Fragrance (novel) [30]
Pr. Dr. Dorin Octavian Picioruș
Fragrance
(novel)
*
It stuck in my mind the street elbow from Bulgaria, formed by the street with the gas station, the one before, where I went to the toilet when I walked to the bus, and our street, of the hotel, flanked by the railway. You could see the lake beyond the tracks. You could see it from the upper floor. But this elbow of streets seems to me, before sleep, like a quick right turn, like an immediate arrival at the destination, at that destination that you didn’t think was so close. Just like in my dream this morning, after four o’clock, the administrator asked me how long it had been since I had paid the maintenance at Unirea, in the rented room. And I told him never, because no one told me I had to pay it. And he asks me, astonished, since when I started living here, without anyone knowing about it. And I told him that since around 2020, even though I have never lived there in all these years. But I lived there before, when I was at the Seminary, and I dreamed about that room, which I’ve dreamed about before. And someone might say that I’m obsessed with that room, the first room I lived in after leaving home. But I haven’t thought about it in a long time. Or if I do, I remember painful days, days full of sadness, after which the great joy appeared in my life. And the great joy was Saint Ilie the seer of God, our Father, with all his wonderful life and with the beginning of my discipleship towards him, the one who brought into my life the Lady Priestess Gianina, whom I first met through her poetry and, more and more, through all her loving openness towards me. Because she counted, like Saint Ilie, on my potencies. On the one I could be with them and they were not wrong. Because the real friendship is the sight of your depth. The meetings, the meals, the discussions are not part of friendship, but of the air of friendship. Your understanding is everything. And if it’s not this view of the other person’s depth, it’s nothing.
The sadness of relationships, the enormous unfulfillment, is brought about by sexual attraction without love, without seeing the other person, without falling in love with him. You think you need him, but you only need orgasm. After the excitation passes, you have no more words, you have no more discussion topics, it takes you the howl. You are trapped in the cage of your own arousal, and this is when you want to run away, to throw yourself into the arms of the one who would truly see you and love you for who you are, for how beautiful your soul is. And Ilona tried her best to be loved, to be fashionable, to jump in the eye, but she found only aphonous in love. They did not know how to delight her with their heart. The music of love is heard abysmally. The sonar of love communicates without words. Until she changed the club with the Church, until she began to calm down, and then she realized that she does not seek things that perish, but the eternity of God. And when you seek the eternity in sin, when you want your sins to make you happy, you are filled with enormous, psychiatric sadness. And in vain do you run to the mountains for therapy, in vain do you sit on the couch and discuss your inner problems, because such sadness is only healed by the love of God. Which, filling you with repentance, also fills you with His mercy towards you.
Ilona’s sister, the journalist, fired from the newspaper for her verbal aggression, writes online. In fact, what are newspapers today, when the online is the one who turns reality towards the reading public or distorts it? Clara claims loudly and emphatically that she was forced to resign due to the libidinous owner of the newspaper, without denying that she touched the interests of some bigwigs and they put direct pressure on the owner. But, without just and maybe, the online has become the maneuvering table of people with money, like newspapers and televisions, because only some prosper. If you make a blog and write seriously on it, you write every day, you don’t grow in audience at all, if there is no hidden need for your writing by some people. If you can’t be fiscalized, you don’t matter. You can write more than well, ultra-brilliantly, your words can show you are a holy man, and you still don’t matter, if you don’t make money. The financial is the microbe that sickens any big idea, and the online is the big idea of our world, it’s the idea with which we are contemporaries.
How many wasted days and how many thousands of words would I have had to say to get my book published? But I write and edit and publish from my home, without wasting time and without being censored by anyone. The self-censorship is of my conscience. The publishing houses have lost their primacy, I no longer need leaves, trees killed for my books, I no longer need envious glances, the evils of the dozen to enjoy my books. They are born joyfully and I publish them with joy and I fulfill myself through them, because they are part of me. And that’s precisely why, the book, this printing of my soul image in others, comes out of my intimacy towards others as a joy and not as a sadness, and I don’t look at who or what says it, if it’s about ingratitudes, because creating means truly enjoying.