Trafika Europe 8 - Romanian Holiday

Mircea Cartarescu

for thepressureofmy feeton the grid. Extremely scared, I tried to open the door. But no door existed any more. The walls around me were no more. I stretched out my hands into the emptiness, into nothingness and my fingertips, like insect antennae, tried to grasp reality. Or to generate reality, like little electrical sparks. They came back inert, however, with no news from death and desertedness. I was alone, suspended like a statue on my grid, in the infinity of the night. I stayed in that state for hours and hours. My palms were going over my face and body to prove that existence continues to exist. I was crying unheard, I fully felt, like in so many nights of fright and cold sweat,

the terror of the ceasing of being, of the disappearance of the world. Eventually the surfaces and the sounds and the tastes and my internal organs and the perception of acceleration and the ineffable flavours came back, or my brain built them again, like a tireless weaver and his flying shuttle, so that imperceptible filaments, cords and infra-real loops were weaved in the non- being first and used to knit the web of space and time. Vaguely, phosphorescently, the walls were recreated around me, as if light would have started to flicker, increasing by one photon every instant, but increasing as well by ricocheting on surfaces, inventing them slowly. I restartedtoperceive the things around me and,

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