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Laura-Corina Miron won the 1st Special Prize in the Short Prose section in English, at the 5th International Literary Creation Competition. We congratulate her and invite you to read another of her works.

A Modern Family

The Shift happened like a global earthquake and landslide: A simultaneous, intertwined phenomenon of Time seeping back into the unconscious being replaced by an eruption of Energy and Money of disastrous proportions.

Global weather turned hotheaded and temperamental, with every passing year distancing itself in cosmic ellipses from our fairy-tales-listening-and-reading induced, partially historically founded perception of correctly functioning seasons according to geography. The outer political as well as our own intimately experienced Time heaved throughout each year like a young child’s emotions on a single day. We retreated from the outer Time’s tantrums inside our modern homes with their artificially constructed interiors regulated at a standard value.

We always had glistening colorful fruit on a plate, fresh palatable jewels watching us in golden, ruby and emerald from the center table in our ostensibly roomy, large-windowed, sunlight-flooded kitchen. It was a sign of health and youth, although at that time four generations were living together under the extensive roofs of our tightly neighboring villas and the fruit would sometimes grow too soft and brown-spotted while takeaway orders and empty phone-ordered pizza boxes lay on our - the younger and youngest family members’ - bedroom floors or on each own private living room’s expensive heavy wood-and-glass tables. The seniors of the then recently established dynasty – achieved through the merging of three large families of three different cultures by one mature man’s and one equally no longer young female’s marriage - still kept their cooked potatoes and canned tomato chunks sacred and didn’t waste a crumb, at the same time not holding their noses up but rather down towards the white linen cloths in the restaurants chosen for the lavish outings paid for by the financial pillars of the family, the adults in their full bloom, during the at least thrice-a-week manifestations of their generation’s freshly established tradition of spending almost blindly for posh plates of elegantly minimalistic displays of concepts of food.

Most of our days’ interactions in thought, word and action revolved about food, its origin, its appearance, its effects on the body and, as they would add “on the state of mind”, emphasizing mental health and happiness – which we youngsters internalized as an image of our future selves luminously levitating in a permanent state of our organism’s inner and outer well-being, demonstrating the level of our achievements measured in the bounty of connections, friends and endless material possibilities. We imagined that, as adults, our minds and actions would have to be at times easygoing or else fuelled by doggedness. It was all in good, ignorant faith and it struck us as a destiny of complexity and hard work although it really was the most superficial Weltanschauung I now could be bothered to draw up. Even back then, the faintest voice inside would denounce chimeras. Maybe they started out with idealistic hopes and views but the better the money became, the more they focused on the simple, exterior bit, since, to them, the visible state of anybody’s body would have a greater effect on their state of mind than the other way around and could spark either prolonged discussions about how not to fall behind in life by holding on to your body – their discourses would consist of passive aggressive reproaches pointed against themselves or whatever had ignited the crisis - or else they would engage in temporary, tight-lipped dieting frenzies that had them follow the strictest rules, dictating what the body was allowed to do and what thoughts they were allowed to think – all so they could strain their body against the current of the passing of time.

At heart, most of us are philosophers. Private philosophers in our lonesome and/or our family lives or public philosophers, the ones entitled by academic degrees to officially and credibly cast their views out into and upon everyone’s ears and minds, as well or as incompletely thought out those views may be.

Our parents were passive philosophers – also like the most of us. They had not read Heidegger but his corps-a-corps battle with Time was lingering like fumes in the airs of the century after his death. You only need to be born in the trail of a powerful – be it an illuminated, be it a darker – mind and you are sure to inhale its essence without having to read a single page of what they jotted down from the spiritual world. What has once been set out into the world never goes away, Einstein said it and now we know it, nothing disappears, everything changes and usually as something more insidious and perfidious and less innocent than imagining that Indians from India think their current pet cat could be the reincarnation of their great-grandfather and so they choose to respect him - or not, depending on what stories run in that family about great-grandpa. But that last bit is a jokey Western approach, Indians would never think like that, they could never…

So had Heidegger´s intimate struggles with the harmonies, with the innermost moving forces of the world undergoing a momentous turning point during his lifetime come to influence my parents’ own passive philosophical views of the world via the great changes in the quality of life that their parents and their parents’ parents experienced during what was the Great World’s 20th Century, with all its Great World Events looming and finally fuming throughout.

Their relationship with time changed slowly from childhood to adulthood, from the grand movements of a magnificent universal river to dammed urban rivers, from storms to showers and finally the conveniently manipulated taps in their own luxurious bathrooms. What had borne them and had been the shape around them during childhood, what had nurtured the development of their bodies and souls had retreated into the domain of the legendary in an ever rarer accessed memory and nowadays showed itself in the shape of a facility at their daily disposal. Extraordinarily, theirs were the only generations that would experience this shift of time as overlapping their coming of age.

Love was of course given major territory in our family. Our parents used to assure us of this noble sentiment toward us by uttering the precise words on a daily basis, usually during a shared meal. The love darts would hit our ears no matter the possible and very probable tensions that would build up in a family at any given moment for any God-given or God-forsaken so-called – let’s not call it reason but trigger. Modern psychology oblige. That was the parental love and it only required us to confirm our love back to them. They requested their own words back.

But back then, words were easy. It was the era of ease and easiness. Of the body, by dieting, of the mind, by staying chill and of the heart, by allowing oneself a multitude of passing passions without depth and throwing words around like confetti at a perpetual party of ease.

Silence lay banned somewhere deep. Awake or asleep, we would talk, read, listen, watch and comment, perform and request feedback. The sun went up, the stars went up, planets were spinning, maybe even playing the music of the spheres while our brains were clattering while still managing to conjure up the images of the reigning days of the World’s gone Illuminati. But those images of millennial truths had lost the power over our souls and so we repurposed them, dressed them up in glittery garments like modern Fools, and they would do their required jumping jacks up and down our addiction- responsible brain connections as if on a yellow brick road, teasingly tickle our corneas and then scurry away, empty and ghost-like.
Words turned light and ease, then, in the end, words were nothing and the silence within grew heavy, the depth grew darker.