Getting Lost

If I sit still long enough, it comes to me. It always does in the silence, even all these years later. It starts with the simplest of thoughts. Dense slabs of bread - cut on the table with a dull knife - crumbs scattering. A sticky jar of strawberry gem. A mug of Nescafe mixed with cacao and sugar.

Then she's there. My Romanian sister, inspecting a jar of Super-Chunky Skippy that I've brought with me to share. She licks her fingers and squints at the label. Nutritional Facts? She asks, her brow lifts. Fat. Calories. She laughs, You really want to know how bad what you're eating? I laugh with her. Oh, crazy, neurotic Americans. But I still refuse the jar when she tilts it toward me.

Her family spreads their bread with untura from a tub. Pure, white and shiny - a plastic bucket of lard. They fry potatoes every night in a pot of oil and eat them with fried eggs and untura slathered bread. Yet, they're the skinniest family I've ever met. Each with willowly limbs and impossible legs that stretch to their necks.

It's because they work hard and they don't own a car. They walk everywhere. It's a beautiful place to walk, Sighisoara. The old city, with it's infamous market square where once Vlad the impaler displayed his bloody pride. The park, filled with barefoot children. Main street. The smell of hot bread.

And I'm lost there.

Until the phone rings or the baby cries and I'm spit back out in the present. Years apart from those streets, that family, my once-upon-a-time life. But, aching as though I've just left.

Part Three: Haunting

(Sighisoara, Continued from The Realization and The Place)

They haunt me when I am still. They appear, peeking around the corners of my idle mind with their doe-like eyes and their outreached hands, caked in filth. Hard black muck wedged under their nails and in the creases of their skin. Their calloused hands slide against my soft white palms and their bare feet pound the hot pavement, walking beside me.

In the winter, I went to their village. It was a mile or so beyond Sighisoara. We drove in a cramped diesel van packed shoulder to shoulder with padded winter jackets and stacks of peanut butter sandwiches, pots of rice and soup. The village appeared in the horizon as stubble against the white-gray landscape. We parked along a brook, slush encroaching on its small brown stream. The children raced to meet us, bare feet, bare legs, bare chests and arms, all flailing against the white landscape and splashing through the brown water to slap their little palms on the side of our van. Their toothless grins smudged with dirt.

We quickly dished out plastic bowls of soup and sticky sandwiches to the tune of Jesus Loves Me. Their parents remained on their side of the brook, watching closely with arms crossed and faces stern.

After eating, we crossed the slushy water to their homes, with medical and cleaning supplies. Their houses looked thin, like cardboard stuck in piles of wet brown earth. The village reeked of filth; dirt and feces. The homes were one room, cramped and sticky with heat. A makeshift stove sat in the middle, blasting heat against the layers of clothes and garbage, lining the walls. Old, glassless TV's were stacked in corners; a solitary mattress would be heaped with mothers and babies, staring glassy eyed at us as we walked into their dimly lit spaces. Standing there, in the windowless room, breathing in the steamy stench, you could forget that there was a shining sun and a cold breeze moving just beyond the walls. I was desperate for the air. Desperate to leave.

I escaped to the cold winter air and was immediately swallowed by a crowd of children; reaching for my hair, petting my jacket, smiling. Frumoasa. Beautiful.

Some of them escaped village life. They live in one-bedroom apartments in town with their entire extended family, sleeping and pissing on the same floor. They spend their days chasing the Americans along the sidewalks, sweetly smiling, eyelashes flickering puene te rog...Bread, please. They are often bruised, either from staggering drunk parents or from scuffles with older siblings. In the springtime, even the little girls heads are shaved. They wear wool winter caps to hide their stubbly lice ridden heads.

I loved them. I would wander the streets of the town looking for them with bread in my pocket and money for ice cream treats or bubblegum. They were all beautiful, stubbly heads, dirt caked grins and all. And I promised them more than I could ever deliver. More than food and smiles, I promised them hope.

And then, I abandoned them.

Five months later, I was thousands of miles in the air, crying and crossing the Atlantic. Back to my safe, ordinary, American life. I left with promises of returning...but haven't.

And so they haunt me still.

Part Deux: The Place

Looking back, I was smitten from the beginning. Intoxicated, even by the gray sky and the cool morning mist on my skin as we walked through the arching door of the train station.

A drizzly winter morning in Transylvania is not a sight you'll find on any tourism leaflets or postcards - but it is what you would see if you could glimpse into my minds eye's view of beautiful. It was the perfect, stark and chilly gray morning that changed my life.

We drove through winding cobblestones streets at full speed, herking and jerking (and gasping and clutching our backpacks to our chests) in the back of a cramped diesel van circa 1970. When we finally lurched to a stop we were divided up into twosomes and threesomes - and me. I was put in a host home, alone.

It suited me just fine. I sat for hours in the kitchen of that tiny apartment, my elbows propped on a shiny white tablecloth, peering through thin red curtains to the narrow street below. Donkey's and carts plodded past. A notebook of Romanian slang and scribbles of poetry sat in front of me and a mug of Nescafe warmed my soft palms. I stirred heaps of sugar and dark cacao into the cup - it had become my makeshift mocha in a city of powder-packet cappuccinos.

I wandered the medieval city on my own. I got to know her. Early in the morning farmers unpacked their sacks of herbs and vegetables on the concrete slabs in the market – the scent of dirt and onions in the air. In the afternoon, her skies are filled with the chatter and laughter of children wandering the square - or tugging my arms and shirt, asking with dirtsmudged smiles for bread or salami. After dark, my footsteps were the only sound echoing against her medieval walls and clapping into the black night.

I found that she is beautiful at any time of day, in any light and through the veil of any storm. (Even when the storm knocks out the power and I'm bathed in candlelight doing laundry by hand.)

Part 1: The Realization

It dawned on me in the middle of a thunderstorm.

I was standing at the bathroom sink with a pair of underwear in my hands, scrubbing fiercly with a bar of laundry soap; scraping them over a plank of wood while warm suds squished through my fingers and trickled the length of my forearm. The candle beside the mirror wavered with each firm stroke, shaking the light and sending shadows dancing around me.

My knuckles were raw from scraping against the sink and the plank, my back was sore from leaning over the dirty sink. It was right there standing beside the pull-string toilet that it struck me: I was in completely in love.

I hadn't planned on falling in love; yet there I was, fingers dripping, underwear soaking, candlelight flickering, surrounded by dirt and sweat encrusted clothing waiting for their turn in the sink - and I'd never been so happy.

Not with a man or a person, but with a place - a place of being (Sighisoara) and an emotional place within myself.