Where the Days Fade Away and the Heart Finally Drops Anchor
The little battered kitchen radio (the one with the cracked plastic case and the coat-hanger antenna) caught a signal just long enough for Jimmy to slip through:
I know I don’t get there often enough
But God knows I surely try
It’s a magic kind of medicine
That no doctor could prescribe
I used to rule my world from a pay phone
Ships out on the sea
But now times are rough
And I got too much stuff
Can’t explain the likes of me
But there’s this one particular harbour
So far but yet so near
Where I see the days as they fade away
And finally disappear…
I stood at the sink with my hands full of beans and eyes suddenly too much salt in my eyes to see straight.
Outside the window, the red clay roofs of the village caught the last light: some blazing like fresh blood, others softened by centuries of moss and snow, gentle as an old man’s beard.
I had ruled my world once from cockpits and pay phones, from departure boards and courtrooms and lonely hotel rooms with minibars that never quite fixed anything.
I had too much stuff: frequent-flyer miles, legal folders, regrets stacked like cordwood.
Then the storm that had no name blew everything overboard.
I washed up here with one suitcase and a child’s mitten in my pocket.
The village didn’t ask for my story.
It simply left the gate open and the stove lit.
Some nights, the phone still rang with voices trying to drag me back to the old oceans.
I would stand on the veranda until frost stitched my beard, staring at those red roofs glowing under starlight, wondering how long a man learns to disappear on purpose.
One winter, the snow closed every road for three weeks.
I walked the ridge every morning anyway, carrying the mitten like a broken compass.
On the longest night, I poured the last of the țuică into the snow and whispered the only prayer I had left:
Let the days fade away.
Let me finally disappear into something that stays.
The snow took the words and kept them.
Spring came sideways, sudden crocuses, sudden green.
A small girl in a rainbow snowsuit stepped off a plane and ran straight into my arms, shouting one word that sounded like the whole world beginning again.
She looked at the red roofs, some bright, some moss-covered and quiet, at the sleeping garden, at the dog trying to wag himself in half, and said, “This is the place.”
I didn’t argue.
Now, when people ask how I ended up here, planting garlic under these particular tiles, I don’t explain the likes of me.
I just hum the line that finally fits:
There’s this one particular harbour
So far but yet so near
Where I see the days as they fade away
And finally disappear…
The storms still circle.
The phone still rings sometimes.
But the red roofs hold.
The moss thickens.
The child grows taller than the garlic scapes.
And on quiet evenings, the little kitchen radio still finds that one station, and Jimmy still sings the medicine no doctor could prescribe.
Boat drinks, friends.
This round is on the valley, on the snow, on the red roofs that taught a restless man how to arrive.