A few months ago, my beloved and I were enjoying the ruins of a ghost town in the Death Valley. Masterfully adapted to satisfy the tourist’s taste, the town, or what it used to be a town, stood stubbornly in the desert facing the merciless winds and the unbearable heat of a sun that seems to never go to rest there in the desert. The experience was amazing, the pictures we saved aren’t as great as the memories of the moments are in our minds.
Not too late afterward, we came to Romania, to join our beloved ones, to spend time on the land of our childhood, with memories and magic of itself.
On one of those days I went up the mountain with the two of my last blood relatives, my Mother and my brother. We reached the place with not much of an effort, the road that once seemed to be an epic adventure, was now swallowed rapidly by the horse powers of a modern car.
Under the shiny sun of an early summer day, the mountains were still there, the highest ones still snow capped. The forest, ferociously decimated by a severe storm that reached the area a few years ago, left some places naked, sad monuments of past glorious days.
The resort, as is hard to name the place a town, is a shadow of what it used to be and today is the promising foundation of what it will become. Massive infrastructure projects are reshaping the place, extending the parking space and the ski domain surface. Comparing it with other such realizations it is of little importance, but applied to the place is a daring but promising undertaking.
And so we walked, a silent party of three toward the shatters of what it used to be our dwelling, decades ago. The sun was friendly, the snowy peaks were watching over us from above and a perfectly clear sky was a perfect background for a return that wasn’t ever supposed to happen. The building we lived in for long, now collapsed under the times, bricks and rocks, wood and shatters, dust and rusted iron are still maintaining the shape of the structure as it was sometimes.
I contemplated the ruins from an elevated point and I realized I didn’t have sadness or any other kind of shocking feelings but the smiling memory of my childhood. How big it was then and how insignificant a size it shows today that it had. How big of a palace it was for me as a kid, a building to have no mysteries but still to encompass the entire world in it.
There were the books, the hundreds of them, I read during my holidays that brought the world, as wide as it is, into my possession.
And while strolling among the shatters, I suddenly realized that someone was missing from our party, My Father, that decided to leave us, a few years ago, for the never ending afterlife on the mountains of Heaven. He was not there with us, but his presence was so vivid in all of our souls. Because this was the place where we had a long time ago, only for us.
It was the place where my Father decided for all of us that is the center of the universe itself, every small flower to blossom in the spring, every summer breeze, every sunny autumn day and all the snows of winters were unique wonders of the world and they all belonged to us. And so we walked, every morning out on the ground to overview our colossal and inegalable property. He taught us how to respect and to leave alone every creature as it was the most marvellous in the whole world.
Now, our party of three consisting of actually four, stepped silently over the last remains of a time that had irremediably passed away, leaving just memories. Our horizon extended past the tree line that still can be seen over the surrounding mountains but still our center of the world is there on a forgotten piece of land that now, with the help of its new owners, is getting definelly rid of its past.
There I walked over the debris of my childhood.
words-of-mine 