred only two years after his mother's, clouded his vision a week before. An old man gripped by the inevitable. He knew it was the end and had become gentle. "I kiss your hand," he said gratefully, looking at Aunt Florica and Nana, who watched over him in agony.

He, who called his mother with the strange nickname "me, don't you hear me", who refused to hold her hand or arm and had never kissed a woman's hand...

It was a December morning.

He was suffocating and breathing less and less, to escape the burning in his lungs.

He knew it was dawn outside, even though his eyes were closed.

Then the eyes of the soul closed too, breathing, all life - stopped, and a great, great silence fell upon the world.

Everything that was his being was lost somewhere in the Universe.

 

A whirlwind approached in undulating spirals, at first a trickle that, as it swept mercilessly in its path, became a threatening roar. In the middle grinned the eye of the hurricane. Cyclops dancing in diabolical rhythms. The latest illusions of the poor suffering soul lay embraced in the eye of the typhoon.

 

Pain - a price paid for the fall into ruin of matter. Denial, anger, fear, acceptance, before the agony phase, paradoxical sliding through memories, crystallization of the venom that gnawed at the inside or wounded dear souls, reconciliation, embracing the good, then, definitively and irreversibly, flight.

Moments die of exhaustion and perish beyond the edge of life, drunkenness of flight.

Release from poison. Peace. Rediscovery.

Fucking death. Rămân urme prelungi de ne-viață: așadar, asta-i tot ? 

Some elderly people seem at peace, as if they are sure of their place in the world and, somehow, anticipate the place to which their serene souls will one day flee...

They only feel adrift in the last moments: what if there is nothing beyond? What if everything was here, their only life?

Life is an anticipated war with time, compromises, renunciations and regrets, steps to heaven that rest on the shoulders of the Ilan tree, the tree of life.

When you get tired, you take a moment to rest – you don't know where the time of your youth went, it was there, it was then, with the welcoming foreboding of mystery.

He slipped down the crazy slope of life, into the gaping mouth of the Pebbled Cave, where old age waits silently.

The tear of farewell is a fresh breath on the bark of the Ilan tree.

 

 

 

The gateway to the dream

The gateway to dreams is like a portal - the sleeping brain sends us into strange worlds, where everything that happens to us seems real, we participate emotionally.

We walk against the wind, we fall like boulders, we fly, we cry and laugh, we witness dramatic scenes and something prevents us from intervening, we have contradictions that seem to occupy our entire night, we live romantic stories, we fall in love with beings we have never seen, we make love, and waking up leaves a confused and sweet feeling, throughout the day, with the thought of an inaccessible being.

Although, it seems, the dream lasts for a moment!

Stars, by their very definition, bring brightness, light, and color into the darkness.

The game of taking a star for dreams is so that we have a guide, so that we don't fall into a bad dream , a dream that doesn't bring fear, but that induces confusion, the heart beats in the throat and the unfolding in reality seems imminent, even if you look around you and know that you are awake.

The nightmare is beyond imagination.

The dream that limits life, that destroys the world, the cataclysm...

 

 

 

 

Astral navel

2008. September came with a parade of colors, a play of green in all shades, yellow, purple, orange, turquoise...

 

The city under the rain looked like in Leonid Afremov's paintings. Full of colors, a little vague and with plays of light reflections: wandering shadows, lanterns shining in the night.

Even static paintings have vivacity.

A park bench - The Loneliness of Autumn, you might think it's a sad image, but the lights and colors, the rain - a predominant element, make the bench vibrate, charged with radiance, in anticipation.

Barely visible silhouettes on the garden paths.

The man is protective when he accompanies the child.

Scenes that reflect seduction, tenderness when accompanying the woman.

The woman in love, sheltered under her lover's umbrella, the   contemplative woman, with her legs twisted in a spiral, lost in music, the elegant woman, on her way to the office or walking lazily with her child in her arms, through the rain, covered by the azure umbrella.

The city in my mind had become restless, and the sky was damp and gray.

I had a sprained left leg, and the uncertainty of physical movements tormented me.

 I liked to control everything: my thoughts, my movement, my heart.

I would have liked to keep even my dreams under lock and key, so they wouldn't invade me at night, disturbing me without meaning to.

I was looking at the light, forgetting the dream.

One night I had a dream that I remembered clearly in the morning.

Somewhere up there, very high up, there was a white light.

Beings animated by a mysterious energy, whose movements slowed down, as if played by an unseen video recorder, and I, participant and spectator, looked with the eyes of the spirit at these creatures who seemed not to see me - or to ignore me.

I was a child, I was like a shadow, and sometimes they came dangerously close, as if they could cross me.

An invisible thread shook me and I broke free, and the movement by which I left the enigmatic and high place was not as if I was being drawn by that thread, but like a falling boulder that, upon awakening, makes the heart pound and the body jerk violently.

I was lying in bed, bewildered and lacking energy, overcome with great wonder.

Something guided me through the strange universe of the dream and brought me back to my female body. 

I never understood why I dreamed of people I'd never seen, colors that didn't exist, songs that no one composed, and why, when I woke up and looked at the light, I forgot what they were like, I only remembered what I was like.

At 10 o'clock the phone rang.

Nana was crying.

Roberto had been in a car accident.

 

 

 

 

Love, Despair, Dreams...

It was really hard for me to think that someone dear to me could leave us.

One day we were seeing each other, then he died...

 

I imagine that we have all been touched by death in one way or another: the death of a hope, of a love, of the puppy we grew up with, of someone dear - a grandparent, a parent, a spouse, a child, a friend...

I associated some of my memories with death.

A perfume, vanilla ice cream, the cuckoo's song that faded away with the fireflies, a red umbrella.

The memories we have of our lives with the lost are what take the form of the stories we share with loved ones and friends, in remembrance of the souls who have reached Heaven.

 

The accident.

An image stuck between the eyelids: the body writhing in pain, the legs trapped in a crushed vehicle, the strangled voice "I can't breathe."

Life that still flickers vaguely, giving hope, stirring adrenaline: "the important thing is to live."

 

The sky was silent, it had only sent its angels.

The silent soul, pulverized in a halo, was searching for the rhythm of the heart.

Roberto was just a boy who dreamed of living, only God heard his inner scream and saw that living fire go out.

His soul remained there, watching, weakly nestled in his body, a nest robbed of life. The ambulance finally arrived and took that dear man, leaving behind his brown eyes, still waiting, to hear the melody, Choir of Angels.

Craiova Emergency Hospital.

There were only two beds in the ward: two frozen bodies, with purple foreheads, which I guessed were cold, under which lay suffering people who were only partially anesthetized.

There were two kinds of souls crying speechlessly, with tears of soul cold, not understanding, in the darkness induced by drugs, the horror of their destinies.

In the next few hours, there would be two ways to die.

The white walls were witnesses to silent pain, for a day or two, when the pain would disappear with life.

Something had happened to his legs, he felt a burning sensation in his chest, he was breathing through a hose, and spears were piercing his body. His mind was foggy.

If only he would fall asleep!

He saw a small creature looking at him. He was searching for something in its eyes, some encouragement.

The doctor's gaze spoke in a way of end-of-life. He did not find the message of continuity of life in the words spoken with encouraging gentleness.

The line had broken shortly before noon. 

I took the first train and arrived at the hospital in the evening.

In the hallway, two resident doctors were talking about him. Distant voices played back fragments of a chilling conversation: “ A terrible accident”… “ He lost a lot of blood”… “ He’s crushed”…

A woman was crying bitterly, her temple pressed against the wall, her hands hugging her body: "Why, God, why him, why him?", and I couldn't help but think that her words also contained a cry for herself: "Why me, why me?".

God had His way of answering...

We spent the rest of the night in a strange room, praying.

Nana knew it was the end, she is a medical professional and had seen the chart with his vital signs, but there was hope. With her in my sleepy mind, I dozed off, a shaky sleep. In the morning I jolted into a reality that I wished I could replace with a dream.

The white September morning was indifferent to the drama that had changed the destiny of a family.

“He's conscious and cold,” Nana told me.

The city was going through its early morning, the noises increasing or decreasing, nervous horns or screeching wheels, the murmur of people, talking carelessly, cheerfully even about the small negotiations in the market or about their naughty children they were taking to kindergarten.

In the hospital, the pain in the wards was heard through wails, sighs, and desperate crying. Eyes patched with sleep, staring into space. In the courtyard, the siren of an ambulance.

He was conscious and yes, he was cold. He was desperately pressing his limbs, a sign that he was feeling severe pain, despite the anesthetic.

 With an unsteady finger he traced words on Nana's palm. It hurts! Where am I? Am I going to die?

And, remembering that it was his son's birthday: Happy birthday , Edi . Don't cry - and tears were shining in his eyes .

"Don't cry," Nana cooed.

He was smiling, and she reproached him bitterly for that smile.

He wished he could have told her that those were their last moments together. He told her with a smile that he would live.

I called Raed Arafat, who sent a helicopter to transport me to Floreasca Emergency Hospital.

"Let's go home, my love!"

As the stretcher bearers carried him to the ambulance, he looked at us alertly. How can you not melt with pain when you know that those eyes that once sparkled with humor, intelligence, and kindness are looking dully at a group of loved ones for the last time?

The Smurd helicopter was a distant dot on the horizon.

I was following him flying to Bucharest.

We were tired travelers on the train, but hope never tired.

Dr. Marek spoke to us in few words about the limb amputation, which should have been performed in the hospital in Craiova, to increase the chances of survival.

Nana had run after the blood bags.

That night I looked at the sky, but I didn't see any stars.

How great is the pain when a cruel destiny traces the path to destruction, sleep still creeps into the body. Awakening is a tragic bulb, from which a poisonous plant sprouts: you do not want this reality.

In my sleep, I forgot what I would miss the next day: spiritual serenity.

In the morning, we donated blood, as did our family and friends, a group of worried, grieving people.

Do we ever think about how precious our blood is, when someone depends on our small gesture of donating?

The wait for good news was in vain. I went outside.

On such a clear September day, under the gentle sun, the sad found comfort in its light. On a day like this, I would not have thought about the tragedy except, perhaps, watching the evening news on television.

- I want my life back! Nana was crying heartbreakingly.

Out of nowhere, a breeze arose, stirring the leaves in the alleys.

My heart sank. There are signs through which, as if, nature is speaking to us.

I heard someone call out to me. It was Cristina Gheorghe, an intensive care nurse.

I ran with Nana and May to catch him alive. Illusion!

I saw a small body, for a moment I thought it was a mistake.

He had been a tall man, and his lack of limbs made him the size of a child.

The body was still warm, it was artificially animated with the oxygen hose, which gave the impression of still flickering life.

A body that not long after arrived at his home for the last time.

I looked at him with the terrible impression that this was not our man, but I spoke to him as if he could hear us, I untangled memories that connected us to him, at the vigil, memories are gentle...

On the way to the cemetery, I mourned him, the earth covered him dark and heavy, and flowers and weeds invaded him, a traveler in a cold solitude, beyond life or, perhaps, part of an unimaginably bright world.

Three words are written on his tombstone: Love, Despair, Dreams.

 

Today, I look out my window at a white sky and write about this soul that left our world too soon, as if it were alive .

There are many things wrong in life that lead to death: slipping out of life pushed by the speed of others' living, fleeing life, other forms of death in life.

Roberto had loved life intensely but he experienced dramatic moments and lost it in a situation into which chance and people's bad choices threw him: the rush of a kid to overtake, going the wrong way, who spoke arrogantly about his wonderful stunts during the accident, who was not punished by justice or his own conscience.

In Roberto's death story, the pull of tragedy caused the inexperienced and hasty driver's foot to slip, he was already in the depths, accelerating, and his mind was fleeing into darkness...

How did you get there, being who caused death? You derailed, then somehow got out, searching within yourself for strength and courage and around you for something to grab onto, without hurting others, saving them, if necessary. But you remained alive and frozen in the fear of your own injury (a gash), crushing a special man to death.

Previous experience is a good teacher, but it's not always the best. Experience is over the starting line. You step over it, you get there safely. Or...

From there begins the new lesson of life. But this is not true for fools, because " fools, in the platitude of their common thinking, are no less frightening". And, paradoxically, fools escape with their lives...

In court, a life lost in a road accident ends up being valued at several thousand lei. " You don't want to get rich , " the dinosaurs in the Oltenia courts grumbled.

This drama put Nana in an absurd, painful state.

But a mother rises from the darkness of suffering when she has a child deprived of a father's love forever!

Life is an acceptable risk, provided we forge our own path and don't lose it too often.

And if other paths attract steps, how good it would be if every wandering could illuminate the future.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The beach of nothingness

You live in a hurry, you risk dying...

Living with a sleeping soul is like a raft.

To live, risking death, is a gift.

And how lucky you are if you meet love!

 

Nana could not accept his absence.

Before, Roberto simply existed, he knew he would come.

Now she was waiting for him and couldn't help but hope that he would appear, filling the doorway with his stature.

He would startle when he heard footsteps in the hallway of the apartment building, but they never resembled the way he walked.

After the crying, the revolt followed.

He felt his spiritual dryness and malice.

She blamed him, argued with his memory - it was easier for her that way. But it didn't last long. Tenderness flooded her mind. Her soul, full of him again, defended itself with vivid memories.

Then came the lamentation. He no longer looked at the old or new photographs, nor did he rummage through the letters they had sent each other.

He would sometimes hear a song he liked, Sweet about me , sung by Gabriella Cilmi.

The objects that belonged to him were emptied of him, of the energy that had shuddered his life. He had left footprints in a soul that was left alone and would become sick with longing. He had left for a flat land of a timeless time. 

It's late and raining. I imagine the beach of nothingness, lying silent beside an imaginary sea . I try to bring them back together on their last vacation. With eyes of memory, I draw, far away, small steps, big steps and the tiny footprints left by Thor, his dog.

Nana still feels the numb tenderness of the wrist he kissed when she woke up. He is beside her, he is here, even though I know he will disappear.

I take a few steps forward, turn around, look for them, smile at Nana, who extends her hands towards him.

It starts to rain. Nana always associates the rain, not with the fear of thunder and the running away from the cold drops, but with the feeling that she felt protected, no matter how big the storm, because it whispered to her: Don't be afraid, you are with me.

Gray sky over the bushes and young trees in the cemetery near Progresul Station. A lonely woman at the foot of a stone grave. A resting field that has become the home of many people with old or prematurely diminished lives.

The wind swallows the woman's whispered cry, and her pain creeps between the words of the heavy marble reminder: Love, Despair, Dreams , homage to the man who once was.

I know my story won't bring Roberto back.

I can only imagine that his desire to have stayed alive would have been greater than the regret of having gone to eternity so young. 

What happens when love is buried in the ground?

The soul left outside of love is also surrounded by walls, by a gray and gloomy feeling of panic, surrounded by anxieties and helplessness.

 

 

Goat embroidery on Călmățui

I put the clock on the corner of the house, the path's thread creeps towards the vineyard.

I'm standing on the parapet.

I eagerly await those spring rains with the scent of briar, for the dawn to climb the fence, the row of vineyards, the whitewashed basin of the fountain, and for the sky to keep the light burning in the heart of the village, I know it won't go out until my return...

I look towards the valley.

The Călmățui stream has white, moving banks - goat embroidery. 

The roads home are no longer well-trodden like in childhood, now they are dusty, my feet are no longer imprinted in the soft dirt, there are no parents and no home.

Their beloved shadows stretch under old storm branches, they gather acorns, the astonished squirrels giggle under the orange sun.

 

 

 

The Zavera Hill

There is so much freshness around me!

My eyes fill with serenity.

The acacias have bloomed, the clusters of sweet brebenei, with satiny petals, hang like earrings. The sun glides over the fields, over the valleys and hills and over the marshy meadow near Călmățui.

The scarecrows of starlings in the vineyard, with faded rags, weathered by the frost and the rains and snows of several seasons, gesticulate gently, puppets in the breeze.  

I fall asleep on Magura Zaverei, in the shade of a tree that grew next to the amputated trunk of the towering storm that raged during my childhood.

I wake up and feel the scarlet march of a thousand ants on my arms and neck.

Someone forgot a sickle and a jug of water here, it has a corn cob plug.

A dolphin leaps on the horizon, cute clouds play in the sky.

The mix of red, pink, blue, orange in the twilight reminds me of the random painting of the gazebo perched in the grapevine canopy, done by my sister, Geo.

We were children, we were in the hollow of a graceful time...

I say goodbye to the place that, once upon a time, when I chose a star as a child, meant everything to me – family, love.

My memories flicker through the pages of this book with the love of life that my mother instilled in me. 

Living energy

It's a dry summer, and the earth longs for rain.

I open the window.

In front of my house a little girl is playing in the company of the August sun.

Stormy clouds carry his smile.

Angry voices and a woman's crying can be heard from the neighboring block.

In dilapidated houses, in downtown apartments, or in villas built on cornfields in residential areas, love mourns its own absence.

There is a living energy in my house, my traveling spirit.

The rays fall over the neighborhood but signs announcing the storm can be seen in the distance.

In the stony fields, poppies die in dwarf fields.

I like how the skies play, how the azure passes from one sky to another, but it doesn't always banish the threat of the storm.

There, between the skies, memories are alive, there are elves dancing above the storm.

Not everything is good when it ends well, not everything is good because it ends. The dream remains. To glimpse the next moment, tomorrow.

It's strange how life throbs with the future, how all our longings go there, uncontrolled, and the present curls up unlived.

His essence is being diluted, too many unrealistic expectations!

Time is twitching in a circle, like a spider in the center of its web. I will never know why it runs. I once speculated that it is searching for itself. But I think it is frightened by something, always on the run, like a frightened piglet with an angry beast blowing on its back.

Remembering things that pass by…

Our possessions are temporary, but when I got tired and lay down on the good earth, like a flower with its fragrance slightly crushed from repeated longings, I did not hesitate to remain with a serene forehead, with my nose in the wind, with my soul at the stars and with my roots in childhood, keeping in my nostrils the warm smell of home, of borangic, fibers woven with silk and love, with a homespun war. 

 

 

 

 

 

Memories with the flavor of childhood

End of autumn.

The sky hangs mournfully, dotted with the flight of crows and gray lines.

You no longer see the clash of white clouds, nor does the sun wander around all day long, making a proud arc.

It's still sneaking around a little bit.

The weather looks pretty much like a polite refusal.

A little frost this morning, a flurry tonight.

The moon is no longer orange, it has become pale and seems to be hiding.

The maple trees in front of the window have lost their leaves.

Someone set fire to the leaves in the parking lot, they are smoldering.

The halo of smoke clouds reaching the window awakens in me a time far away. I don't know how I can keep the memory of burnt wood, of laundry brought to the heat, smelling of frost, and of childhood.

And I don't know why, finding out that someone who was repairing an old silver candle last night thought of me, I got emotional and imagined that I was a traveler in the future.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Meeting with myself

I wake up every morning because I have a date with myself.

I breathe and smile.

The places I visited in my dream, the waters that swirled like a riot of aquatic monsters and became still, the ridge from which I watched the entrance to the dream house dissipated with the light.

The smile hidden behind my morning rituals, while I looked in the mirror, received an extra dose of amusement after I looked out the window, at the little garden in front of the window.

Between the bushes, a puppy was sniffing the wet leaves, then concentrated a bit, leaving a steaming ball under my window and contentedly pawing at the grass.

The little furry one looked at me every now and then.

He knew I saw him.

He ran to his plump, platinum-haired mistress, who pretended not to see anything, waving a hand full of stupid bracelets in the air while probably decreeing in her mind: "there are more important things than a little puppy shit under your window"!

I invite you for a walk.

I walk in the dead grass and I don't care about the weather, because I don't like autumn anyway. Every step is gnawed gravel, under which slinking lizards squirm, the hot traces of our passage through summer.

I look at the sky - the clouds look harmless, like teddy bears fighting over childhood, there's something strange about this autumn morning light, too artificial, it hurts the eyes.

Only untamed hair flirts with a gust of wind.

In the sky - arrows of crumpled birds.

In the mornings I always feel like a younger version of myself, waiting to learn something new, and in the evenings I stroll leisurely, in the company of someone who has so much to forget that they are scratching late histories on their retinas.

I stop looking at the people and buildings that shine in vibrant colors, and look at the sky: look at how the white moon disappears behind the city, I think out loud.

Daylight makes it look like a moonlit sky, shadows scatter it and it scatters across the world.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Give moments of love...

Time has stripped my heart of some bitter memories and preserved them clear, tender.

My youth was crazy music, learning, working, loving, making love, giving birth to a child.

In my rush to live, I often made mistakes, wasted time, and gave up on my dreams. Fragile, I moved on, swayed by the uncertain movements of this miracle that is life. 

Maturity places a melancholy wave or roundness on the face, and at the corners of the eyes small rays of concern or joy.

There are many things wrong, but life is part of the mystery of the Great Universe.

Time is a wonderful meadow when you are happy.

The worst thing on the edge of life is death.

Old age, "heavy clothes" and illness, precede it... sinister sides of life, because they push the being towards helplessness and eternal silence.

The time of the heart feels like you've become a child, while the time on the outside caresses the worn silk of the skin and the rays from the corners of the eyes.

And he too closes the eyelids under which all memories have faded.

I can't find my place on earth.

I live in a cosmic time and I am agitated by the strange effect of the moon's movements.

When I manage to detach myself from the grayness of the world, I become a being full of possibilities, optimistic, serene, I find myself glued to the pendulum of timeless time, and my spirit reaches an incomparable light.

It is love, exaltation, dedication, peace, abundance, silence, health, and the eyes see a rainbow core. And

A thought comes to me - this is what silence is like.

I am silence myself.

I stand on the threshold of a vast unknown world.

An impossibly bright sphere plays between my palms.

 

In the Calmatui Valley...

Nana looked at me as I was dreaming under the hayloft, smiling.

Smile almost as bright as the beauty of her heart.

I could hear his thoughts: "Mir is cosmic."

And the sun had set behind the hills.

- Under the starry sky it would be good to dream. Do you know what you can do under the starry sky?

- Should I look for Orion's belt?

 

 

 

 

 

 

Having children…

Having children is an accident or a choice, but you have to come from a world gifted with the gift of procreation.

Having children is an acceptable risk, almost as high as not having any at all.

When you have children, a tender and caring light is born in your soul for the little creatures.

Fragile worlds where reality sneaks in, leaving scars, weaving chains around ankles, with samples of selfishness and uncertainty.

You think about the little beings with the joy that your smile will creep onto their faces and, especially, that something of you will enter eternity through them.

They remain children to you even when they have children of their own.

How fast they grow!

They grow up and you wait for them to come home in the evenings, they come with the scent of fearless youth that ignites fires in the chests of boys running through their bodies, intensifying the hunger in their eyes, for beauty, which makes love to girls, and in them arouses the desire to be loved, respected, protected, to achieve stability.

 

 

 

 

We are called to love.

Children should be supervised by a happy adult who knows how to play.

What makes an adult happy in the company of children? To become a child again, for a while! To "put oneself in the mind of children".

Have fun, be yourself, and the other kids will come to you.

If you looked closely at the sparkle in their eyes, with childlike eyes, you could see their dreams!

Do you remember your childhood pockets?

Colored pebbles and shards, half-cracked acorns, pigeon feathers, tinfoil, empty penicillin bottles from Aunt Lisăndrina, the Hamlet's midwife, "filled with beast grass"...

Isn't it amazing how many things end up in children's pockets?

By the end of the day they are filled with all the little things that their hearts yearned for, that brought them joy, and that they wanted to keep for later.

What would it be like to remain an eternal child, where the Land of Stories never ends? Take a look inside your soul and meet the child you were, the elf's gaze, even before you did something stupid. 

Growing up, you became a realist, too often living a routine life, leaving the dream life somewhere, in a place (in time) where you think about returning someday, but no, not now.

"It's time," you tell yourself.

Time is running out, however, and you find that it takes you too long to return to the Land of Stories, and anyway, you don't know which dream to return to.

Destiny winks every now and then, and in difficult times, when you look over your shoulder, you see pale scars behind you, from hasty departures or from reunions that have lost their momentum in automatisms and routine.

Cynics define dreamers as being brambura .

A dreamer is no less frightening than the man firmly attached to the back of reality, for whom dreaming is a waste of time, or for the one who has stopped dreaming.

The dream is born from pure desire, determination, love.

When you leave him, immediately after birth, you bury him in the placenta of exasperation.

Cruelty to a baby...

The trees are starting to come back to life, the swallows are mending their nests from a year ago.

And this beautiful spring breathes within us...

 

 

 

 

 

I'm happy we're here.

Dia

When you come back after an absence, emotions break the silence, and my heart jumps out of my chest, I can't breathe.

You've grown up... You're tall!

My chin barely touches your kind and fragile shoulder, wrapped in love, on which I do not cry, because that is where I smile, most often in secret, with my face bare of worry. Your emotions put my heart back together, I listen to the words and the childish laughter and feel this clean spring with the scent of saltwort.

Mornings cast beams of light on rooftops, on untrodden roads, in fields, in cities, on the heads of travelers.

I hear a dove cooing.

It has rained and the air is clear.

The sky is here too, with sunshine all around, from sunrise to sunset.

The morning sun twinkled on a block ridge, and my eyes flinched at the silver intensity.

I entered her room.

On the desk - cups of sea buckthorn tea, lipstick-colored napkins, written notes, pink objects and turquoise light that changes its intensity, following the play of rays, of course, they are fascinated in trying to find the meaning of her dream, in which she smiles.

The bluish lines on my girl's wrists pulsed gently, she slept peacefully, her hair on her shoulders and on the pillow, like a fan.

A few freckles marked the beauty of the arms, the fine bones - the fragility.

Before he was born, I imagined that God was going to paint azure on his retina, to resemble Dandu, but it was not to be.

Her honey-like eyes are wonderful and they read my soul with mastery.

When she was little, she liked sweets and cereal.

The cereal nuggets rustled in the bowl, and the milk ran down her chin in white streams. 

Babies have a sweet smell of milk and innocence!...

I look out the window: the alleys are paved with dry pods, long and shiny, like mahogany, fallen from the boyar acacia in the garden, the small leaves slide between the fingers of the trees, the late autumn breeze.

The seeds that I imagine sleeping under the pods awaken the rest of the day, I feel the softness of lunch. I quietly retreat but, at that moment, her phone alarm starts ringing: I feel so close to you right now.

I keep looking at her, she keeps sleeping...

 

 

 

 

 

Hai-hui through the city, on a Friday..

The leaves gather near the curb.

A girl in a seasonal dress and a boy laugh and throw leaves into the air, nature's confetti, as if at a holiday parade or on a vacation yet to be experienced.

The sun powders everything it touches with gold, the wind plays recklessly with the girl's hair.

It's Friday and at night the lights will devour the city: Museum Night.

In the sky, clouds are always moving, changing shape, taking on different faces, looking like dragons or cloud ghosts.

On the streets, people are always moving, changing their opinions, losing their beliefs, looking for love and, like clouds, taking on different forms, appearing as dragons or human ghosts.

In University Square, groups of people with sad faces chant various slogans: "We're fed up!", "Down with corruption!". "The wound of injustice" - the clenching of their hearts, with five fingers of anger.

Others pretend, with their hands in their pockets, that they are uninvolved.

"This is none of my business," their eyes say.

Mature men who hold hands with young women look at them as more than just an accessory.

Beautiful, free-spirited teenagers play rock music at the Fountain.

Its water is defiantly clear, but no one cares.

On the walls of the Faculty of Architecture, someone naively wrote with spray graffiti:

I like you

i like you too and just what's that mean,

What are you going to do?

today - I think

I'll write a love note to you.

On the streets of the Old Center - mutants rejected by society, who lack everything. The glint of fear in their eyes makes them alive.

The city, last night, under the rain, had its alleys washed and the people were washed too, only the worries on their faces still lingered.

The colors had cooled from all the rain.

The stars had descended to find their way into the city center, and the sky had darkened completely.

Last night, at the Intercontinental, the stars were sleeping, tired.

Snowflakes danced in the air, the first snow of the year.

Night travelers were waiting for them to wake up.

What should people do with the stars?  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Happiness, the triumph of

affirming your love

Christmas usually starts in November.

The city is bustling, it is in a state of uproar.

Stores sell all kinds of objects to make people happy or relieve sadness.

This, while the frosty whirlwind twists snowdrifts, flattened beer cans, and newspapers thrown into the alleys.

Holiday thoughts also spiral.

The city doesn't just have houses full of light, where families live cheerfully, without hypocrisy, and sometimes they play childish, silly scenes through which they affirm their love.

The city has many homes where quarreling and despair are daily, relentless.

Happy people are concerned about their bright and comfortable state.

Simply put, the happiness they are blessed with makes them not see the side streets of life, where the unhappy wander...

They turn their gaze away from the scenes where filth and hatred are rampant, they protect their love and well-being.

 

 

 

 

 

The City - a walk on a winter evening through Bucharest

The ochre, damp leaves between our feet become battleships in an invading army.

We don't care about the stormy weather. We get lost a little every day, we wander through mountains of illusions, we don't find our bodies, only the bleached bones of deer discarded by spectral eagles and broken by stones, and our dreams dreaming on the edge of life.

The autumn shiver has silvered the horizon, it's winter for real!

I walk down Carol I Boulevard, away from the old buildings from which ice floes and pieces of plaster fall. The trees have been trimmed, the gnarled branches look like amputated arms, covered in snow.

I see a Christmas tree towards the University - a flickering hologram. Lights, bulbs. The frost-bitten concrete makes the steps of passers-by zigzag, avoiding frozen puddles. The traffic makes strange signs to the streetlights. Their orange light lengthens the hurried shadows. A cat sneaks into an abandoned basement. Under an eaves I see an old woman with a Bible to her chest. With her eyes closed she asks for nothing. Two girls pass by laughing, shining in the evening light. The shiny shopping bags, with the names of expensive stores written in bold letters, twist into fans. A taxi stops at one of their signs.

I walk through the passage towards Lipscani. A girl plays the cello. The music is sweet, sweet. The sound cries, then moves to the top of the passage and rumbles like the beating of a blue heart. The roar of the metro passes, arrow by arrow, under the passage.

I approach the house. The Youth Park is deserted, but lit up.

I send my thoughts to the sky, they are not stars. My memories are tendrils that stretch across space and time.

In my mind I touch many stars. I arrive home, Love opens the door, a child smiles at me on the threshold.

"How was your day?" Love asks me.

He invites me to the couch, I put my feet up on the coffee table, the mahogany shines like a soft chocolate, I move my fingers like a child.

The house smells of oranges and almond liqueur, Amarreto candies. In the evening, it lifts its eyelids. The house comes to life!

The child disappeared in the blink of an eye, then I heard a squeak. I looked around, no movement.

"I thought so," I said. Another squeak. "Whoever isn't ready, I'll take him with a shovel," I joined in the game. I searched everywhere, except behind the sofa. Before I got there, the crystalline laughter that greeted me triumphantly warned me that I was about to "get laid." I started counting: 10, 20, 30...

All the children hiding behind the couches need someone to look for them and not find them the first time...

I'm preparing dinner. The house is a buzz of joy, with the funny voices from cartoons, on the carpet - sheets painted by Dia with characters from "Happy Tree Friends", the song she hums while painting "especially for you, mommy".

Later, two heads with gray-blond hair, on the edge of the bed, muffled whispers, brief moments of laughter. Dandu and Dia… Father and daughter…

I am grateful for my family! My soul smiles like the sunrise over the city. When the shadows rise in the morning, the light burns all the carcasses of failures (no, not all of them).

The tiring moments of the day scream for life, a meaningless babbling.

In the evenings I wash away my fatigue with warm water and smile in the mirror with wet eyelashes (sometimes, when I don't forget about myself). In the bedroom, tempting, his spicy-scented cheek leaves me breathless...

I am grateful for the joys that touch my life.

 

In our little studio apartment

I can smell the snow.

Earlier it was snowing with big flakes, I was looking at the sky with Dia, laughing that another pillow fight was taking place between the gods.

The first snow always fascinates, it's like a rain of astral petals , it sculpts in me the pursuit, the sigh, will you come?

My bones are blue from all this waiting.

My soul dances under the pale moon, with snow on my head, intense and silent like a lonely finger on my lips.

I remember a snowless Christmas in our small studio apartment, the joy of decorating an artificial tree with a plastic leg.

The early mornings, when I felt you next to me, warm and asleep, breathing like a child, with your arms hugging the pillow, were a wonderful gift.

Frozen mornings chasing oranges, through the city that had become cheerful...

There are universes in the lines I trace in your palm.

The last time I played with your palms, I modified your happiness line, and your head line became in love.

The life line vibrates between days and nights.

The line of your heart throbs in my arteries, awakening shivers, burning under my temples a thought that haunts me naked.

We don't talk to each other because now you're dreaming across the English Channel, time is also dancing in circles with itself.

And we will always be together in our stories, whether kneeled by time or unconquered, serene, untold, only the unfilled spaces between them await our smiles of reunion, giggling on the railing of the porch of our house.

 

 

 

Twilight blue

I looked outside, the snowstorm was making its way to the window.

I fell asleep, and the sleepy thoughts of my mind drove my soul to an idyllic clearing, where my dear departed loved ones were.

Bobică and my childhood friend were there too.

I was happy, but I couldn't get close to them.

Then a vertigo began, and their souls spiraled towards the sky.

I start crying in my dream, I cry and dream, I dream and cry.

The feeling of loneliness woke me up.

He had caught me sleeping in the evening, it was still snowing, and the sky was scrawling the air with a misty twilight, without a moon, without stars.

Every tear I cried felt like a snowflake kissing my soul, soft, cold, melted with shyness.

I went out to buy bread and milk.

Nearby, children were skating on the glassy Dâmbovița, beneath which the water trembled with cold.

The joy of the children and the fog with neon lights on the river's surface made me smile and feel like playing.

I found a shiny strip and hit the ice, like I did as a child.

I slipped, the kids laughed at me, I got involved in a snowball fight with the neighborhood teenagers, and I returned home without milk and without bread, with the joy of playing.

When you feel down, go outside into the light!

 

Time travel

Dreaming helps my mind fly. It intensifies my emotions. It calms my emotions.

I think of flying not as a pair of wings in the closet, but as a detachment from myself, but also a rediscovery.

The essence of my being can travel anywhere in time. It becomes one with everything around it, captures a time far away and remains riveted, when stories startle people from other times.

I feel surprised by the past in me when it bursts in like a childhood ghost gone to play. It returns home hopping from one foot to the other, playing hide-and-seek.

I missed an aquatic dream, I hadn't seen a waterfall since my adolescence.

I closed my eyes and was transported to a plateau surrounded by a liquid enchantment: Norval Waterfall.

I was looking at the waters, the mist growing into a rainbow.

I was looking at the sky, my worries falling vertically with the swirling waterfall, while my thoughts drifted like cotton candy clouds into the Blue World.

I was alone and I missed the world, the sins, and that carefree happiness.

I woke up in the courtyard of the country house with a veranda in Băcăleşti.

I sat on the grass, next to the fig tree, and breathed in the cool air.

 I looked at the sky again, it was cloudy and the air was churning - the storm was coming.

In this dream I loved storms!

The thunder that tore the air, the zigzag lightning, the rain, the wind that shook the poplars and bent the branchy trees, the rushing waters of the Călmățuiului, which swelled over the bridge...

The house was shaking, and the windows were closing – opening.

The door of the house opened and out came a petite orange - Nana.

He rushed to collect the laundry that had been hung out to dry from the ridge [28] .

He didn't notice me.

Then Roberto came out, took the laundry from my little sister's arms, and then they both disappeared into the house.

I stood up and took one last look at the house.

Nana was taking off her orange dress, laughing, her hair flowing.

Storms didn't scare her either.

Robert approached with a large towel, brushed the wet strands from her forehead, then they drew the curtains.

Their love made the house come alive.  

I went back to my time, took off my red dress, and let the water wash away history. What a beautiful dream! A dimension in which Robert existed and Nana was happy.

 

 

Taboo

As a child, when sex became the big conspiracy, I began to understand that it was viewed as "a sin."

Those who supported this had good intentions. I became even more curious to find out: why? No one said anything (explaining anything to children about sex was taboo).

In my early memories:

Sometimes I would find little lumps in the haystacks, pretending to do "that thing" ("silly").

They would run around with their pants down, they wouldn't go out to play for a while, their parents would punish them and the rest of us would laugh at them.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There are places waiting for me

There are endless beaches that nothing else touches except the present.

There are beaches where beauty, youth, hypocrisy touch the mica particles, sparkling in a hot summer.

The stories that are born on nocturnal beaches are difficult to locate in the murmur of the waves, only the sea knows them, sometimes the moon.

There are people who have never seen the sea.

Just like my parents...

There are places that await me, just as I sometimes await words, and they come for me and I have only one thought: to awaken an echo in the hearts of those who will read them, to delight, to thrill.

An idea that sprouts and leads to the creation of a story is like a frenetic moment that you make dance.

One idea calls for another idea, stories in the midday sun or in enchanting nights of creative solitude.

And when those days come when nothing happens, when no idea rises in the great sky of words, not even a small, timid one, inspiration dries up, leaving you empty.

I wander lost in thought, close the computer and start sharpening imaginary pencils.

And there is a wait (the wait for nothing). Then...

On a day that seems to have nothing special compared to other days, I think I hear light footsteps moving away, but paradoxically, they stop at my door: it's the Muse Bliss.

I fill the golden-capped pen from my childhood with the ink of your eyes and begin to write.

The pen…

I kept it as a talisman because I had written my first poems with it, at the suggestion of Mrs. Mariana Peşu, my high school Romanian teacher.

With large, shadowy eyes, she was beautiful and dynamic, a beloved teacher.

He spoke to us about time in verse, in an ecstatic tone: "Oh, a moment, stay, you are so beautiful!" I was trying to reserve this privilege for a single moment, but they all seemed to be similar.

Likewise, living in vain, the wastefulness that the kind-hearted teacher spoke to us about, with a sweet accent: "Isn't it a sin to waste the fleeting moment that was given to us?"

Now, when my heart rejoices, I think: that was a happy moment!

 

Someone hurt me emotionally.

If only I could just forget!

Wouldn't it be easier to forgive?

Forgiveness does not mean that I am going to forget and put myself in the same painful situation again. Forgiveness, not forgetting, does not absolve the person who offended me of guilt, but it does not prevent me from wishing what is good for them, for their correction.

My own release from the problem may be the hardest part.

To keep my heart clear, without the burden of regret that I agreed to spend too much time with a person who enjoys emotionally abusing others because they are afraid of being discovered: they are nothing more than an anxious and deeply unhappy being.

Such people should not have the right to have subordinates.

Caught up in the wave of poisoned anger they bring home, they impatiently stamp their feet, insult (and " insults are not included in the salary"...), then ask for forgiveness.

Paranoia is a bizarre attraction for these people.

When you let a weed (in your life) grow for many years, the roots go deep.

This is how diseases appear. 

Intention and reality are not too far apart, like the muddy banks of the Călmățui River, but how difficult it is to cross from one bank to the other, when the water is swollen and the banks collapse...

I try to understand the world around me, I have only avoided a few crossroads in the short term, breakups cannot always be avoided.

But how clearly the new path I followed unfolded for me!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I'm lovin' it!

You want to take a train, but you arrive at the platform too late.

You stare into space for a long time, it gets smaller and smaller and disappears.

You'd think it was just a lost train, but what a fascination on the tracks!

You take the next one.

The train moves forward and you feel like you are creating your own story.

The movements on the rails, the conversations, the sleep, the images scrawling on the window are part of a monotonous dance.

At the end of the road lies a love, a vacation, a reunion.

But things will never be the same again.

It's just another train.

The lost train might have changed their fate.

I'm waiting for a train coming from far away.

In the morning, I wake up sleepily at McDonalds, in front of a cafe.

A quick and good breakfast smiles a hamburger flanked by a cheerful bunch of fries. The impression that I have stumbled into a disguised castle, with turquoise stained glass windows, like the vivid colors that surround me, the hum of conversations between two trains make me forget why I am here.

Encouraging rhythms pour from the speakers. ''I feel good''...

Tablets, laptops, and the latest generation phones connect with the planet.

So many people concerned with escaping reality!

Coffee is bland - even milk doesn't make it taste like coffee.

The train is late.

I smile at this morning that began in a place of departure, of rediscovery, of return, whose purpose is not to become just any morning.

The floor lamps with their whitish light, with bulbs that resemble drops of molten, incandescent glass, shine like clusters.

At a table, a young man smiles at the screen of an Apple, wearing sunglasses that point their lenses at the clusters of guards.

It was as if he were looking at the false ceiling with dozens of eyes.

The train is arriving.

A familiar emotion floods me.

I'm lovin' it!

 

 

 

 

Kid - the child in the dream

I could hear his heart beating there, above, in the darkness.

Sometimes he trembles - sighs?

She was worried. She was worrying about so many little things!

When I'm a real boy, I'll tell him a story or two.

She complained that she was no longer young enough to bring a child into the world.

Then she smiled and caressed me - it was like her palm was shining on my little head.

She knew what a miracle it is to be loved by a child because, I forgot to tell you, I have a little sister who is now grown up and she still hugs her from time to time (she's a bit forgetful!), and sometimes, I think she talks to me, even though we don't know each other yet.

He calls me a fool (what else could that be?).

Or, even more terrifying, when evening comes and mommy falls asleep, she blames me for her drowsiness: the dwarf has tired you out .

Dwarf! He competes with the joke…

But I'm not mad at her, she's my little sister.

One morning, my mother cried a lot.

I got agitated, I nudged him with a message.

I wanted to be there, in the "outside" light, and caress her.

I didn't know what tears were, so I didn't cry.

But I wished then and prayed fervently to the God of babies to be born sooner, so I could see her.

I'm sure he has beautiful, gentle eyes.

I heard her whisper a name: Vlad .

I don't know anything about names, but I feel, deep in my heart, that my little sister will use diminutives.

This is the fate of babies - I can hear: "Vlăduţ" up, "Vlăduţ" down.

I know I will have green eyes, though: like my father's.

Sometimes I see a kind of green light, it can only be from the color of my eyes.

And I will be tall like him and my sister, not like the frail creature that is my mother .

I'm sleepy.

I hope she dreams sweetly or, better yet, doesn't dream at all, because she's so happy in the mornings when she wakes up after a dreamless sleep!

But I have a fear: what if I'm also her dream?

 

 

 

 

Can you fall in love with a photograph?

God

 

The camera's eye captures the story that the soul tells through the eyes, it captures the gaze, the smile, the life that bursts out greedily, for a moment, the slip.

A shade of sadness, a little bitter, like cheap cigarettes, a kind of liquid nostalgia for a world where man no longer has access, but where he was happy.

We like to appear smiling in photos, to give the impression of cheerfulness and harmony, but a tight smile doesn't let the joy shine through.

Not all smiles can be immortalized, they cannot be captured.

We smile at a randomly chosen photographer.

People on the street would refuse to take time out of their day to help, but they happily pose for a picture: smile, please!

We look at pictures caressing them with our eyes, some expressions bring velvet to the soul.

Carol Park.

I open the camera, the sky trembles on the surface of a lake, it seems so close.

The statue of Atlas comes out disheveled.

I take another picture, the image becomes playful: a little boy is hiding behind the statue.

It's Dia, with blonde curls and a bright smile.

I appear in the picture with vague faces, colors melted into water, they don't care about me or the sky. Dia laughs, it seems to me that the statue is smiling too.

Some memories are better in black and white, others are better hot and vivid, like an ember. When I close the camera and look out over the water, only Dia smiles at me and hides behind the stone arches, dancing.

Atlas continues to dream by the water, very sober...

Can you fall in love with a photograph?

Can you fall in love with a smile in a photo?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Never Hide

KidBloom

 

One autumn, time gave me a hummingbird watch with amber wings.

It beat so fast that it stirred the souls of the stars, and on earth the arpeggios of cats in love.

I look out the window, shielded by glass, tongues of fire gather on its surface, the dead leaves burn brightly, they face each other fiercely, ever closer, a dance in stripes of light and darkness.

The sunset laughs at me as I stand on the right side of time and wait for you, and the soul is silent in the sky, another form of prayer.

Outside the hummingbird clock hang my previous dreams, which you didn't care about...

When you come, spring will come.

The window of my soul opens into syllables: "Hey, you, bright elf!"

But no one cares, only I can hear you, and the linden flowers are ready to burst forth in the alleys.

You take my hand and we walk under the wisteria arches.

We tell stories over cups of tea, the steam breathes our words, and we, each other. And you ask me if I still love you.

Sometimes it's better not to ask, better to enjoy. But you can't enjoy, you know, a risk you take when you start looking for truths.

Near the cafe, an old man, in the doorway, talks to the moths, butterflies, and snails that have come out after the rain.

I know him, he's a poet.

He feeds the pigeons in front of the Church of Saint Eleftherios every day.

A young woman in very high heels walked past us, crushing a snail under her sole. The crackling sound of the shattered shell didn't faze her, she looked at the small, destroyed creature with disdain and then walked on, rubbing the sole of her shoe against the asphalt to get rid of the crunchy remains.

Crush fetish … you tell me, seeing my eyes shudder at the snail's death.

The poet bends down with difficulty, picks up the snails from the alley, and carefully moves them into the kindergarten.

" Where are your wings, symbol of purity, snail fertilized by dew?"...

He looks at us, I smile at him and wave, his eyes smile resignedly and say: " a scared snail, that's all!"

But we don't care.

We have this spring, we have each other.

We wrapped words around blades of grass, murmuring lucky charms   .

There is one constant in the ever-changing world...

Love.

 

 

 

"Myoritic fatalism"

In an attempt to break the routine by living a hybrid existence between the dream to be fulfilled and the unpredictability that time brings, falls are those moments when life makes a knot. You need strength not only to get up, to move on but, sometimes, to give up on something that used to represent everything.

The bitter sky of the world that opens after such a moment sheds its foggy coffers, allowing the silvery light to penetrate along the curve of the ribs towards the heart - a puncture of celestial love.

We complain that we can't talk to each other openly, that we don't look out for each other.

We take refuge in virtual space, where we ultimately feel even lonelier, surrounded by thousands of lonely souls.

We are given the opportunity to be silent and listen to the voices in our heads, the buzzing.

We don't listen carefully, we just hear some of each other's words, because our own thoughts speak louder. Instead of listening, others listen to us, evoking echoes and curses.

We would be able to lose ourselves completely and shrug our shoulders: that's how it was meant to be.

What others say we are doing wrong is not wrong as long as it heals the evil within us.

The desire to control struggles within us, in everyday life.

We control our loved ones, we control our emotions, our impulses to respond as we think (but we say things that others want to hear).

We are not always foresightful, and at moments in life when we are convinced that we are making good decisions, we destroy the fragile balance and fail.

How will the guilty feel when they realize the depths of degradation they have allowed the world to sink to?

But – they already know and they don't care...

My heart breaks for the children who are born with disabilities, for the children who are abused or neglected.

It breaks my heart to know that so many people work far from their families, in humiliating jobs, among strangers who despise them.

Knowing that there are people in my country who live aimless, underpaid and sad lives, people who still suffer from hunger or who cannot receive adequate medical care. People who are ignored, such as the homeless, the sick and cast aside by society, like gangrenous parts of an exhausted and sick body.

It saddens me that some people are devoid of love, that they no longer trust themselves, in life, that they have lost hope.

That people are not only afraid of   death, illness, and the unexpected, but, above all, of other people.

There is hope!

My mind clings to the tips of my child's fingers.

 

 

 

History - a place full of sighs...

The coffee cup on one side, my current concerns on the other.

I look out the window. In the neighboring yard, under a crumpled blue corner of the sky, a little boy smiles toothlessly. A cat crosses the yard, rubs against the child's leg. 

Two lovers embrace on a street corner. Their hands float in the proximity of the love of their lives. They are not afraid of the buses that sway in the air at the curve at the Opera Center. They form, lively, a cell of life in two, and the horizon in their eyes is serene and blue like their jeans.

People who walk the streets with their heads down, seem unwavering in their grayness. Just facts, no emotion. I prefer people with their heads in the clouds!

At the corner of the Bocca Lupo restaurant, an old woman sells withered bushes, with resignation and gentleness, for a bagel that she shares with the pigeons. 

I walk down the alley flanked by piles of sand and stones (the curbs are changed often, very often), a pebble jumps into my shoe, an unexpected penance.

How much truth will we find in our wounds?

I turned on the TV. Legal machine guns that keep an eye on guilty or inconvenient characters. Too many trap doors. A wave of news, gossip about celebrities, the celebration of a grandpa of politics. All these compliments and polite banter addressed to one or another of the political figures should arouse some kind of responsibility.

People would do better to hone their tastes.

But the people, a flexible reed, seem detached from the body of the country, with flight abroad pulsing in their blood.

There is so much amazement in the way the powerful of time fall into the abyss, potentially dangerous for this people.

There is so much determination in the throbbing in the joints of some of them, to nudge, clearing the way. Because they have a corrupt soul? Because friendship means, for them, chains of relationships and money?

Trafficking in positions, theft, deception, evading the law, a deliberate waste that works in favor of a few privileged groups.

Revenge is a jumble of plans, violence, failed strategies, ideas that flash out of nowhere - how to strike at   the best moment and tear more effectively. A darkroom where images begin to become clear. History is a place full of sighs...

- It's nice to be able to see the sky again, in freedom! This day should not be forgotten... speaks loudly, with broad gestures, a politician freshly released from prison.

Too many dolls with fresh sawdust in their phalanges, pigeons are pecking at their fingers. Too little food for the roots!

People learn to do meaningless things: to draw sunbeams on a sky cut by mysterious, gray streaks left by airplanes, to straighten the frame of a painting on a ruined wall.

I turned off the TV and looked at the photo of my mother smiling at me. How much I looked like her when I smiled!

I was going through a difficult time and I cried often. It was no longer like the crying of childhood, when reconciliation came to my little heart with my mother's embrace.

I refreshed myself with the thought of her.

And it wasn't because I had looked at the photo, but because I had felt the warmth that had resided in this woman's heart, her courage to start over.

 

 

 

 

 

Is there an end to the

wicked ages?

The rich have so many financial resources that some of them don't even appreciate life anymore!

He is always looking for new reasons to approach death.

Money cannot extinguish the despair in the soul, because despair has a toxic scent, it poisons the heart, the tissues.

No matter how easy it is for them to buy love, everything rolls away without any energy and they lose it, sooner or later.

While the little men with chosen spirits fall to the ground, into the earth - they are nothing but beings defeated by the cosmic sadness that amplifies their spiritual muteness, the others, dull, noisy, brazenly lively spirits, reap the good, put the world back on solid foundations of manipulation and violence. The poor have a lower life expectancy, because of deprivation and despair, with fear well-tensioned in their bones, with the thought of lurking.

Only sleep gives a little more light, and in the mornings, falling like a boulder brings the heart to the throat...

Is there an end to the wicked ages?          

 

 

Look at the Sky!

Deception is a rotten land, disappointment - an aseptic meadow.

I smoke this late spring and exhale swirls of cold-scraped clouds.

 

The city seems like a carefree place.

Calligraphic graffiti urges us to lift our puppet chins stuck in routine: Look at the Sky!

I look at the sky…

It's clear and loud.

A helicopter with a large, dark sign in white letters: "Can't you see the stars or the skies that encompass your horizons? Storm the stronghold of the liars and overthrow the mockery."

The city seems like a carefree place, despite the fact that meaningless exhortations fly in the sky.

We will live as before, we have our green stars and green horses on the walls.

My body is also green and transparent, it carries within it the sap of this late spring that erupts in ambushes of foliage and raw grass, and I am green with you, longing for you...

It's getting dark outside. It's raining.

I'm confused and I don't know what to wear !

I fall into melancholy, I'm cold and I feel like nobody's business, the damp gray outside annoys me, I'm myself, that is, lucid... without ladybugs in my hat.

Illusions lie on the lawn, their heads pointing towards the mountains.

But this state of sincerity does not last long.

I build myself an advantageous state so that I can overcome my anxieties and I comply.

I use my imagination again, become hypocritical towards myself, and smile at the sky I looked at at the urging of a graffiti teenager.

This new state sends back the souls of illusions about to succumb.

I am brightening as night falls.

I put The Enchanted Mountain on my bedside table - the pages stick together from sleep and longing and green stars fall into my head.

Before closing my laptop, I read Alex Vidia's status on Facebook: "I don't know why it's raining outside, but as a married man, I tend to think it's my fault."

I fall asleep smiling with you in mind, it keeps raining...

Unguarded and vulnerable soul!

 

 

 

 

 

Equinox

Light shines in the silence of words, the words left to be said and the tears unshed, go to sleep at the root of a sea pine, bypassed by roads and rains. We don't say everything, we don't cry about everything.

 

I hung the clock on the eaves in the morning and the time jumped from the set and the Sunday driven crazy by so much rain woke me up early. Last night in my dream the wind chimes were ringing. The sky by the window is gray, the sparrows are shaking each other in the trees where the sap is waiting to burst into buds. They don't care about the rain, they don't care about me.

Next to you, in the evening I whisper a thought to you, and time falls asleep first. We speak the same language, in our sleep, savoring every syllable.

Time is an elusive thing, a vagabond, and we - transients, closely resemble molten glass: it manipulates us, transforms us.

With my arms wrapped around a sleeping snail, I walk through my own soul as if in a temple and smile - childlike.

"Look up at the sky with this smile," you whisper to me in my mind.

I eat a red apple, the seeds, the brown beads, slide under my bare feet.

I invent a walk in absentia, I don't cling to sleepwalking, I don't walk on a wire and I don't even walk, I imagine I'm flying...

I bite violently into the apple, the core looks like an hourglass, and I start talking about... nothing.

You're laughing at me, I know... Stop, stop the music! These moments deserve silence.

I wonder if people believe even half of what they say or if they simply wave their lips and arms in front of a captive audience, waiting for words, their breath dribbling between their throats and hearts.

The words roll down the tongue, the tongue between the teeth, teasing the gums, a knot in the stomach, the knot is good, emotion is a sign that you are human, plus it's not that far from the stomach to the heart.

 The place I go to when I realize you're not listening to me is an old house in the heart of things.

I throw away the hourglass and decide to speak in my mind.

The mind-talk is a familiar animal, it smells fear, it keeps me away from crazy impulses, like walking with my eyes closed down alleys, bumping into people and poles, or hugging the first thing I see when I open my eyes (like my childhood friend, Kat, did one summer, running into the arms of an elderly gentleman with a thick beard, in whom the flocks of starlings in the vineyards were hiding).

On my left is absence, empty, arrested by thoughts, in my head, on the other hand, there is great bustle. I talk to myself and forget to breathe, and the gap between my lips warns me to be silent, the pink embroidery under my skin demands oxygen insatiably, I breathe!

- Solutions can be found, I recommend a lobotomy, says a cynical thought, grinning.

- What exists now, here, in the silent season of your heart is an accident of love and longing. It will pass, you'll see! says the good, foolish, pacifying thought.

I get up with disappointment clinging to my body, but with new energy in my thoughts, a few minutes of nothingness have brought me back to my senses.

While memories burn, page by page, birds from another time flutter their emotions in the flames and remain silent in thought, silent and smiling and silent.

 

 

 

 

Whatever makes you happy,

when you have no worries and are loved

- You have crept into my soul, you troublemaker!... I am happy!

We were in love, then we moved in together...

Happiness makes you float, so on the first day, his feet barely touched the ground.

It wasn't unusual for him to be happy without me.

And yet, he said he had never known happiness before me.

And he was tender, he was looking for my face, and his gaze was charming, as if I were a delicate flower.

The days passed easily, without worries.

One day I returned home.

We walked from one room to another and then a floating whisper came from the ceiling, where the wind chimes from Costinești hang.

- Hey?

He was looking down at me.

- I missed you!

Then God came into the world.

He came back down to earth, he was happy.

The years passed with worries, with care and love, with irritation, with patient waiting. The wonder of being together in love, of having a child kept us close to the magical.

Life, hustle, grace.

And then came one of those mornings when the entire weight of time seemed to rest on my shoulders.

To miss something is to hope that it will come back.

Your stories are leaden clothes, you carry them bravely, they are part of you.

Life is beautiful when you know and have the courage to get what you want, but it makes wonderful promises that are not kept when you lose your way and wake up with your soul agonizing under the thin light of the moon.

Orion loosens his belt, the night descends over the earth with a dress with blue ink sequins, pink flamingos or at least a circus performance.

 

And, one day, he decided to make a change.

I wanted to stop him, but it was too late.

There was a ray of sunshine towards an island.

It floated on into high spheres, passing over mountains and ocean.

The silver dot seemed so peaceful from a distance, most things seem to be. Only a trail of vapor marked its path in the sky.

I've never been on my own.

Freedom smells so tempting, but it scares me!

My mother's words of wisdom still ring in my ears. "Keep your man close, Mom"...

I live among people but our destinies do not touch.

I hear their conversations, they list their victories and losses, their struggles when the road gets steep. They want to escape the crowds, the stress, to be on the mountaintop, but the mountaintops are rocky and cold.

The raw grass and rich soil are in the plains...

Our bed is now a waiting cell.

The evenings are the hardest. I cling to the door frame, where lines are drawn with a marker, as Dia grew, his silhouette appeared in that door, his smile addressed only to me, like there is no other.

And, deep in my heart I feel the stirring of longing, like the earth burning darkly under the careless plow.

His eyes are a blue cave, distant, I can't reach them, but at night, before bed, I feel them on my neck and my bare arms. I get cold, I wrap my arms around my shoulders, crazy with longing. A self-embrace, a straitjacket.

I would go to him, he needs an anchor in an uncertain world. Gravity keeps me firmly grounded.

It may be hard to live with familiar worries with your love, but it's harder to live them alone.

Every call means care, love and continuity. The illusion that it is like before, but it is not...

Only distance makes you understand that "together" does not only mean routine and shared worries, trivial events, responsibility, but also teasing, spontaneous laughter, tolerance for small lapses and laziness on Saturday mornings, with breakfast in bed and the aroma of coffee next to the laptop, caressing, gentler love, but with the confidence that he is the one , the search has long ceased! Let's keep our loves close. Close from afar...

 

 

 

Forests live and die in bookstores...

Books open the mind and encourage disobedience (my father's belief).

Mom didn't agree, but Ilie enlightened her.

Shut up...

My father jokingly threatened to burn my books. Witch books! But he wouldn't touch them...

 

Cutting down trees erases everything that once meant a tree: the brown bark, the sap, the rustling of leaves, the sun, the breeze, the songs of birds – all of it ends up hidden in the middle of a chapter, in beloved books, or in waste paper.

The forests in the bookstores vaguely recall the days tattooed with our hiking stories, the carefree laughter, the reckless climbs, to the dizzying edges of the horizon...

The protective god of the forests has forgotten the sensation of buds pushing towards the light, every day, a dream freed by the shine of the axe.

On a cool spring morning, I was indeed, with my sisters, in our parents' house, which had fallen into ruin. The windows were gone, a wall had collapsed, the sky was visible through a remnant of the roof. Lessie was still guarding the house... We gathered all the photographs and paintings from the walls, and on the shelf in the living room, I found my mother's Bible. 

I held the holy book in my hands, wrapped in soft, delicate cherry leather, I traced the small folds of the pages with my finger, without making a sound, and when I untied the rough linen thread with which my father had tied it, it unraveled and from under the cover a photograph emerged, like the edge of a letter in the desperation of waiting. A bookmark…

It was a black and white image, in which my mother and father, very young, looked at the photographer smiling. My father was wearing a felt hat and a vest. They were holding hands, a sign of tenderness. They were probably at a wedding. Her headscarf had almost slipped off her head, rebelling as she was against the barbaric custom in Cătun, which forced women to cover their hair. My father was looking “under his eyebrows”, and my mother’s face looked beautiful and mysterious, her gaze had slipped to one side.

The books, what remained, were affected by mold and gnawed by mice.

I sat on the three-legged stool my dad made and started flipping through them.

I was cold... I lit the fire on the stove, the flames lent the house a cheerful play on the walls where cobwebs and voices of angels from other times danced.

I would read books when I was cold, then put them on the fire to warm them up. Look, Dad...

The pages were turning, the flames were embracing the pages with tenderness. Bitter and black the ink retaliated, and the words would probably have killed me if they could...

I burned books, as if I had burned something from the heart of the trees, something from the heart of the words in no-man's-land, worn down by time, roofless, windowless, with bird nests in the corners and climbing vines, relentless links between ruin and life.

The typewriter, witness to the incineration of stories, received the heat and fell silent from all the keys, waiting for words - inspiration - comfort for the collective memory, which no fire can extinguish.

And the smoke rose in wisps, scattering among the trees, while Lessie's doglike thoughts flew to the sky...

 

Today, now, love

The heart may be a strong muscle from which love springs and into which someone can enter to bring you suffering, but it is also a place with amazing shelters for emotions that you thought were dormant, about to commit suicide or succumb to natural death.

Love is stronger than any social earthquake caused by ambitions, interests, betrayals, which completely exclude it, relying on themselves, indifferent to the disasters they cause, in favor of a small percentage of humanity. Love, when it exists, is stronger than the fear of death - the most terrible of fears, or the fear of what lives within you: a tear, an illness, an abyss. 

My remaining youth intoxicates me with life, keeps me away from despair.

My imagination stretches across the world, climbs hearts, steps on thoughts. Listens to their drawn-out voices, until the last thought. I carve benches for my dreams that I place, to await my longings, with tools of time, with patient love.

Facing the world, I try to keep my thoughts in check, so that they don't go to the soul, only good people, with light in their eyes, go to the soul.

This light comes in a subtle way, you don't even realize that youth is only holding you by the little finger, having you there, playing with you. And, when you get angry with it, for the hasty decisions that brought you to a present where you don't find your ideals, but see them behind you, outdated and hostile, it squeezes you by the finger, in a childish wavering: reconciliation, reconciliation, without any anger...

The secret mechanism of life! What makes existence tremble, in large doses brings frenzy, in strong doses - the cure of illusion.

I'm getting signals from the stars. They look up there like elven souls on their backs, peeled back with fragility.

On both sides of the alley, houses have come to life, people are listening to music, making love, playing board games and games of hope, mourning their lost dreams.

No, I can't save them all (maybe just a few)...

Today I feel like playing, to make everything that's worrying disappear, for a short while.

I'll make evil fly through a fairy window, in a rain of imaginary glass. This is not enough. Sometimes, it isn't.

We are crazy souls who will live forever, and these encounters in love, in true love, are not very numerous.

There is no better shortcut than today, than now, to carve memorable stories out of ordinary moments.

Tomorrow is just another day...

But, if you are healthy and smile at it, it will shine.

Look at the Sky!

 

With love,

Myrrh.

                                                     Bucharest, 2016

 

 

 

 

About a life hidden between the covers

            With writing that borders on the diary, Miriam Tkee outlines the novel of an existence that seems detached from necessarily idyllic worlds.

            The leap from normal or banal is made with disarming ease and through a naturalness that not only comes from the depths of feeling, but is also marked by an otherwise turbulent existence, its story being the common thread that runs through the entire story.

            The characters are extraordinarily alive, they are (re)born from the chest of memories, slightly styled in places, partly to avoid twisting knives in wounds, partly to make them more viable in times unsuited to the soul and delicacy.

            "The Abstract Square" is the book in which Miriam Tkee fully demonstrates her puppeteer skills, her characters moving along well-established paths, sometimes being removed from the spotlight, sometimes left under its scorching rays.

            From this apparent chaos, a kind of Brownian motion is born that does nothing but outline their physical and moral portraits more easily and fully, from such a puzzle a story emerges that keeps you on your toes.

            The author juggles with poetic means, the charge of metaphor, its contribution also having the gift of relieving the tension of the reading act, most often appearing after the evocation of sad, even dramatic events.

            This approach betrays the fact that the author knows that she has made the reader not only an accomplice, but even an intense experiencer of the act of storytelling.

            Events come together with each given page, the village takes shape, the characters are defined, the existential context in which they unfold, everything is illuminated from within words invested with memories and a lot of emotion, thus passing before our eyes the images of a film full of substance, experience and life.

            Miriam juggles these artistic means in each of the short stories with which she assembles her entire novel, the epic thread thickens, gaining consistency with the (passage) to adulthood of the main character, a moment in which introspection becomes law, many passages being true psychological explorations meant to clarify not only the context of the action, but also the positioning of the characters towards one event or another.

            The return to certain themes is captivating, approaching them from other directions or perspectives, suggesting not a certain imagery poverty, but an investment of words with valences of spectacular freshness, the retouching of such moments having the purpose of emphasizing, strengthening, outlining the evoked and invoked moment in a different way, of truly illuminating it.

            It's the technique he uses with the nonchalance and assurance of a master to imprint his subliminal message in the reader's mind, the reader's state of well-being, of reverie, coming on its own afterwards.

            Everyone wakes up knowing something, reliving something else by reading this "Abstract Square" that is meant to thrill, the (distant) childhood suddenly returning to the core of existences otherwise marked by preconceived ideas and false social conveniences.

            Miriam Tkee proposes self-liberation in this book, and those who will pick up the gauntlet and respond to the challenge will give themselves the chance for their own rediscovery.

 

Ioan Romeo Rosiianu

 

content

 

A word to the readers

The abstract square or about the temptation of immersion

Looking for Nioka -  could this be

my childhood name?

The Song of the Ielas

Dawn of life

A little girl was stirring up heaven in a sun

Nioka

seizures

I am the girl next to Criș…

The snail of an imaginary violin

"Nature gave you: cultivate what you have"

In the swing

Velvet Soul

Burdened dreams

The crazy storm

These beings called children and the choices they make

Swamp

Calmatuiu Stream

earthquake

Wanderer on the Hill - At Páducel

After the rabbits

With mornings in mind

Cloud clusters

The snows of childhood

Childhood home

snuggery

The captive reindeer

Time, an invention of adults

Bicycle

And I was looking for rose hips

The Holy Romanian Language

Think pink!

"Drink, and the devil will do the rest"...

rose

The Blue Man

Diaper with love

Delusional images

Tragic embryo

Sequences from an imaginary life…

High school students from Mihai Bravu

The Blind Pianist

We leave behind what awaits us

rose

"A burning firefly...   Look! I wanted to shout"...

Cioruta, jade eyes

A time of incompletion

Brown-eyed trouble

Winter mirage

Talismans

No sparkle lasts forever!

The road to Capella

My memories are retro

You'll never walk alone!

Blue elves love books

A clown without a goal

Purple flux

The exit from the labyrinth was   in his heart.

Today is a fresh canvas   on the easel

Back to the nest

People and places

Church

With light in the soul

Who really knows what's best?

I miss you.

The Roşiori Fair

Guguloai

Another picture in the album of time

Barefoot heart, tears   and abstract birds

Watchtower

Recovery

This moment is about to rain...

So, is that all?

The gateway to the dream

Astral navel

Love, Despair, Dreams...

The beach of nothingness

Goat embroidery on Călmățui

The Zavera Hill

Living energy

Memories with the flavor of childhood

Meeting with myself

Give moments of love...

Having children…

We are called to love.

I'm happy we're here.

Hai-hui through the city, on a Friday..

Happiness, the triumph of   affirming your love

The City - a walk on a winter evening through Bucharest

In our little studio apartment

Twilight blue

Time travel

Taboo

There are places waiting for me

Someone hurt me emotionally.

I'm lovin' it!

Kid - the child in the dream

Can you fall in love with a photograph?

Never Hide

"Myoritic fatalism"

History - a place full of sighs...

Is there an end to the   wicked ages?

Former security officer turned poet

Look at the Sky!

Equinox

Whatever makes you happy,   when you have no worries and are loved

To miss something is to hope that it will come back.

Forests live and die in bookstores...

Today, now, love

About a life hidden between the covers

content

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

---

[1] shingle - thin piece of wood similar to shingles, but shorter than them, used for lining and covering peasant houses

[2] bench - wide plank fixed on pegs along a wall in peasant houses, on which one sits

[3] încurarea– (about horses) to outrun; to run freely; to ride

[4] tiugă – (tugă, gourd) pumpkin of different shapes, thin at the top, where the stem is, having a convex, yellowish body, in which a notch is made, it is emptied of seeds, and when dry, it can be used as a salt shaker (salt shaker); peasants drink spring water with the tiugă

[5] lamp – lamp

[6] vermorel  - portable device used to spray plants with special solutions to combat pests and rodents

[7] croșneag – untreated, freshly dried, hard, choking tobacco

[8] dusk, dusky - at dusk 

[9] rut- irregular, rutted depression formed by the wheelsofvehicles (tractors, trucks) onunmaintained countryroads 

[10] lamé-țsilk, cotton or wool fabric with fine metallic threads 

[11] "Drink and the devil had done for the rest" (Robert Louis Stevenson) 

[12] Mad Forest - is the Romanian translationofthe Turkish word Deliorman, which, slightlymodified, gave the name toTeleormancounty 

[13] Păpușaradisappeared village located on the Tecuci stream valley, near Merișani,documented in 1562-1563 in the Charter of Petru cel Tănăr, voivode, by which he grantsOprea's daughters, Marga and Daica, residences in PăpușarluiZlatco and other villages (Ecaterina Ţânţăreanu - Medieval habitat in southwestern Wallachia in the 14th-17th centuries). 

[14] pancióc - house slipper 

[15] Meerkat - means"lake cat" in Dutch; "Angel of the sun" who protected villages from the moon devil   

[16] rúscă - hill, ravine  

[17] Ruși-Roșioride Vede (ancient Russenart), a townlocatedin the center of Teleorman, "among gentle hillsandclumps remaining from the famous Mad Forest (of Deleorman), which gave the name to thisregiononthe right bank of the Vedea River, called "Apa vănăta" (Wikipedia). 

[18] lunească - nunească (bride's dance) is the name of a dance that is played at a wedding after the religious ceremony 

[19] The Pegaeae Naiads were freshwater nymphs who ruled over springs. 

[20] white elephant = a burdensome possession that creates more problems than it's worth 

[21] to (be) slow-to work slowly, to work hard at something 

[22] The GiantPeriferigerilerimini– an ogre who liked to eat small children (from the book of the samenameby Charles Perrault). 

[ 23] to itch –toitch,toitch 

[24] nation - not at all 

[25] to support – to prop up, lean on, support  

[26] firestop -metal circle that is combined with other concentric circles, made of cast iron, usedtoplug or unplug the fire access holes in the stove  

[27] Traista Goală (Crivățul) - is a strong wind, which blows mainly in winter, bringing snow, snowstorms (blizzards)andandairfrom the east. It is also called "Traista Goală" or "Vânt de miaţanoapte", because it blows from the north. (Wikipedia) 

[28] culme – wire or rope on which laundry is hung to dry, which is raised in the middle with the help of a vertical pole forked at the end, supported by the ground

A word to the readers

"I am here, thinking of you, Reader, and I am also there, as you read my story."

These are the words through which the author of this book tries to connect with Her Mother, the Reader. And I invite you to travel through the world created by the mind and soul of the girl "with her nose in the wind, curly hair and eyes the color of cinnamon"!

I have known her since she was a child of about 11 years old (I was her teacher in middle school), set on discovering the world with its mysteries, passionate about the power of the Word "which celebrates life". Moreover, she was blessed by God with ease and mastery in expressing her deepest feelings, through skillfully combined words, dressed in the royal robe of Poetry, and the Ursitoarele whispered to her at birth: "Sing, write poems. History belongs to Poets!"

This book is another kind of "Childhood Memories" and has something from Creangă and, more from Zaharia Stancu, but the facts are told in an original manner, the narrative combining with introspection and reality with imagination.

"The Abstract Square" can be considered an autobiographical novel, but also a diary of the past in which notations on the present overlap. The chronological thread is often interrupted by returns to the past, by reversals and reruns that give rise to the idea of ​​a continuous present. The writer captures the narrator's struggle to preserve her identity and change, renewal, adventure, presenting her evolution from the naughty, curious child, in love with life, with her native village, the Hamlet - with its people, with the traditions and customs to which she feels very attached - to the mature woman, the mother-woman who has not lost her former attributes: spontaneity, exuberance, sincerity, originality and talent, a lot of talent, all of which are enriched by culture, life experience, imagination ("a magical vehicle between the sinful earth and a star soul") and an extraordinary affective memory. It was not an easy evolution, but the girl experienced contradictory, turbulent moments, because the comparison of the new environment, the new existence, was made with the lost paradise of childhood.

We, the readers, accompany her everywhere, suffering or rejoicing with her: in Cătun, then in Bucharest, and again in Cătun. Because, whenever city life made her suffer, she returned to her native village, either in thought or in reality. The village gave her the strength to fight on, not to give up, here always finding a cure for the pains of her soul. If in the city she cries and suffers, in Cătun she sings and laughs, rediscovering her former joys. In her native village she encounters the memory of her family, of her parents. The scene when she falls asleep on her parents' grave is symbolic. Even the dead, they transmit the energy of life to her… The connection of a living person with those who were alive…

The girl feels "lucky to have been accompanied by them part of the way," and "Now, the earth spins without a part of me." The book is a eulogy to her parents, to her native village.

The history of a family must not be forgotten! Do not forget us, so that others do not forget you either , was an inscription at the gate of the cemetery in Peretu.

"I write about childhood, life and love!" exclaims the writer, in the preface of the book. From its pages rush the love of life, the thirst for beauty, the joy of admiring the "dusk blue" and the "goat embroidery on Călmățui". The "longing to fly" is another state of mind that accompanies her, which is why the book ends with the exhortation: "Look at the Sky!" Also here, the Stanescian construction "I'm green with you!" is surprising.

The chapter "Give a moment of love!" characterizes her youth as "crazy music, learning, loving, making love, giving birth to a child..."

Some thoughts about life and   time, and not only, have the value of an aphorism: "Life is part of the mystery of the Great Universe. Time is a wonderful meadow when you are happy. The worst thing in life is death..." So, another theme of the book is "Time - an invention of adults". Its flow is not the same at all stages of life; "I lived in the heart of days, an enchantment", in childhood, but... "I live in the shadow of days", "now, when time seems to have narrowed." It is a kind of dialogue between two temporal planes. At other times, the author asks herself: "Time? What is time? Where does it go, when does it go?"... In other words, she tries to find an answer to the eternal question: "to be or not to be?"

Another striking aspect of Miriam Tkee's book is the image of her parents' house, the little room, the courtyard, with details deeply embedded in the author's emotional memory. This setting is the image of the person; each of the walls or objects in the house represents an alter-ego of the person who lived there, especially the mother.

Maria Delcea - Tache (Miriam Tkee) does not forget her roots, does not forget her ancestors, does not forget the Călmățui stream to which her childhood is linked. For foreigners, this is an ordinary stream, like a muddy ditch, during drought, to become dangerous, during floods. For them, the villages along the Călmățui are monotonous, devoid of poetry... But for those here, including Mir, Călmățui is the center of the Universe and has a special charm. For them, Călmățui has little economic value, but, above all, a sentimental value. Călmățui is part of their lives.

The book is worth reading, because it urges us to dare, to seek, not to capitulate, because the soul knows how to choose the right path. Its author has found the key to reach the hearts of the Reader, her words becoming a link between the two entities: author-reader.    

A writer with all his twists and turns!

 

Prof. Maria Peșu

 

 

The abstract square

or about the temptation of immersion

"The Abstract Square" is a personal and highly personalized journey to the abyss, to the (most) innermost depths, it is a path that Miriam Tkee has embarked on and which no longer allows her any respite, any break for rest. The route is long and very difficult to travel, to complete, but the author's diligence and tenacity copes with it and manages to finish it exemplary.

"The Abstract Square" is a book of bright yet dark lyricism, full of the bright light of joy but also heartbreaking and painful at the same time. "The Abstract Square" is a book that is absorbed, that returns to the real and the personal, becoming with each line of its reading,   very charged with living and with everything that composes and can fill the life from which the text of this book was torn. It is a book of intense emotions and the joy of writing, what its author has lived and dreamed, it is a collection of truly lived events and metaphors, unhidden and not left to perish in the mist of oblivion.

Miriam Tkee creates a kind of living album, lived as I said before, full of stories that settle on your body as a reader like decent tattoos but that can no longer be easily removed, cut from the author's own textual body onto the body of the one who absorbs and adopts them naturally during reading. Miriam Tkee writes with the door of the soul open, writes using and using memories only to be able to escape into the story, into fiction, making what was initially personal become literature and everything personal that had to be said amplify and literary charge each word used.

Miriam Tkee uses writing as a secret door, known only to her, a door that lets her escape, to flee into the lush world of fiction, into the world to which she immediately adapts, a world from which she, along with her characters, can never leave, can never return, can never die.

Immortality, the definitive permanence of what is written and what is written, described and narrated here, in "The Abstract Square" is what Miriam Tkee seeks, their permanence as images composed of words, of impressionable and impressive forms of writing, forms that can ensure and grant them eternal life, the life they actually deserve.

Miriam Tkee takes small steps and opens her eyes wide to feel and see everything, to show us that she has lived everything and to assure us that she has not forgotten anything that should not have been forgotten. Miriam Tkee reveals, unveils and shows the world in all its beauty and ugliness, the world that she also helps to save with the help and together with the characters narrated (evoked) and brought before us. Miriam Tkee swims tirelessly through the ocean of dear and less dear, pleasant and less pleasant memories, without taking a break, trying and succeeding and fulfilling her mission, that of... a seer, a seer and a living being who survives to tell, to magically amplify and enrich each story from which she has composed, built and delimited her abstract square metaphysically and spiritually . Miriam Tkee helps us see a world incredibly rich and full of beauty, color, kindness, joy, pain, tears, suffering, light, darkness, and at the same time helps herself to see more and deeper, deeper and further. The look back that Miriam Tkee casts has no limit to her vision, no point that hinders her or a screen that can stop her or disturb her penetration into the details, making the gaze she placed on what was to be seen definitive and open forever.

Miriam Tkee chose this way of saying, she chose to sink to the lowest limit of memory, of the memory lived and dreamed, of the memory that no longer detached itself from her, from her soul, and she did this knowing that there is no return, no possibility of being able to heal, of being able to live without writing what you experience, without a story. Miriam Tkee chose the path of no return into the definitively saved and saving world of writing, of writing that makes you and forces you to see, of writing that says and forces you to live.

"The Abstract Square" is a book that shouts its sincerity, that speaks loudly to its reader about itself, about its world, and about its author. It is a book that struggles and manages to break out of the tight corset of passivity and shine in the safe and visible zone of literature that produces convulsions.

"The Abstract Square" is a book that tells you and shows you, with every word you read, that it is not easy to write about returning home...

 

Gabriel Enache

Writer