I smoked a pack. The madness of the exaggerated winter cold slowly freezes me. I feel like I can't move my fingers anymore, and my legs are paralyzed from standing stiffly at the window for so long. But the pride of having won you over, of being in your apartment, makes me endure it all, just so I can watch the faces of the fools who longed for you and now walk by on the sidewalk. Everything feels unreal. I've triumphed. Red and blue stars dance around me, and a glowing angel gives me an injection, telling another she-angel that I'm an idiot who fell from your window.
Adriana Patroi Miu
It was too late to try to reconcile. When they had parted, he thought he was doing himself a favor, indulging in pleasures with a guilty greed. One day, he knocked on her window. His youth was fading, and he felt the chill of the night. Take my hand, my love. He had been replaced. Did you think I would wait for you? Once there was a girl who loved you, she told him. I don't remember her anymore. I've lived three lives since then and with each new birth, I lived again. He watched her as she prepared the children for prayer, then slipped into the darkness.
Gheorghiță Mircea
I stopped at the entrance to the dead-end street and fired the driver. I told him to keep the car. I watch through the bars of the basement window as you read and smoke. While everyone else went upstairs to the attics to dream of the sky, you buried yourself in a 5-square-meter cellar, condemning the false revolutionaries, in love only with themselves, the sex beggars, the Nouvelle Vague movie characters, full of their empty words borrowed from Freud. I've played my part too. I tap on the window. Will you let me in? You know it's a single bed. So what? We've managed before.
(Translated by Andreea Sorana Oltean / University of Bucharest, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, MTTLC, year I / Corrected by Silvia Petrescu, coordinator of the translations)
Versiunea în română a acestui text se poate citi aici, în rubrica Ficțiuni Reale.