Romania is a restless country.

The lack of historical respite had taken its toll. The tiredness of being Romanian has
turned to indifference, so that afterwards, we would live it today vaguely, like it’s an
embarrassment. Slightly flustered by our “Romanian-ness”, we glide through the
modern world like we are wearing an old coat. The plenitude of being Romanian, as an
interwar example for this nation, seems like a statue savagely shattered by our brave
contemporaries, riding upon the hasty steeds of the lack of conscience.

The process of nationalizing the Romanian identity first started under the tracks of a
communist tank and it’s now being done through soul stealing whilst listening to the
mermaid song of a shapeless world.

I made myself a mast the best I could and tied myself to it, shouting to the mermaids:
“Lies! Being Romanian is one of the beauties of the world!”

The Ground
“You will run away from here… You will go to America…”
“No, you won’t” the trees’ leaves and the grass whispered to me.
‘I will!’, I would answer with conviction. What could I do here, in this ugly world?
“They will go, you will stay, and the moment will come when you’ll see here the most
beautiful thing in the world!”
And during the night I would think of childhood, retreating into it. And there, the sky
would talk to me, as would the river, but especially the mute crosses from the small
cemetery of the little church in the village. The twilight came like an unseen fay, the
beetles running through the air and I wished I could obtain wings like theirs.
The silence ruled and the stars reclaimed their place in the sky every night.
“Wake up, you asshole!” came the voice of the sergeant who tortured us every morning.
My heart would jump out of my chest and get ahead of myself. I would dress my body
who remained without myself within, unmoving corpse. My hands were stammering over
the buttons and shoelaces. Then I would hear the wet, steamy breathing of my
colleagues and mine, sounds like a horse stud cast off nowhere. Through short orders,
the sergeant would cut my last bits of dreams short. The reality was theirs.
‘I will leave this country!’ I would tell myself, grinding my teeth. It’s full of evil, it’s
unnatural!
“No, you won’t!” the frozen ground would answer back as I stepped on it with my
combat boots.

How would you, ground, know what life is? And distinctly, what my life is? I want to be
happy!
“We are your life, we are your happiness. The ground you step on is us,” the earth
would answer.
‘Who are you?’ I would ask.
“Attention!... Attention!” you would hear the corporal would shout. “Crawl with the gas
mask!... Attention, you! When I say ‘Attention’ nobody moves, not even a child inside its
mother’s stomach! Understood!”
We became still as trees. Only the frost would remind us that we are alive. The truck
had then taken us to make the military oath. The sergeant read off some papers. How
many papers he had!
The soldiers would listen to the glassy frost. The sergeant’s words didn’t leave the
papers, they died on his lips, like moths touching a lightbulb.
“Soldiers! We will visit the Marasesti Museum!”
My eyes went over the old pictures. Romanian soldiers 1916-1918.

All of a sudden, my eyes fell on a shirt hollowed in the middle by a shot. The blood was
still surrounding it. It was like a still-open wound.
“I am the ground you walk on and the one you want to abandon!” the bloody shirt
whispered to me.