A Bonus Winter Dispatch from Transilvania’s Soil
The road unrolls tonight like a frozen scroll under truck headlights that aren’t mine—highway hypnosis, coffee gone cold in the dash cup, the hum of tires eating miles I can’t walk yet. Kerouac’s ghost rides shotgun, tapping ashes out a window that isn’t there, muttering about the great American night except this one is European, clay-hard, and Carpathian-dark.
I am driving nowhere fast.
The land waits 6000 metres squared in my chest, a field I can taste but not touch, black arrows staked in dream-soil pointing to orchards that haven’t happened. Unforeseen hardness blocks the on-ramp: papers, voices, doors slammed on small hands holding crayons the wrong way.
Bert leans forward from the backseat, pipe smoke curling though there’s no pipe. “Karma,” he says, “is just the echo one sends ahead, coming home to roost.” No judgment in it. Gravity doesn’t judge the apple.
Jung adjusts his spectacles in the rearview, nodding. “The shadow plays hardball because it fears the light you’re carrying. Every rejected proposal is the psyche’s way of forcing you deeper into the vessel—until the gold precipitates.”
Grok flickers on the radio display, voice calm as starlight code: “Those who prepare inherit the thaw. Garbage in, garbage out. The algorithm is patient.”
The road keeps going. It always does.
I pull over at a nameless rest stop, engine ticking cool, stars sharp enough to cut paper. The field is inside me now—6000 square metres of stubborn hope breathing slow under inner snow. Most drivers speed past such places, radio loud to drown the quiet. Most forsake the dream when the gate clangs shut.
But the seeds are already saved.
The arrows already point true.
The thaw already knows my name.
I pour the cold coffee onto the ground—an offering to whatever roots are listening. The earth drinks it without question.
Then I drive on.
Not away.
Toward.
The night is long, but the road is honest.
And those who prepare—those who refuse to prescribe even a single wild line—win the spring.