The danube delta gashes the enigmatic south-eastern land into 3 symmetrical watercourses. In the collective consciousness as well as on national maps, they appear to be merely creeks. If their number and composition do not connote divinity as they are, the one deepest south guards the swathe by holding the name of a saint.
Once a certain barrier is crossed, rusty means of transport and entire civilizations coalesce eastward into a leveled meadow, tucking itself clean behind the horizon like an ironed duvet. Fishy-salty air guts tracheas and lungs into bodily bliss - here, one can talk virtuously about eternity.
I go into a train of empty seats, crosswise to my destination. every journey makes me aware of my affinity for thinking in cartograms: I operate as a point in passage, a traceable streak in a matrix. I think of myself from a satellite viewpoint - if only satellites were aware of political geography, of country borders drawn in white. Of small humans rubbing their dog days' sweat off of their faces in trains following diagonals.
My mind is busy with the logistics of sleeping in slanted positions. I have always been anxious about the comfort of my sleep. I close my eyes & the mean echo of the train dissipates into a fatigued mist.
An off-kilter light blinks into my eyelids from behind the big window. Dying industries and ghost towns are shown in their forlorn glory as the railing produces sounds of unfinished metalwork. I eventually fall into dreaming of nothingness and old people's smell, stuffed into the train cushion, bare on my unsuspecting skin. In midsummer, I never dream of disease or other unspeakable things; I simply rest my cheek on any familiar surface. My dream is as sweet as the yellow light I discern dying away.
In the morning, halfway through my journey, the grounds fall flat and green, water is coronated, and the energy shifts into a general volume decrease. No saintly name protects me on the fine-lined chart anymore; I am stuck in my secular awe.
I reach the geographical edge of the country, where I land on a lunar scape; this is an odyssey of opaque motives. Here, it’s easy to wonder why people even travel at all. Here, it becomes clear that existence is circular - it renders me back and forth into vacant spaces like this one, glitches in the ozone layer.
The trees look at me with entitled dominance, they insist on making me aware of all the knowledge they possess and that I will never have access to. I caress them gently as if our discrepancies in wisdom can be melded.
Once settled, I travel to the nearest lukewarm crater. Reclusive, holy. Its sinewy flora awaits my redemption. I undress in the back of a rented kart. With some reluctance, I hop off into the expanse.
On the hood of the kart, sand glimmers in strobe light-like motion.
Looking at my dusty sports shoes, I expect to peek at graphite mineral fragments, yet an earthly vastness opens at the corner of my shadow instead. In mild annoyance, I throw the shoes to my back, together with everything else that hinders my purpose. My vision is clear. I observe the inhabitants of the margin: screaming crickets, languish lapwings, bacteria-looking insects. Some kids shout from the water, particles of a big forgotten bowl of soup. I step in with fervent force, plunging in, my qualms immediately repented.
Here, I am bent on swimming until there is nothing else. Here, the crater is a union between my dreamlands and my limbs. In the depths of this parched land, I feel every one of my pores breathing, pulsating like hungry gills.
Fey rays of light, a week passing like a lifetime. I am left to swim in any basin I find an appetite for. The algae befriend me, they couple to my body, magnetically resonant and docile. Kids also swim ceaselessly. With cupped hands and zealous calves, they radiate like champions of an unknown game. The inertia of their bodies passing each other suggests that they are made of the same skin. I almost get the impression that, if their arms eventually touch, they will morph and latch into each other or into a harmonized lap.
At the edge of existence, rules become arbitrary.
At the tail of continental rivers, prior knowledge becomes redundant. Gravity loses its voice, scant in the loud heat, tapering off into whispers. Only kids’ screams prickle the otherwise calm vista. The summer season exhibits itself naked and enduring. At the will of a child’s reddened forehead, the sun glints yawningly.
This is my own Apollo mission.
Like a wet towel, sunset falls heavy over the now cheerless crowd. Night transforms the ample space into a tiny, dark aperture. It is an opening to a distant thought - an oblivious child, asking her dad if he saw angels the first time he took a plane.
I cast my sight to the plankton while the sky smolders, perforated with shimmery stars. I am merely an inflection point between the masses of blinking light. As above, so below.
The rooms of the pension smell of mildew and body spray. There are wooden constructions all around the domain and an ongoing chatter incongruous with my sleep. I spent my entire youth bloated, anxious and on edge, waiting to be exonerated from my growing pains. Tonight is no different. To my demise, the bed misses a tiny leg, propping me at an unsound angle. Before my dreams wash over me like a south-eastern stream, I have to face all of my fears and pray to the gods of the margin to be seen or to be ignored, to be shielded.
Here I am: young; proud but sanctified; whirling through turbid waters. My church is now a basin, formed in timelines and consciousnesses parallel to mine. Here I want to draw a cross onto my body, shamefully, swimming a bit deeper so the other kids won’t sneak up on my act. Here my body turns into sinews and disappears into stirrings of light. In the beginning, everything has to take place from within - another rule of the arid southeast. Obey or watch yourself perish.
At night I dream of hollowed out teeth and punctures in tissues. I think of my biology class and my poorly drawn vessels and organs. All I envision is schematic and silly, portrayals of dance moves, swinging bodily fragments. I can draw in my imagination proteins shaking vigorously - yet I could never describe them in words. When I swim naked, I glisten with the same lack of constraint through cavities and other glowing masses or bodies.
A man disturbs my amorphous dream with his imposing presence. His explanations are elliptical, hard to piece together. Through the whirring, he tells me we are late for church. I have not been to church in a long time. At my favorite church in my hometown, or a slightly erroneous copy of my hometown (you know how dreams go) I place 3 of my fingers in the pit of holy water. The motion is mechanical and the water is lukewarm. The walls carve an austere resonance into the church’s enclave, like a crater. Here I used to expand my some-time-ago-tiny body towards angel’s feet, caressing them with care. Here I am again, becoming immune to the dirt in the finger beds of everyone who touched the marble crevice before me. I start with the forehead - left to right motion is arbitrary in direction and I forgot its significance - I end with a slight touch of my belly. I gratify myself, consecrated.
I leave looking at the altar, taking tiny foolish steps back into the profane. Facing the divine, I feel eternally indebted. For whatever reason. For plenty of them.
Once I disappear and leave behind an orb, I imagine feeling tingly just like when going numb. My most fulfilling daydream of a summer nap was to be forgotten.
In the Delta, I learn to reach into outer space and kneel against gravity into the cricket sounds, all pious. Forever devout.
The boat back from the delta shakes and creeks, soft sighs of exhaustion or malaise. The girls on the seats speak kindly to me but they have a threatening energy. They have those freckly-pale faces, distinct to so many people living in the country’s highlands. They tune themselves to our talk with dumbfounded, feline-like stares. Looking into their eyes is like looking at curdled milk: turning, betraying. I sense them softly refraining when I shut up, open my phone and record a voicememo of the sounds from the boat. Seagulls and fishermen and distant rolling gravel, looping like successions of synths. To my naked ear, their sound is kneaded into a runny paste. I hope I can record them like a secret that I can decipher on my own terms. A prayer in an echoing church, forgotten forever in an iPhone draft.
Reaching coarser lands, I stop dreaming for multiple consecutive nights. I drop my furtive plans of ever listening back to the recordings. The inherent loss of the flat lands haunts me. It dawns on me that I might never be water, I might never be a dried up tree, no meadow ever exists outside the control of my own sight. I process these circumstances in avolition.
My room is covered in wooden darkness and faint smokiness. The white walls empty me of fascination, of piety and of godliness.
They watch me tremble and waste sleeplessly. At this hour of the night, my heretic journey comes to an end.
Luna Sferdianu is freshly 22, Romanian born/bred and currently residing in The Netherlands. At the moment, she is completing a queer literary residency (remotely) in Romania, while starting up her internship as an editor for Glamcult magazine in Amsterdam. Her gap year allowed her to explore various facets to her artistry ~ be it writing creatively, filmmaking or illustrating. Later this year, she will be moving to NYC with a Fulbright to study Media & hopefully grasp onto new creative mediums. She lived most of her early life in a seraphic haze, to which her art bears witness.