One Postcard (Melania)
I want to become a famous writer. Melania has been telling herself this phrase ever since she was in primary school. Of course, that was already a long time ago, or at least it seemed like a long, long time for her. So many people would have considered her so young, but somehow, deep inside, she felt awfully old. She did not know why, but she felt tired and worn at 17. And so incredibly far away from achieving her dreams…
Melania grew up in a fairly unknown country from the ex-communist block. And although she was 6 when a highly controversial revolution overthrew the communist regime, she still had some strong memories about the unending queues to buy a liter of milk per child per day or the portrait of the ‘beloved ruler of the people’ hanging at the front of the kinder garden classroom or the blind adulation with which even a child of 4 was worshipping it, unquestioningly putting this adulation above one’s filial love. She has also heard uncountable stories from her grandparents and parents and the various ways in which her family was disintegrated and then brought together by the system.
But that was a long time ago. Melania, like so many others, entered school immediately after the Revolution and was therefore considered the first post-revolution generation. She knew little of it and she hated stereotypes anyway, but maybe in a way, growing up in a freer society imprinted some different sense of the surrounding world and the people in it. She definitely had wider access to the sources of universal knowledge, she was freer to read all sorts of books and think and speak her mind unhindered by the fear of being overheard.
However, all these achievements for which young people chose to die during the Revolution didn’t really make her life that much simpler or better. Melania felt lost and guideless, not knowing which way to turn her steps. Like so many others, she longed for a better place, she longed for more knowledge and she desperately longed for love. She would sit alone on an empty bench in the most famous park of her provincial city, reading Joyce or Camus in a half-snobbish hope that her other self would pass by and notice her interest in higher matters. And she would sit on the edge of her balcony on warm summer nights gazing at the small patch of clear sky that could be seen between the high buildings surrounding her block of flats, gazing and singing for hours with her pretty voice in a helpless waiting for Him to pass by and notice her.
She loved singing almost as much as writing. They were both ways of letting out the agonising movements of her interior world, struggling for a way to emerge out of her chest. But she never ever considered becoming a singer as part of her destiny. She was aiming for a higher, more intellectual kind of recognition. She wanted to become a writer.
She had but a few friends, and even those, due to a self-aware compromise. She felt that the kind of friend she was wishing for was a too rare sort of person to run into it and ended up in the company of people who though decent and nice, could never understand or share her dreams and interests. She was at ease with her choices and her life, but she wasn’t really happy. Just like the little mermaid in Disney’s animation, she wanted more.
Increasingly aware of the small world in which she was moving, she decided to use the greatest achievement of her times, the Internet and try to talk to people from other corners of the world, perhaps in the same desperate attempt to find love and higher understanding. And between many other frivolous meaningless chats and email exchanges, she met Andrei.
Andrei was, paradoxically, sharing the same nationality with Melania, though he lived in a different city, the over-developed capital which she had but scarcely visited as a kid, when her aunt used to live there. He was too a seeker. He longed for knowledge and guiding just like her. But whereas she was drawn to literature and arts, he was quite passionately into mysticism and alchemy. He desperately longed for a sense of belonging, he was restlessly searching for a guide. He had ever since junior high school devoured every book about alchemy and the occult that he happened to bump into and thus he learnt about the knightly orders and the Holy Grail. But above everything, he wanted to find the Philosopher’s Stone. And he too, in his own unacknowledged way, was longing for love.
“To my wandering knight,
Towards what unpierced skies have you outstretched your wings
And towards what untamed dreams you drag your iron-heavy steps?
When the Unpierced’s gate is widely opening its gate
Just a finger’s distance away from you?
Your medieval princess,
Melania ‘’
This is what she wrote on the backside of a colorful postcard of her native town which she half distractedly sent him one day, shortly after they first met. She was not in love with him. Her past Internet experiences taught her well about the dangers of falling in love with love and not with the real person. In a way it well betrayed her taste for fantasy and romance and maybe a drop of melodrama. She always thought she would have been the ideal inspiration for any artist and she often envisaged herself as a novel heroine. She liked to flirt with the idea of incarnating the Mother of Gods, the primordial feminine essence, of being the Woman, with whom any man would fall in love with. It was after all a very vane desire and Melania was well aware of it. But at the same time it was a proof of how much she thought she had to offer and how eager she was to do so.
However, she didn’t write that pseudo-poem with the intended wish to seduce Andrei. It was more like a test. Would he understand the message encoded therein? Would he take the challenge and rise up to it? She was more like just teasing. And by that time she had already grown skeptical and disappointed enough to doubt that he’ll actually understand what she was trying to tell him anyway. She never fully expected him to take her postcard seriously either.
