Ndrek Gjini

It happened years ago, I left. After I walked just two or three steps, I heard the door anxiously being closed.

I don’t know why but ever since that moment the sound that the door made echoes in my ears like the clatter of a handful of pebbles on a coffin.

I started to hate the closure of doors. To me they sound like coffin lids.

This evening I walk the streets hand in hand with my grief. I have left, locked in my house, my disabled memories and my crazy dreams.

So, the streets, my grief, and I are ruling the world tonight.

Oh, you cannot imagine how relaxed this walk is, without those foolish memories and those mad dreams.

There are millions of inventions by man and still it goes on. All have had and still have a single purpose: to make a better and easier life for humans on this planet.

But shoes ... the invention of the shoe was an earl one. This damning invention - with its tenderness, seduced human feet so much as to make us not to feel the craving for fervent kisses of the earth: the first human betrayal of land.

Millions of other betrayals came later but the first one shouldn't be forgotten because everything began there - everything that causes suffering today and will continue to do so until we begin to walk barefoot again, until we start to passionately feel the kisses of the earth in every step we take.

Trees are shy brides. During spring they wear their clothing in the dawn of the day before we awake.

During autumn they take off their green dresses late at night while we are still asleep.

Death sneaked up and took you, my friend. She found the door open, and you lying there alone, To the mill of hate we had gone grinding our tricks and our defamations against each other.

Too many people had come to your funeral my friend. All of them downhearted, blubbering. ‘Why did you leave us, our friend? Ah, man, you were too young to pass away.’

Friend, if we really loved you that much while you were still alive, death would not even dare to come close to you.

Mainly the parents do not die. They just feel lonely when their children leave the nest, and they start to miss their own parents.

They go to meet them and forget to come back. That’s all.

My mother did not die of old age, nor did any illness lay her low in bed. Her worries for us, the fugitives, broke her heart, and one day she decided to not breathe anymore.

Her last breath became wind, and it’s blowing wild on this November day, whistling and singing to my ears, sometimes as a lullaby, other times a lament.

And very often the wind says to me: ‘Why so late my son?’

The frost under our feet doesn’t cough that loudly, yet it sounds more like an old man’s mumbling.

The wind is not breathing fast and chilly like last month.

Undressed trees do not look that pretty yet they seem shy, hiding within thousands of pregnant buds.

It’s February, the daylight has emerged victorious from its great battle against dark.