Friday, August 31, 2012

short stories

The short story I randomly read in a weekly magazine embeds a soft, still unplugged guitar; the dark violet sky colors the upstage. And music is coating everything up in a sweet yet, refreshing, flower-like scent. 
Sunday night, around ten o’clock, I was coming back from Iasi. A North Railway Station full of people, trains with huge delays over 270 minutes, and a smothering heat. In front of MacDo, a young lad was waving at his girlfriend. She was backpacking and rushing towards him. When she came close enough, in a stroke of enthusiasm he made the perfect splits before her. A perfect stretched split, like a pro dancer or at least a gymnastics champ. An athletic, full of love happening in the middle of a wearied, heat-dried world.
It’s strange how things are linked. Few random words retrieved in milliseconds a clear picture of rails, the smell of tar, dust and metal, the fuzzy sound of voices and trains…all these made me remember her. We used to live in the same town, we were in the same university. Never too close, never friends. She studied French, she used to write poems, and I was looking at her with admiration and childish yet well tempered envy. And now, digging through my scattered, faded memories she had some sort of French like features, mignon, dark haired, heartfelt smile. That day, probably more than ten years ago, in the same North Railway Station, in a hot summer day, at the end of the platform he was waiting for her with big a bunch of marigolds. Tall, thin, in white shirt, smiling a bit shy while giving her flowers. She was wearing a simple long white dress, her dark hair in a ponytail, a blue bag. And that big bouquet of orange marigolds… I was watching them disappear from sight off the dusty platform in a world of hasty, indifferent, tired, busy, never dreaming people. Two thin white silhouettes hand in hand, leaving behind echoes and shadows of an odd whispered love song.

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