I loved loneliness, but with this illness I realized how lonely I can be. Never have I believed I would get to the moment I long for something. A kind of longing that makes your bones ache, a longing that makes the egocentric molt and the allocentric metamorphose, a longing for humanity, love, beauty. My loneliness was like a pot with boiling pitch poured over my soul to take the form of misanthropy. And I didn't want to die. But the church bell disagreed. Every toll chased me away.
(Translated by Alexandra Lica / University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, MTTLC, year II / Corrected by Silvia Petrescu, coordinator of the translations)Real Fiction is a collective project started in 2013 by Florin Piersic Jr. The concept of Real Fiction continued to exist as a Facebook group, after a volume of stories was published at Humanitas Publishing House. (In February 2022, the group has 7,950 members.) The authors write ultra-short stories, with the texts limited to 500 characters (in Romanian, so the length of the English translation might be a little different) - a flash-fiction exercise on a topic that changes every few days. The group's coordinators are Florin Piersic Jr., Gabriel Molnar, Răzvan Penescu, and Luchian Abel. (Drawing by Adrian T. Roman)
Versiunea în română a acestui text se poate citi aici, în rubrica Ficțiuni Reale. 
