#2 Ciorba

I'm watching a man walk through the door, he's quite tall, of medium build, he has long brown hair scraped back into a ponytail that curves around the nape of his neck. His bone structure looks as if the God's themselves carved it out of stone. There he is with perfect pink lips and utterly glittering sky-blue eyes. He walks into the edge of a table on his journey through the restaurant and is knocked to the side, his limbs flailing all over the place like an oversized giraffe slipping on a banana peel. This is Pup, he works here. He's one of these rare gems who are both naturally hilarious and utterly oblivious to it. I adore him.

As he enters the kitchen he smiles at me and lightly kisses my forehead with his arm curled around my back.

"You okay sweetie?"

"Mmm."

We used to have sex. We'd finish work and climb into his car, Dacia Logan - mustard yellow, shipped in from Romania about 6 months after Pup was. He'd smoke green and I'd smoke tobacco and sip Jager out of the bottle until we'd gone through all the greats; Metallica, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin. Being with Pup is like getting lost in a foreign city. He wears knee-length leather jackets and drives a bright yellow car and doesn't even think of other people enough to care what they think of him. It's like it never occurred to him that someone might look at him like he's different.

I used to live in a three-bed terrace with six other people. There was a stuffy kind of girl downstairs who used to very nicely-but-not-so-nicely tell me when I'd left my clothes in the washing machine. She used to live in the room opposite me and barely gave a passing look when we crossed paths. Then she moved into the Big room (used to be Living room) downstairs, and the Romanians moved in. Five grown men squeezed into one master bedroom. They bustled in with their bicycles and barbeques and a homemade palinca-fermenting set up stuffed into a kitchen cupboard.  They laughed and guffawed through the thin walls in their fiery, indecipherable language. They brought a pumping heart into a sterile, bony home. I adored them too. 

I was the most sick I've ever been in that house. I went to bed normally. Tired, exhausted really. Cold to the bone from the slow walk home in the rain while my stomach gnawed at itself.  Waking up, however, was a different story. My entire body was on fire, my head swam through a thick fog of dizziness and nausea. Reaching from the edge of my mattress to my phone on the floor was the equivalent of moving through setting cement. I fumbled with my blurry screen long enough to call work and choke out I had the flu. Someone said reassuring words and I muffled noises to indicate I understood, then dropped my phone and collapsed back into the kind of unconscious you only feel when you are really, really, sick. 

When I woke up again it was dark, and I was gripped by an ungod thirst. I gasped at the air as if it would relieve me somehow. It didn't. I tried to move to get up, to stumble to the bathroom for water. I couldn't. My spine against the mattress felt as if it was lined with stones. Suddenly I started to panic. I had been seriously sick before, but never so utterly alone in it. I didn't know anybody in this house. The 9 words shared with the girl downstairs since I'd moved in had ranged from cold to downright bitchy, and my vibrant neighbors across the hall had never spoken a language I could understand. I had no one I could call, no boyfriends or friends around, no family in this dimension. What if I didn't get better quickly? And how could I while starving my body of even water? This mattress on the floor of my mattress-sized room was all I had to hang onto as I spun back into a flu-induced vertigo, hoping I would wake up walking again. 

The next time I woke up, it was daylight and with the opening of the door. It was a gentle open, a soft, hesitant open. As if afraid of what one might find. I dragged my eyes up to observe the intruder, panicked and vulnerable. It was a man. A middle aged, kind-faced man holding a bowl. He smiled gently and placed it down next to my sweat covered mattress. I tried to gasp out a thank you, but my mouth was filled with what felt like sand. Then my eyelids dropped again. 

Later I pulled them open, dragged myself to the bowl and spooned something, not even considering what it was, into my mouth. The liquid was rich with fat. Soft shreds of chicken and chunks of potato and vegetables. Whether it was the water, the flavor or the calories, I don't know, but it felt as if I had swallowed life. I emptied my bowl and fell back into my pillows, the next time I woke up, I was resurrected.  

I don't know whether they noticed the space behind my door was eerily silent and unmoving, I don't know if they discussed it or planned it or wondered aloud if I was in need, I don't know whether they just had extra lying around offered it out to the house. I don't know any of these things, but I do know that the gently smiling man with the hesitant knock who was holding that small bowl, pulled my body back from the worst sickness it had ever seen. 

Some days later, I made my way into the kitchen and the den of cigarrette smoke and loud chatter to thank them. The gently smiling man pointed to a huge, steaming pot on the stove and said one word, my first ever Romanian word; "ciorba."