With a kiss closer to death

When I was little I could not stand the tick of the clocks. And this was not because I had troubles with getting asleep or with my nerves, but because the clock reminded me about the existence of time. Every tic-tac was similar for me with a knock at the gates of death. When I lied down in bed and only the shape of the window could be seen in the dark, then the tick of the clock was resembling to the noise of the wheels of a train which was bringing me to the death. One tic-tac was so short but it was enough to plunge me into an overwhelming sadness, into a sadness from which I did not believe to get out ever. It was awful to know that I could not bring back the time of my life at least with a single tic-tac. I was eating my heart out feeling how that monotone and sad sound disappears for ever and irrecoverably into the non-existence.
I was especially living again this feeling in the evening, when I was going to bed. But the true sadness and loneliness was overwhelming me in the foreign houses, even at my grandmother, where a big soviet clock got me off to sleep. Then I was thinking how depressive it would have been to hear this kind of clocks all the day, but at the same time I was realising that they tick even when I do not hear them. Whatever I was doing, wherever I was going, the time was passing.
The only meaning that I was still seeing was to observe most attentively the passing of the time, to register, to explain it. It was the most painful occupation of my life, but it was not in vain.
I began to see the passing of time in everything: in leafs that fell or just moved, in every change, in every word or gesture that were suddenly swallowed by the past as by a swarm of piranhas. I myself was helpless and motionless in the front of the past which was swallowing me little by little.
The passing of time can be measured by everything. I measured it by the clothes from which I grew out, by the people who died or married. Nothing can stop the passing of time. Even those in love can say: we are with a touch closer to death, with an embrace, with a kiss closer to death.
We are always closer. Many times I catch myself on the same thought during the Liturgy, when the priests and deacons give to each other the kiss of forgiveness and love before receiving the Eucharist, the Body and the Blood of Christ. Then they embrace and, kissing one another on the shoulder, say “Christ is among us”, and the other replies “He is and will”.
How wonderful! Then they are really with a kiss closer to death, but also closer to Life. For one thing I pray then, that this kiss bring me closer, particularly, to Life and not to death.

Translated from Romanian by Veronica - epistola7@yahoo.com