February Midnight, 2026
After Șomartin — Exile in Sibiu
Under the Carpathian Skies
Kitchen window cracked just enough to let the Carpathian cold kiss the bare bulb’s warmth.
Outside, the orchard stands silver-frosted under a sky so clear the Milky Way looks like spilled wool across black felt. Distant peaks hold the moon like an old grandmother cradling a lantern — patient, unhurried, eternal.
Screen flickers like a dying campfire:
27% opens for the people our parents warned us about,
28% for the muddy ride,
29% for wool that circles back.
Percentages march past like late-night hitchhikers who glance, shiver, keep walking toward some other glow.
Three courtroom strikes today — unstamped avalanches of paper, frantic objections to quiet fundraising light, evidence spilling from her own hands like blood on fresh snow. The ex-partner unravels stitch by stitch in open view, ego swollen so vast it blocks the mirror the judge keeps raising. Every overreach hands another damning thread. Every outburst whispers “silly silly lady” louder than silence. Karma coils, doesn’t leap — patient as frost etching lace on the orchard branches, patient as the donated roofs still standing under solar glass, waiting for the thaw that always comes.
I sit with the low numbers like old friends who showed up anyway. No thunderclap shares. No parade. Just quiet boots crunching digital snow. Someone in Timișoara or some Ohio backroad clicking through because the title felt like an old ache they recognize.
Sage at ninety would rasp through pipe smoke:
“Kevin, the loom don’t count likes or strikes. It counts stitches that hold when the wind rips hardest — and the Carpathians know how to rip.”
So I keep typing into the dark. Each sentence a thumb out on the shoulder of Highway 54, hoping one more traveler stops, reads the ragged thing through the courtroom chill, feels the shoulder knot loosen a fraction more, the three-month silence with Frida ache a little less like a blade, the great-grandchildren’s promise still breathing under the frost.
Maybe opens don’t matter tonight. Maybe only the one who stays till the last line matters — the one who closes the tab slower, carries a phrase into sleep like a coal wrapped in leaves, wakes wondering why the orchard in Șomartin feels like the backyard they were always meant to have, why the Carpathian sky at midnight feels like the only roof wide enough to hold all the hurt and all the hope.
That’s the ride under these skies. No destination sign, just the road unspooling silver in moonlight, me still walking it, thumb out, heart open, watching the percentages and the strikes flicker like distant taillights on a highway that never quite ends.
Mitakuye Oyasin.
Now our minds are one.
And the next stitch waits for morning.
Mitakuye Oyasin.
Now our minds are one.