Te Iubsec...Forever.

1 Franceska Dalca

You know it isn't effortless to explain all this; I mean, if you had been around me from the beginning, I'm still not sure you would have known; I didn't even know for a while. By the time I got clued in, it was too late; I was in love. I resigned myself to it. I didn't want to live without Franceska, couldn't think of it, no matter what she had done in her past, and believe me, it's not all that pretty. She's told me a lot about it. That's one thing I must give my girl; she's honest to a fault. Among other things, I love her for that.

I'm getting ahead of myself here; better start at the beginning; that's the best place. You know how it all turns out already; I'm here, so I'm not dead, so to speak. The Ducati's dead, too bad, too; she was a beaut. Franceska was always a little jealous, but what woman likes an Italian mistress, even if she is a motorcycle?

So it was my trip to Europe. I had turned forty, remember? Boy, that sucked. I thought my life was over, and I was trying to squeeze all I could get out of it. I felt the same way at thirty but met Sofia, which changed everything. Of course, you know how that went too. It seemed to be a common decade thing with me; you know, feeling like I was going to die from a panic attack on my birthday. Anyway, you know that part too, we've been friends for a while.

I saved forever, it seemed. Not too hard to do when you aren't married and have no life outside of your work. Another dead-end soul-sucking job I had to quit to get time off. Remember? I think I worked for that engineering company putting together parts lists from blueprints—God almighty, what a job. No worse than any of the others, though, I guess.

I was really into abandoned places back then. We'd already been to Detroit. Remember that horror show? St.Louis too. I've got every single one of those pictures on yet another hard drive. I've updated twice too. That stuff is priceless; half those places are gone now, and that video of me laying in the middle of the intersection in downtown Detroit in front of GM at rush hour, no way I want to lose that.

Yeah, so when I turned forty, I had a rough time. Whether anyone knew it or not, I was panicked, something fierce. I didn't see much point in living, really. I still don't like to think about my birthdays, but I'm not as uptight about it anymore. I can see that I owe Franceska for that too. She brought out a lot of good in me and gave me much peace I never thought I'd find, and that was before this shitty accident.

So, I decided to go to Europe to see abandoned sites. I had seen a few different websites, but one place that kept sticking in my mind was Buzludzah. You know it's that abandoned commie conference destination spot on top of some mountain in Bulgaria. That place was amazing, too; my pictures don't do it justice at all, not at all. There seemed to be so much cool stuff to see over there, so I went to Europe all right, but I went to the Balkans. I wanted to visit Romania, Bulgaria, and Yugoslavia to see what was left of Sarajevo's Olympic village, stadium, and ski sites. It turns out there wasn't a Yugoslavia anymore, and even though the fighting between Bosnia and Croatia seemed to have cooled off, it was still sketchy. Buzludzah, though, was in Bulgaria, and I wasn't leaving without seeing that place.

And don't ask me why, but I wanted to see where Caecescu and his wife got it. I remembered the Romanian Revolution even better than the Berlin Wall coming down. Those poor people were repressed, and that guy was just another Communist ass clown to the very end. He was a mean and shitty guy. For whatever reason, many of our Senators and even, at the time, presidential hopefuls lauded that particular Communist regime as worthy of admiration. The Romanian people did not feel the same. He got his comeuppance in a very public fashion. After the people thwarted the bullying communist soldiers of Romania, Caecsecu and his wife both made their final appearance on live television on the wrong end of an AK47. Morbid, I know, but I wanted to see the place.