OF BROKEN SHELL

Artwork by Adela Serban

          Do you remember?… Once I have asked you to let me cry in your arms. I just wanted to cuddle my little body close to your heart and to sigh like a faded autumn leaf. Without any special reason, or maybe because my cross was too heavy. But you drove me away. And I promised you that you would never see me crying again.
        The Poet used to say that everything that exists on the earth needs to cry from time to time… That’s why all I could promised you was not that I would forget crying, but that you would never know the colour of my tears again.
        And I have kept my promise. Maybe you have forgotten that day. But I will never forget it, as it has been engraved in me, starting to build bas-reliefs of sadness. I used to leave home when you were not there and to go to that rock which was as lonely as I was… to be alone with the sea and the dead shells… I used to come back late, lowering my eyelids in front of your hostile-suspicious expression. But you have never asked me where I was coming from.
        I will never know if the reason for which you didn’t ask was only pride, or if simply it wasn’t hurting you. But I was painfully wishing you to ask. In order to offer you the silence as an answer. Or to wonder. In order to find as answer the same silence which I was desperately hoping that one day would make you wish to see where the barefeet traces left in the sand were leading to.
        I was imagining that, if you ever reached that rock, old as the earth, and instead of the miserable secret that you would expect to discover, you would find only the bitter purity of the driven away cry, The Angel of Tears would be able to spread away in a single moment the heavy padlock that you closed your heart with. And once there, none of us would have ever come back to the world which would have thought us forever lost, stolen by the sea or by the storm… and our story would have begun again and again, from then on, written on the sand with fish bones…
        I have always been waiting for you, laying down on the rock, watching the sea, my hair mixed with killed shells, thinking to hear in each noise of the grass in the twilight wind the beloved steps coming closer and I was closing my eyes wishing it so badly as I was almost feeling your tender palms covering my closed eyelids. I would have only wanted your hand on my forehead… and to fall asleep, maybe for good, hearing to the swinging noise of the waves, beneath the mercy of your hand… But you have never come and the oblivion slapped again and again my cheek hurt up to blood by the shells’ dead bodies.

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        "This is an unsual natural phenomenon", the guide was explaining to the group of tan and happy tourists which were setting their photo cameras on to take pictures of the phenomenon. "It  is a stone of an unknown origin or age and its structure is unknown as well."

        "Very interesting…" said a bold young man surrounding the stone. "If you look carefully you will see that it looks like a woman laying down on a side watching the sea… She seems to have been waiting for someone for a very long time, then she have fallen asleep…. And she’s dreaming… And there’s really nothing known about this stone? No researches have been carried out?"
        
           "Yes… but the results are very inconclusive… there is a strange, unknown material, that the winds and rainfalls don’t succeed in destroying… Fragments of shells have been discovered in its structure… as well as an unknown substance, which is very, very similar to the human tears."