"My Eskara never wakes up with a shout; it unfolds slowly, like the rhythmic breath I have taken for seventy years. At this hour, the village is nothing but a silhouette of jagged roofs and sleeping chimneys, etched against the fading indigo of a tired night.

Before me, the lake lies like a vast sheet of silver glass, swallowing the secrets of the reeds I’ve known since I was a boy. No doors have creaked open yet; no path has felt the weight of a footstep but mine. It is a fleeting, sacred moment where the world belongs only to the mist and the water.

But beneath this deep silence, I feel something stirring in my bones. Even the soil beneath my boots seems to lean toward the horizon, waiting for a beat of wings that hasn't arrived yet, but is already written in my heart."

That morning, she appeared at the edge of the shore like someone the mist had carried in.

 A camera in her hands, a foreign name on her lips: Galatea. She said she had followed the storks across half of Europe, and the trail had brought her here. 

To our village. To Yaren. I did not ask too many questions. 

I have been a fisherman my whole life, and you learn pretty quickly that some things show up in their own time, just like the birds do. 

I grabbed my usual catch and we walked over to the nest without saying much.

When Yaren came down and landed next to me, 

same as always, Galatea went quiet. 

She lowered her camera. 

She just looked.

"How long have you two been friends?" she asked.

"Fifteen years," I said.

She did not write anything down. She did not take a single photo. She just nodded, slowly, like someone who had come a very long way to find something and was only now starting to believe it was real.

"Fifteen years ago , an early morning, one like any other I pushed my small boat gently away from the shore, as I had done a thousand times before. The lake was still, holding the sky like a secret. I pushed the oars for a while without thinking—just another day, just another cast of the net.

The water barely moved.
Everything felt ordinary.

Then I noticed something—white, faint, almost part of the mist.

At first, I thought it was nothing. Just light playing tricks. But then it moved.

I stopped."

At that moment I froze, I didn't know how to react, I felt terrified because I didn't know what could happen. I couldn't call anyone because I was alone in the middle of the sea, but my feeling told me that nothing bad was going to happen.

            So I stayed still and let the silence settle around me, the way you do when you don’t want to scare something fragile away. The shape came closer, slow and careful, until I could see it clearly—a stork, struggling against the water, one wing dragging like it no longer remembered how to fly.

            A stork—too still to be just tired—balanced there, one wing hanging lower than the other. Its eyes did not blink. Not once. For a moment, I had the strange feeling it wasn’t looking at me, but through me, as if it already knew who I was long before I noticed it.

                 I don’t know why, but I spoke to it.

“You’re far from where you should be.”                     

Cristi B                                          CSEI "C.tin Paunescu" Recas-Romania