LAVINIA ZAINEA

A Series of Unfinished Stories

       During the course of your life, there are many people you cross paths with: you start from the moment you are a toddler and you meet your first kindergarten friends, little children much like yourself, with their future in front of them. They are as real to you and as vital to your life like you parents, or even more so, since you probably see more of them. You know them by their nickname and only have a slight idea of the existence of a surname. You play with them, cry next to them, learn how to speak properly next to them, are fully aware of the terrible misfortune of one of them destroying their favourite dress or losing their toy car. And then something happens: you grow and without being quite aware, you leave, go to school, start a new life, forget your friends’ faces and their names, and for you, they remain stuck in that land in which you met them, playing by the sandbox, or, as time goes by, running on the school corridors, reading and laughing outloud. They get lost somewhere in the passages of time, and every once in a while you pull them out of your memory and wonder what ever happened to them.
      Your best friend from elementary school, the one you used to tell all your secrets to, is locked up somewhere in the drawers of your mind, never aging, and you are under the impression sometimes that if you picked up a phone, they would still answer, as willing as ever to listen to your troubles with your parents, your math exercises and your desire to run away from home and be famous.
      There are people whom we kept in touch with over the years, whose stories became part of ours, but we lose most of them along the way, and we never find out what came of the person we used to love, of the friends we cherished at one time or another of our past. For us, their stories will remain unfinished, unless we bumpo into them by chance, and disover that they are no longer what we remembered them to be, that they no longer remember us. And still their story does not end, it just becomes foreign to us and it withers away.