Maybe unhappiness is the continuum through which a human life moves, and joy is just a series of blips of islands in the stream. Or if not unhappiness, then at least melancholy . . .
– Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses
The heavens have been kind to me these past few days. She exists! My imaginary pensive queen made real! One who has lived, loved, and lost for almost as long as I have. A pleasant dream, the hues of roast durum wheat and hot tears. She’s clothed in warmth and heartache. Her eyes, they smile with a tinge of knowing sadness. She showed me a glimmer of my soul! Snarled and faded, I thought I had done away with it for good. Tucked away someplace so deep, even I didn’t care to look for, or had outright forgotten about. Exchanging songs, sharing sorrows, holding back intentions. Slender fingers tapping on a 6-inch sheet of glass, strumming on the hair-thin strings of my innermost desires and hopes from thousands of miles away, until late into the evening.
She tells me she is afraid of saying something stupid. Yet, I am the one who apologizes profusely, reminding her ad nauseam of what a foolish man she’d chosen to connect with. She tells me she is acutely aware of the fact that we’re in our mid-thirties; I tell her I am gearing up to live to be a hundred and fifty! She tells me she fears losing again, but what’s forever for if love ain’t? She tells me she’s prepared to spend the rest of her days alone… I want to, I need to hold her so close that my blackened heart relocates in her chest cavity to keep hers company. Words of encouragement, of timeless wisdom, of praise. In vain, I search for them, rummaging through the beggarly contents of my mind.
Nici măcar nu știi asta când ești aproape O pace mare coboară pentru a-mi potoli agonia, La fel ca tăcerea la răsăritul unei stele;
You’re not even aware that when you’re near
A great peace descends to quell my agony,
Just like the silence at the rising of a star;
Mihai Eminescu’s poiesis produced a crack in my hardened blood vessels. I know that newfound warmth also courses through her body, but she warns me not to do that. She asks of me, of us, to talk less. It’s distracting, it’s confusing, it’s misleading. She will let my strings go, and the winds of oblivion will blow me away. I can already see the day she turns her back on me. The colours of life will invariably lose some of their lustre.
You have probably figured out the pattern. The fake complexity to my latticework of observations and feelings. And You’re probably tired of it by now. The comings and goings, my mind, a revolving door of all-too-human banality. And longing. Yet that’s how I attempt to make sense of it all. My copium.
tsvetoslav shalev 
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