Antonia

I was fifteen. Post-communist Romania was fifteen with me. We were both learning how to stand without holding the walls.
I was a hippie. A real one. Long afternoons of music after school. Guitars, cigarettes. Too much cheap alcohol.There was teenage anxiety. There were questions that never stopped buzzing. There was love, and there were kisses, all brewing in that huge, tiny fishbowl we called life.
I remember those summer nights in my older friend’s apartment.
She was a university student. That made her mythic to me.
She had a record player. She had Pink Floyd.
We used to take diazepam with vodka, just enough to make the floor tilt softly. I can still feel myself on her thin mattress, windows open, a faint breeze teasing the lace curtain like a slow breath.
From the cemetery across the way came the funeral brass band. And inside that tiny studio, like an answer from another world, we played Shine On You Crazy Diamond on repeat. And me, fifteen years old, shining between them.