*dovezi ca insula a fost locuita?!...

I think it was more than one year ago when I started listening to the last album, listening to it because someone also liked it. Someone I'd almost literally gone to the end of the world for. (if the end of the world was a cold Romanian mountain town).

You know what it's like with the albums that remind you of people. You know, all the lyrics somehow connect and tell you a story. And if it is lyrics from In Rainbows, well then, you've got some stories to hear in your mind. Some romance, some lonely love, some bashing of heads against the metaphorical wall of "I miss it all" or "I wish I had something to miss".

This was a long time ago. Heart-wise.

There are two stories that link me to a Radiohead and subway experiences.

One was back then, when I was waiting to get somewhere, listening to All I need, thinking "yeah, he liked this album too. Wonder where he is. Haven't seen him in 4 months (and thirteen days, the count went). He is in Bucharest, though. So why haven't we bumped into eachother?".

Then I thought I saw him on the train, close by.Thump thump. False alarm. Same hair, not the same person. Shame. And the song kept playing "You're all I need/ I'm in the middle of your picture/Lying in the reeds...."

The engulfing feeling, the chills, the veins pumping blood to my heart on the divine rhythm. The thoughts that the song spawned.

Then the subway train pulled to a halt and as the doors opened, there he was, waiting to get in.

"You're here. I was listening to Radiohead. and thinking that you liked them. And now you're here."

-that was my coherent reaction.

The other story happened yesterday. In the London subway. So it's not really a memory yet. Slowly turning into one.

You know how you look at people in the subway and think, sometimes, " You are beautiful. In another lifetime you would have talked to me, or I would have talked to you...and I might have found out more about you.You might have disappointed me, but wouldn't that have been something? To let a perfectly beautiful stranger on a subway disappoint me?"

I was sitting behind a group of Italian youths, taking in all their conversation, away from Italy for three days and yet I missed it. So I was staring at this one individual with the warmest face and deepest eyes, thinking away. "Ah the eyes. But he might be a jerk. But he looks like such a nice person. But he might not be one" and so on and so forth.

The subway train pulled to a halt. We all got out.

I had to follow my friend, Mihai, and Lisette, a fun Chinese girl brought up in Austria. We were going to a stand-up comedy gig near Leicester Square. But the group went our way and on the escalator I could feel and hear them talking behind my back. I turned a bit.

That's when he started to sing.

"I don't wanna be your friend. I just wanna be your lover. No matter how it ends."

and I quietly joined in "No matter how it starts".

and then the escalators ended. And his voice died down.

The romantics in us cry out "wouldn't it be a story to tell, had we met on an escalator, sharing a Radiohead dialogue?"

Hugging my backpack like I would craddle an infant to protect him from danger. In fact, I am protecting my Philip Roth book, helpless in the face of water.

The drops keep hitting my hair, tangling with my brows, perching on them and then sliding down, having loads of fun in this joyride that they´re taking all over my body.

And I´m splashing through puddles with my gray boots turned slightly darker and wet till my socks,and I step looking down, hunching over my child, thinking “faster, faster!”, warmth, room, roof.

It´s getting colder here, in this old city. Winter shall arrive here as well,as it finds its way into everything and yesterday...or before yesterday, (was it?) I could smell home in the air. That air that cuts through your nostrils and invades your lungs with mountains, pine trees, old dying grass and simplicity. The air that rushed past your cheeks when you were dragged on a sleigh.

It was then (choking on the intake of freshness) that I realized how much I miss that winter, our winter, cuddled with a blanket in front of the television set while my mom is drinking some tea, my brother is typing away at some RPG and my dad is reading the newspaper with a serious pout visible under his mustache.

The silence in our togetherness and the comfort of being us, undivided, with no possibility of separating our common life and the memories we´ve created together.

In that gulp of fresh cold air I felt I could taste the warm milk with “cozonac”, a type of cake that melts with the milk in your mouth, or tastes even better when you dip it in before sinking your teeth in.

Being tied down to some place, being reminded that there is a place where your entire past is recorded in the hills and mountains you´ve seen through your windows, this makes you whole.

The laptop is playing the first of five cds with music from the 60´s. Some of the songs we´d listen to on our trips. You remember that cassette, mother? I almost ruined it one time, when it got caught and spit out its dark shiny guts out of the cassette player. 60´s 70´s 80´s songs, in a melting pot of words that back then I couldn´t fully understand.
For me it was timeless. The order of the songs was already imprinted in my brain, and I am quite sure I could still guess their sequence was I to hear them again now.

But I remember,remember it all, and I am thankful that my nostalgia is linked to something as sweet and as far away as these melodies.

Rainy days make my thoughts pour away. So now I´m holding my head above the keyboard, so they´ll all get in, as unplanned and hard to pull out of my fingertips as confessions of wrong deeds.