Fragrance (novel) [3]
Pr. Dr. Dorin Octavian Picioruș
Fragrance
(novel)
*
Your books are the fingerprint of your soul. If you give yourself at the hour of death because you don’t understand a detail, that’s not the problem. But you need to love the author of what was written, you have to love him, in order to understand yourself. Because, in turn, you have to give yourself so that someone can understand you through your gesture, through your love for him. If Miruna had existed before Birds to the sky[1], she would have been a man. Many probably feel she is a man, with a manly soul. But she is very feminine deep down, very forgiving, she is a mountain of dedication and trust. In a world where women are emasculating themselves, because this madness is fashionable, Miruna is the wife you need. With whom you can talk in peace, who comforts you, who understands you and, above all, carries you on her arms everywhere. For she understood to be a woman from her suffering, from the love that keeps maturing within herself. And if I sometimes cry at the strong feelings, at the living pains, at the greatness of human patience, I put these sweet tears in my writing here and there, because they are the refreshment of my heart.
Writing has made me very sensitive, it has made me tremble at almost everything, along with the incessant prayer. I need ice on my heart sometimes, and the air conditioning, to extinguish my flame of love. The cold does me good, it preserves my heart, but the heat disintegrates me. And writing, from a certain day, is no longer a sharing of words, but a tearing of oneself. Because you give away endless territories in each of your books.
Many people believe that the death has become trivialized precisely because we have seen it too often. That we have seen it mediatized. But the death became trivial because we were not part of it. When the death touches your loves, it teaches you that you exist. Because the life without the perimeter of death is not life, but ease without conscience. A profound change occurred in her soul, immediate, painful, when my Mother-in-law died, and I was the loving witness of this change. I was the one who filled her need for stability with my love. She had lost both her parents, she had freed herself from them inside, to pray for them in her heart. And her husband became her only rest, freedom, self-discovery, because he was the one who would never leave her side. In fact, when we go through the tunnel by train, when we travel in that void of light, we realize that there are passages in life that we experience crawling, on our stomachs, hit from all sides. Or, on the contrary, pricked with needles everywhere, in the good cassock being dressed, because everyone wants to tell you what they don’t like. And the formulations are not carried out to the end. They are fragments of hatred, of revenge, of insensitivity. They want to say what they would certainly like to say to themselves. They impute to you what they impute to themselves. They grab you by the collar because they don’t know how to hug you. And that evening, on my bicycle, when I was taking the salaries of my fellow Teachers to School, I realized that I have such great freedom that I no longer need a witness to it. That my freedom is the love of God and, based on this freedom, I give myself to these children, my students, in order to make them look to the future. Fragility has always moved me. When you see that they are beginning to understand, you want the flight of their mind to never end. The tenderness with which you have to embrace their flight is what gives them confidence.
I published several online control papers, when I found them in my teaching archive. And one of them dared and wrote to me online. About how he took his geese to the grass and how God helped him in his life. A few details, although I would have liked much more from each one. But back then the level of writing was minimal, it wasn’t a short story. In my memory, the one who answered me is a small child, but unfrozen in mind, who knew the shortcomings of life. I don’t know how he grew up, nor what he does now, but he is a man now. The small is in the man now and it is important what he still remembers. For our memories are our thoughts and feelings and the things we have done. The memories are our treasure, even though our brain, affected by old age and disease, increasingly forgets itself. The Emperor could not speak to me, because his brain was affected. But his soul was there! And our soul forgets nothing, but when we leave the body through death, we will remember everything we have done and everything we are. The memory, apparently lost, we will find intact! What we are struggling to remember now, we will have at hand in eternity. Because we are the hard drive that has recorded everything, that knows everything about itself, and all that is needed is to remember. To return to oneself.
One thing is certain: a child’s eyes see differently than an adult’s eyes. From my small height, I saw buildings as very large. Now, seeing some of them again, I can’t imagine how I have them so big in my memory, when they are not like that at all. And I wonder: Have they always been like that or have I seen them distortedly? When we start to minimize things, do buildings also shrink? Feelings are so strong, so alive, when you are close, and when you are no longer there, they fade away? Or does nothing fade away, but we, having other worries, let our loves of all kinds fall to the bottom of our soul?
I enter the Cathedral, I look up, but I can’t seem to see anything, and I see insistently those at my eye level. I hadn’t seen that they cut down the poplar, I was surprised, and afterwards I only saw its root which was bigger than me. I didn’t see the accident of the siphoner, the one who loaded our siphons, when he died in the ditch, but I saw his body covered in blood. The first dead man covered in blood. Because I pass by with my eyes, I wander everywhere, I only stop for a moment at one thing or another. I look, but I only see a few things. Because I don’t ask myself to see, but to rest in what I see. I think that’s why I don’t like endless descriptions of things: because I want to see only what I want to see and not statistics.
[1] My first novel, from my youth, which I haven’t published yet.