Fragrance (novel) [50]

Pr. Dr. Dorin Octavian Picioruș

Fragrance

(novel)

*

I was right to think that I was moving on and that each new age did not mean going back, but I was not so attentive to the fact that each age is organically linked to its past. Each year meant something else to me, something more, a startlingly big change, and I assumed that this was how all people lived. But each year did not separate from my past, but added to it. I also forgot the internal updates of each day, just as we forget those on our phone, but they remain in us. And not only do they remain in us, but they also make other people out of ourselves. And when we look in the mirror and no longer recognize ourselves, it is not because we did not know that we had changed, but because these internal changes are always surprising. You rediscover yourself, you see yourself more closely, you notice how your eyes and your face and your whole body have other lights, other signs, other proportions.

After the tea with all its, the cold kvass is refreshing, although the tea is the beginning of the day and of writing. And after the very thin biscuits, pigmented with rosemary, I ate three slices of biscuit salami, soothing, while I was writing here. In other words, the novel’s hunger was sweet, plus 3 white grapes, because it is autumn now, the must is made, and I was not in the mood to do it this year. But I drank 500 ml of last year’s, thawed must, when I was writing another book. And yet, eating and drinking do not explain the work. Because the life of the soul is the life of the novel, and what we put in writing is ourselves and not peripheral things.

Their Cross was broken, the grave no longer belongs to them, because Nicu’s sister took over the place. Dying without children, married on Nicu’s deathbed, Florina remained a widow, sold the house and yard to the one with the shop, who buried her. And it’s as if they had never existed, the village almost completely forgetting about them. The death dislocates you from your neighbors and, to continue to exist in history, you must be somewhere, in some books, in some stories, in some hearts. Our passage through this world is extremely humbling! We come naked, we leave the same, and our history is recorded in a hurry or not at all. That’s why I collect images, words, books, data about various people from everywhere, so that their memory may remain. So that their lives may still matter to us. To be a point of support for us, some presences that can teach us something. And although many say that we no longer have time for others, because we love ourselves too much in the mirror, I see that we always like to find out, to be up to date with data about many people, and that we have not died. Our lively interest, the desire to find out, has not died.

When you travel through the night, you have the persistent feeling that the road never ends. That it is endless. The proximity lights are the only touch of the places you pass, because everything is vague beyond them. You don’t know, most of the time, where you are, you guess, the train is fast, it often clatters, and you can’t sleep in the upper bunk. And when you feel the various unevennesses in the ribs, the feeling of floating, of flying, of derailment is continuous, just as the plane’s fall into the void is the vivid feeling of unwanted death. The expanse of the night is boundless. You visually detect various buildings, lights, changes in relief. You are an explorer in the night, one of imprecision. Just as, in 1859, the author woke up at exactly 4 a.m., turned on the computer, and began to write green horses on the walls. He was not interested in the laws of Parliament, nor the latest cancans, nor whether it was raining or snowing outside, but writing, his writing so deep and sweet. The only embrace with which he loves us. Because you don’t know when, you don’t know where writing is a cake neither too sweet, nor less sweet, but the night begins to fall apart. From all sides you can feel the morning, this youth that you relive every day like the first time. As if you didn’t live it yesterday and it didn’t slip through your fingers like the wind.