Procaryote

I was about to punish myself for the horrible
transgressions that I had committed, fighting
with my sanity for my sanity,
but then came the sword, down upon all
I held as mine, my dreams, wants,
and paperclipped people, all frayed
beyond recognition, tassels whispering
in the wind - forwards, not back -

I didn't kill myself that day,
for what went down in the ring
was more than a jewel's worth of
precious, and what I learned, my lesson,
what I'd been solemnly swatting for
the past nineteen and a half years,
had come, bearing with it an empty sack
of shoddy patchwork but within it, promised,
the promise, that it was fuller than
the superlative of what I had been yearning for.

Tucked away, I rose from my problems,
as a phoenix, sans the fire, sans the ash,
sans the smoke and mirrors and stampede of
interest into the egg that I had hatched from.
I flew, without wings, without anyone in particular
looking out for my inexistent blazing trail in the sky.
I beat no wings, I beat all odds,
I scoured and developed and penetrated
and found hope beneath my preening brothers,
fawns of the new day,
depth-receptive and drowsy.

I fell out of that yonder's dream,
whipped by a cloud into the obscurity of a concrete
path by a creek, flowing downstream as
water doesn't comprehend, but just does,
and I watched it, from my dead perch, where it went.

It never happened. It never will.
My will's not meant to take me any place but home.
So I say I flew, I have defeated and triumphed,
and I disregard the order of events to impress,
yet, even this, now, doesn't satisfy.

The moments pass, the moment remains.

At Last

I have responsibility
to let go of sensitivity
lest it break the trust
that pours through me
and waters down
all it cannot see;
and sensitivity
hurts my honesty
blindly keeping at bay
the falling ashtray
supposing mistakes
rookie mistakes, it takes
heaven from its own
and mine, and home
it brings me back
and all it asks today,
all it asks right now,
is that I let it free,
sensitivity,
to cure me.
My responsibility,
all it asks of me,
is not to hold my scream in
nor boil my anger,
but to let the river flow
and wash the horror
from my eyes, and tongue,
and brain cells.
It will be the same day
that I wait in patience,
no longer waiting for love.
That same day, this day,
I christen with my soul
as it moves into redemption.

Her, Her, But Him

It's an evening rain
I long
to touch sensitivity in my hand,
give it just a lightest tickle
to tell me how I feel, really.

She's here, for the taking,
but it's only his attention that I want.

She's whole,
yet she's my means and passover
to the other side I deem my home and happy place.

He's listening to this,
my play on words built up a scene.
He can't tell I'm acting,
neither can I,
so we sit and wait, an eager audience,
though the difference is I'm playing.

I'm playing him.
That guy, man, do I even know his lines?
They just seem to come up
without a prompt and cue and I say them
out loud, by his radar ear.
My fear, bubbling away discreet, streets
down - I'm running away gunning
for reality.

One shot, it's dead, I'm dead.
It remains,
but there's blood everywhere
and rubble
and underneath the shattered structures of trust
lies the culprit bomb, impending,
suspiciously vacant.

I want him. I can't have him.
I am him. I don't know him.
I want her to get to him.
I'll hurt her.
I can't have her, nor her eyes.
I still want him, my brother.
I want the truth, these lies.

And all for completion.
God, what am I doing?
If there's no doubt as to what lies ahead,
why am I seeing double?
And actually, what am I to do,
who am I to be,
that I don't turn away each time
fear talks back to me?

Attraversiamo

I couldn't compare this year to a kiss from a rose because I've never been kissed, particularly not so sensually or invigoratingly. A year ago nearly, I started this blog, this space of expression, ushered by an idea from a friend, one who walks by me. I wanted to write, so this, finally, was that opportunity to put something out there and have it reflected back and not disappear into the nether of the rubbish bin. About anything, about something, about nothingness itself, I wrote, experimentally, experientially, discovering that writing was a means of communication and connection, of courage and unity and the exploration of emotion, thought. It's a canvas, on which I can either paint an infantile abstract piece, or be blessed with something closer to art that's a window into my soul. So I can see it. So you can see it. And from the statistics that Blogger collects regarding my blog, it's not been a very widely-accessed experience, which I accept. Thus I can say that this space resembles more a spring in solitude than a photographed fountain in the centre of Rome, with statues in dynamic positions and coins carpeting the bottom. Looking for love, looking for the eternal, looking for happiness, that is what I had in mind, and each post, then, was my coin, my wish, my prayer, this being the 125th.

I began the year without much knowledge of where I was going, except to university, which was to be dreaded and revered, and therefore not very helpful as a goal seeing as it could be anything I made it out to be. Life was in my hands after high school, though I was to realise later that it was not perched warmly in my palms but coursing through the veins in my fingers, and like the blood there, it wasn't in my control. I wanted to know more about myself, so I went on and began a journey of self-discovery. Fears, shame, guilt, stress, all emotions that I had felt before, would come at my door and I was supposed to open it for them. I had some new unwelcome guests too, such as jealousy, desperation, insanity, heartbreak. I'd seen them in movies before and in the lives of those around me, but oh, I did not expect them to come caroling at my doorstep, and yet life did guide them there. Hesitantly, I let them in, then at various times kicked them out, then after pacing back and forth in the hallway, I opened the door again, and they walked back in, temptation hand in hand with itself, so pleased to see me, and later to lure me with its sex. Beyond being host to this cauldron of negativity, I had been blessed with signposts everywhere I looked, telling me what I needed to do to entertain the guests or to be a better host. Friendships formed, friendships strengthened, friendships stilled and weathered the teacup storm that started when clouds gathered.

I started university in March. Stressed, I experienced a sense of loneliness that I had thought had been buried back in Year 9. It was a bitter, alcoholic aloneness: addictive because it placed upon me thoughts I did not want to think but which I ultimately scooped up again from the sands of time and built a crumbling mound I'd pretend was a castle. Suddenly, the world had opened up for me, and I did not see myself in it. The tempest had begun, trying to find my shelter before it was too late. But I wasn't quite getting to that place of safety anytime soon. I don't think I was meant to get to that ideal place at all, and every pocket of sunshine I could find, I basked in half-heartedly, aware the rain would come back in again and I'd get wet. I changed my clothes, my approach, several times, but that wasn't going to stop the weather. So, instead of racing away from the eye, I was instead guided towards it. The centre. Where the demons lay together and fornicated. I received "A Course In Miracles" in the mail. I thought to do the course, it wouldn't hurt to find some answers that the introduction promised. It specifically said I didn't need to believe each day's lesson, just follow it. With that guarantee, I went for it. Spiritual awakening beckoned.

I don't remember what I thought it would be, but this was not it. The course emphasised completion, devotion, courage, presence, gratitude, all which have taken turns to teach me this year about life, about what I had missed, about what I have held in my past like an idol to commit suicide over. But it was not just about learning, it was also about experience. Suffering was tearing me apart below the surface, and habitually, I would try to understand the shit out of it and then it would make some fleeting sense and I'd be happy, until it stopped making sense. What I learned was that I could not, could not, could not, understand it all. And if I couldn't solve my problems, then, woah, there would be pain, content to suck on my life like it came out of my teat to nourish this cute, pudgy, infested, destructive baby. My mentality took a serious beating, and I had to question everything, what people meant to me, what I meant to myself, what I was doing, whether I was hurting people, whether I was who I thought I was. The perfect list of ingredients for overthinking, and that's exactly where it lead me. Thought. So much of it. So much of it unnecessary, because it was unable to answer those questions with certainty.

Certainty, then, came from elsewhere. The course lead me to God, or the universe, or Life, or whatever else you want to call what you cannot call anything. I was to have faith in Him, as I had consciously never had faith in anyone or anything before. Here was my life, on a platter that I'd chewed the silver from in my overthinking. Here it was, for God's taking. I have to surrender it completely, for the decision to have a transformative effect. I have let go of many things, but there still are some that I yet hold on to, still fears, lies, things I am ashamed of, things that burden my heaven and make me confuse it with hell. I am confident that I will let go of all of those, simply because I am willing. When and how, I don't know, but I do still have until sometime in early April 2011, when I am scheduled to complete the course. Past that, je ne sais pas encore. There are still lessons to be learned. Yet this is an appropriate time to reflect, as I have learned enough to witness a change. I don't know how old I am, mentally. I don't know whether I am gay, or straight, or bi, or a, or b, or c. I feel a sense of resentment towards being packed into a labelled cardboard box to be looked upon and segregated into some portion of interpretation. I feel it's detrimental to discovering reality. I don't know what specifically I am supposed to do. But I know that all the answers I need to know, will be given when they are needed, and it is in that promise that I trust. I can't rush everything, nor can I slow it down or numb myself from feeling pain so I can feel just joy. They are mutually exclusive by definition, but underlying them, there can either be unconsciousness, or the peace of consciousness, not both, always one. It comes down to the decision, whether I want the truth, or whether I want deception. Where I feel safe and secure is the criteria on which I base that choice.

The thought philosophy has dominated this period of time since the birth of this blog. I am trying to figure life out. While I watched others go on with their lives, content, taking part in joys and games and at times, their own soul-seeking, I removed myself from the stream of mindlessness that had driven me before so that I could prepare well for an adult life of doing what I was supposed to do. Quite frankly, it comes down to what I want in life, and I knew there had to be more than just chasing pleasure in a game, or a girl, or porn, though I do recognise they have their roles to play. With this realisation, I wanted the truth, I wanted what lay underneath the forms and things that we as people would involve ourselves in as if we were dolls in a house full of props. From situations, I wanted to go beyond to reason, to the mechanics of depth and creativity. I expected an intricate but clear machine; I found nothingness exemplified. Because, really, soul-searching had lead me to a skeleton of myself - dead in form, or at least, dying, ephemeral, but in essence, well, untouched by anything, invulnerable. Perhaps there is a better metaphor for that. I have touched that depth and its beauty is like a well of openness and disregard for difference. And it's really when I let go of thinking that that place is reached. The moment of experience is over and then I open my eyes from meditation and look on the world differently, as if it were all okay, even if there was fighting and politics and advertising and gore and poverty and apathy. For a brief glimpse, I do not even register the suffering, as if it was gone, and it mattered not. Then I slowly scooped it back in, because I thought I had to, as if it were my responsibility as a human being to take on the pain of others when I had some respite. I copy-pasted instead of select-deleted. Then I released back the tide, and that was the back-and-forth experience of finding peace, because it went to and fro. I want to say peace is winning, but the truth is peace isn't fighting, so that would be a moot statement.

I have been blessed this year, despite the war of worlds and words in my mind. Perhaps when one agrees to find themselves and agrees to confront their past with no weapons, just forgiveness, one is greeted with help from previously thought-of-as-unlikely places. Each situation has been and is a lesson. Each person is a brother. And underneath my strict mold of the world, that mental construct I foolishly wore as a protective helmet, I am a brother, too. In that spirit of oneness in which everything real is, I am. This lesson, I found difficult to digest, especially when there were those around me who were very different outwardly, who had different goals, approaches, behaviors. More often than I would like to admit, but I do here anyway, my ego has played the part of a victim, ever the attacked, ever the one who is hurt. Other times, my ego was the conqueror, dealing blows to other egos. Yet behind these masks, I am to learn that we are all the same. This is a glorious truth, but one I know not if I can impart but merely point to, one I yet bring to the world because I still believe there are exceptions to, even though there are not. I have talked with friends, at times nearing a point of desperation, and in those moments of vulnerability was revealed the river of love I had been searching for elsewhere, in the wrong places. In case you wonder, I talked about behavior, personalities, hopes, fears, pain, suffering, guilt. Identity too. Things I would normally stray away from but was needing answers to. And friends were happy to steer my vessel in the right direction, whether they were aware of it or not. That's another interesting thing that's happened this year, I've gone under the radar and achieved so much personal growth, without many people noticing. Help, signposts, have come from close friends to strangers to strange situations to music and literature. I figure if I am willing to give myself to life so that it can use me for whatever it wills, then it would point and guide me in the right direction, and if I deviate from the path, it would come and show me the way back after a pep talk and a realisation or two. But I don't want to create a tornado or some other dramatic turn of events. I want to quietly find peace and then radiate it through my impersona so that those surround me may find their own lives more pleasant and enlightening, wherever they are on their own journeys.

Ultimately, I want to be loved, but I also want to give love, as I have before. Giving and receiving is the same thing. In the spirit of unconditional love, I would learn that love knows no boundaries, no definitions, no traffic lights nor walls. I expected at the beginning, foolishly, for someone to tell me that they loved me unconditionally, and then I would impart all my pachyderm belongings onto their ass and I would be a free mule alongside them. Bull. Yes, others can love you if you don't love yourself, but you cannot know it unless you love yourself in some way, at least a tiny bit, somehow, tucked away beneath layers of difficulty. This year has taught me that I can tell you nothing about love as you may want to hear it. I have never been with anyone intimately, so I cannot give any stories of romance or consuming bodily passion. Yet what I know of love, is that if it really is love, that is, if it is without reserve, then all it is is a recognition of yourself. You are love. And so am I. I am writing these words but language cannot encompass such completion, wholeness. From memory, I don't think I've felt it wholeheartedly. But I want to. And it will come when it will come, but I know it will come now.

Love is everything, and there's nothing else. Love is the word that I use, but I use it loosely. I like love. It sort of symbolises peace and contentment and fulfillment and joy all in one. Perhaps it's not very focused in my mind, but I don't hold on to it. I find myself saying 'true love' now instead of love because of all the changes to the term, not that adding 'true' makes it more true, it's just easier for me to know what I mean. Like I said though, I can't tell you anything about it, though I've written quite a bit on it. Perhaps it's me pointing to it, for me, for you. Perhaps it's my romantic mind, or my secretive desire to express emotion in a world that doesn't value it to the extent that I see it, especially coming from someone of my gender.

I am grateful for so many things, so many people, some that know themselves, some that may not yet. I appreciate you, for sharing your life with me by reading this. Everything really, even the 'bad' stuff, for it came up and showed me where I needed to change. The puzzle pieces fit perfectly, even if it all looked like a mess on the floor when I began. Now it's beginning to look like what it was meant to look like, life. I feel like I am right where I need to be, and I have faith in the gentle light of guidance that I am going where I need to go, home.

Attraversiamo.

Dissection

Keep a comfortable distance
Away from prosperity before
It can make potholes of the
Windows of opportunity
Through which the house
God lives in finds the light
Of day.

Sail to the sun.
Backwards from the apocalypse
Searching the advent for a
Rubber band, to hold the
Letters together when
The speech is read out
In the basement of rapture
Backwards from the new eclipse
Captures the sizzle
The fire
The pew broken
Shattered by the wrist
That shackled membrane
That tepid cork
Burst.

Keep a wine bottle in the cooler for the better days
That have run out
With the children outside.

Settle back in.
The world is wet and the seat is damp
And the wood is growing
Beneath the carpet.

Upstairs there's a man
Singing about his imagination
Soaring into valleys
That break through mountains
Hit pelicans in the eye
And startle prams
Through a hole in the concrete.

Catch this
Cold feet
In the bathtub
Masturbating
A vulture calling out
In ecstasy
Ready to feed upon
Death's leftovers.

Looking Up

Living here, in this brand new world, might be a fantasy. But it taught me to love, so it's real, real, real to me. And I've learned we must look, look inside our hearts to find, yeah, a world full of love, like yours, home. Such a place I've tried to find for a long while, I've tried to locate where my heart was. Some find it in precarious places like their birthplace, some discover its existence in the remote reaches of a dream and from then on go on the search for that dream. Some Google it and get 100,000 results. Some seek and find what they are asking for. Some don't ask for what they really want, and get that which they ask for. The subsequent results indicate that it's somewhere elsewhere where I haven't looked previously. It's not complex. When I feel apart, I am not.

It's now that I see. It's clear to me that home is where the heart is, not because one feels an attachment to where the heart might be focused on, but because home is always here. I go on journeys of discovery to find places I belong to. Where do I descend from? Who are the people I have originated from? This leads me to new paths, new worlds, some traveled, some unexplored, some ancient, some untouched, some inexistent, some on the edge of exception. It's a compelling search, the search for home. I look at the yonder and wonder. Clouds mourn their lamentations and it rains, and I am scared to look up further. Then it stops and I look up again. Awaiting the lament.

To stand outside when it's raining
When it's pouring
Up I'm looking
Up I wish to be looking
To meaning
To being
To being myself,
To healing
Towards what I'm praying
About what I'm feeling
To what I could be seeing
If I was looking
While it was raining.

Home. It's where the heart is. It's here.

I seem to like to twist the idea and play with it around so that I can see it from different angles so I can understand it. Really, it's quite simple. There is no hidden message hidden in the obvious. The rain is symbolic for the 'tough' times where we forget to forgive. I am learning now. Thank you. To look up when it rains, to see that the world is not blanketed in darkness. There is light, because the light that shines upon me comes from within.

Nightingale Street

Growing up, I lived in an apartment building on Nightingale Street. I was on the second storey, excluding the road/ground level which was considered as a storey in itself but not actually called a storey. My young body was small, and through it I saw a world much bigger. The road was much larger than it appears to me now, at least in photographs. I had to take many steps to get to the other side where there was a small store that served as our dairy. It was quite a mission, not in the difficulty, but in the responsibility of it being assigned to me, to take the 50,000 lei note from my mother's hand and go downstairs, across the asphalt street into the store to buy a Coca-Cola and a Mirinda. Then I made my return journey with the change. It took less than five minutes, but I had completed my errand.

Nightingale Street was small. It connected two other streets and ran parallel to a larger, longer, more traveled road. The sidewalks held ample room for two people to walk side-by-side. More recently, they (whoever that may be) installed parking spaces in front of the buildings, which our family used when we got a car. This left only room for one car to actually travel through the street at one time. I imagine it would have been even more difficult in the winter with the snow. The street looked different in summer compared to winter. In summer, you could see the shoddy repairwork that was hastily or improperly done on the roads. Bitumen spots covered random places, somehow like mosquito bites, together with a myriad of cracks and other potholes, from wee to big. As a child, these features are part of the landscape - I saw nothing wrong with them, they were just there - irrelevant and included. Come winter, a blanket of snow would just about cover the whole street, which is why they had to send in snowploughs and a roster for locals to do manual shoveling of snow. Generally, the street itself would be clear enough for cars to pass through. By that I mean there was a layer of muddy stamped down snow that coated the way for vehicles to travel to work, that is, if their engines weren't frostbitten at 7am in the morning. The sidewalks were also snowed on, as one would expect, but they were also manually cleared by the shovels of middle-aged men with warm coats and fur hats. If the snow got too wet and mushy, footprints of gumboots and thick shoes were visible. At times, when the conditions were right, sheets of ice would form, which would provide good entertainment for children like me to skate on with the neighbour or with some friends I had made at the playground two streets away. Older people at times fell and scattered their groceries here on the ice. The few trees that interrupted the sidewalk to the right of the entrance to our set of apartments were covered in a white mantle all winter. They simply lay there, warmed by the cold, an odd oxymoron, because they were preserved until spring when they would bloom in their natural magnificence. The grassy garden areas between the sidewalk and the apartment building itself, while naturally green and alive in summer, now was tucked away in hibernation, perfectly white except for spots of yellow which neighbourhood strays decided to paint on the landscape. Then there was the occasional sign from heaven that winged children delivered in the snow.

During the warmer part of the year, the aforementioned trees would bear fantastically green leaves, an assortment which would change to warmer colors during autumn when they would carpet the ground, no one to clean them up but the children who kicked them away and awed at their slow dance with gravity. The farthest tree along gave us chestnuts, free to pick. If I were to get one, it would be off the ground because it would have fallen. I wasn't tall enough to climb, but my brother and his friend from the apartment vis-a-vis ours were. They climbed up, exploring the crevices, the spaces between the branches and the view from close to the summit. At one point they may have shaken the tree, resulting in chestnut rain. They're supposed to taste nice. I think I tried them once but I can't recall the taste so likely it didn't make a very good impression on me. At least not a lasting one, and I'm usually one to remember smell and taste.

Going the other way towards the end of the street we didn't live on were more apartment blocks. One of them held a dentist which I went to once or twice, probably just before I moved to New Zealand. In between the two apartment blocks on our side of the street, each four storeys high, lay a rubbish dump where stray dogs used to rummage through. I didn't like going past there, out of fear. There were also some tramps and/or gypsies who did the same thing (rummaging), and I was scared of them too, but they may also have repelled other people with their stench. The lack of hygiene puts people off. By the rubbish dump there was also a concrete space which now probably is a car park. But it used to simply be a space where friends, brothers and sisters played catch or ran around deceptively aimlessly. The other side of the road also held a four-storey apartment block, and then in front of our block lay a much taller ten-storey block, which had, understandably, its own elevator. Generic would be one way to put it, but the whole street from memory had an entrenched quality, almost fixed in concrete, as if those buildings would always remain there, even though they looked unappealing and impersonal from the outside.

I never quite got the significance of why the street was named after a Nightingale. If we were to be correct in translating from the Romanian, literally the street belongs to the Nightingale, and I don't remember any nocturnal songs being sung outside. Maybe it was named after a person. Maybe not. The place, though, has evolved over time, and just as my own vision has changed with age, so has that place. The cracks that I did not notice before, I do see now, and the amount of them, metaphoric and otherwise, leave me with a sentiment of sadness - that my childhood home isn't really being cared for. I still have my memories though and while I don't hold on to them, I am aware that changes happen. Nothing lasts forever and that's the way it is.

In The Evening When It Rains

In the evening when it rains
It gives us hope that tomorrow
Will be a brighter day.

In the evening when it rains
We remember that same sorrow
When we lost our way.

In November in the cold outside
We cross the frozen river
And we pray our feet hold fast.

In November in the cold outside
One snowflake makes us shiver
And we feel our breath at last.

At the peak of glory we stand tall
We have our heads held high
But our hearts grow fonder of home.

At the peak of glory we stand tall
In light we bathe the sky
For as birds thoughtlessly we roam.

To us the heavens send a hand
To hold when to ourselves we die
And no longer can reach beyond.

To us the heavens send a hand
To realise our hands untied
For miracles in life to happen.

In the evening when it rains
We remember that same sorrow
When we lost our way.

In the evening when it rains
It gives us hope that tomorrow
Will be a brighter day.

Cracks In The Walls

From here, they look like tiny Lego pieces, all the same off-white colour with a faded orange stripe. These apartment buildings, home to a slew of people that I never knew, rise up in ordered lines. The rectangular windows are equidistant from each other and as they dot each storey of these homes, it becomes a message in Morse, a cry for help. With my two eight-year old feet planted on a grassy descent, facing away from civilisation, I look at the camera, hands on hips. My childish smile – unaware of the truth behind me – turns into a smirk that I see now, some ten years later, to be a question: what happened?

Today, there are cracks in the walls that used to be my home. The security that they once provided, the warmth during winter and the shelter during storms, remain but memories of a place I know does not exist anymore. The process of leaving Romania, leaving childhood, leaving my home and learning about the “real” world in New Zealand shattered the window through which I looked out and put a filter in its place. Romania was not a comfortable place to live in with its corruption, its disorganised system of government, its apathetic politicians, its victimised mindset and its overall squalor. Blame the communist dictator Ceausescu for his totalitarian regime. Blame the gypsies who are marginalised and look for food in the rubbish dumps. Blame the people emigrating for not loving the country enough. Spit on the ground in frustration at the wretch of a life you live – no one is going to clean it up. Blame every single other person, except yourself.

I sometimes wonder what would have happened if I had stayed in Romania. How much would my family and friends have changed? Would my mind be as open as it is today? I don’t like to dwell on the ‘what if’s because they inevitably distract me from the reality that I do enjoy and appreciate life. But I imagine that, when seen from an unlike perspective, my experience of the world would have differed quite dramatically.

Romania – a simple place when viewed from the curious gaze of a little boy with eyelashes girls would kill for and a face that looks a little bit too much like his mother’s. A boy with a happy childhood, because what else would you call it when his grandmother ties both ends of a rope to two branches of a tree to make a swing because the metal ones in the nearby kindergarten were vandalised and broken past the point of repair; or when his brother builds a tower of bricks around him so that he only has enough room to poke his head out and smile as his mum takes a photo on his eighth birthday, the same day he would witness a solar eclipse at 1pm. These snapshots are not few in quantity, because they fill about ten photo albums of family history. But their quality, their ability to preserve a reminder of childhood joy for a teen to revisit as he matures, is what really indicates their value to me.

I find myself looking back at these photos to relive the emotion of the tale they tell. I used to feel nostalgic within the first few years of living in New Zealand as I was still reluctant to accept that the reason we moved was because it was better for us here. My childhood ended on arrival in this foreign place with palm trees, clean roads in good condition and personalised houses, as opposed to small unkempt streets between copy-pasted apartment buildings that Ceausescu had built in an attempt to attract workers to the cities. The contrast was and still is quite stark.

My coming of age story thus has elements of adjusting to a whole new culture and keeping from being absorbed into it. I’m not a Kiwi. I’m not a Romanian either, despite my saying that I am when asked because although I empathise with what is going on back home, I do not share the survivalist view that the world is cruel and unfair. And yes, Romania is still home, because so much of what I knew to be happiness originated from that place and those people there that were close to me. You can tell this from the number of smiles in the photos, and the amount of smiling they in turn cause.

Growing up is magical for any child, for they cannot see the cracks in the walls. So much of society is built upon righting past wrongs and realising a world better for the next generation. Children only find the present, and what a gift it is to them. What can we say about ourselves then, as humans, when we take that away because we lost ours, too?