JUST ANOTHER PAWN..

The Z-files

You open any social media feed and learn that the truth doesn’t need to be sought elsewhere. You will always find it right where you are—or you won’t find it at all. It’s a piece of advice you read in five seconds. Five seconds later, you’ve already forgotten it. The scroll has carried you onward—through politics, gossip, sports, or online shopping.
I never thought I’d return to my childhood home. It belongs to another world—a time when I lived a different life, long before I knew how many other lives lay ahead of me. In truth, I had no way of knowing that multiple lifetimes awaited us before we could finally take our leave.
I haven’t spoken to my father since I was fourteen. That was the day he came home drunk and beat my mother. I didn’t feel capable of intervening, so, out of sheer distress, I chose silence. I’ve never been able to decide who was actually being punished—him or me. The silence remained, as did the question mark.
My parents are gone now, and those questions have turned into memories. And today, the "truth" has become a strange thing: you discover it through the revelations of "well-meaning people" who open your eyes without asking for anything in return. These same well-meaning people also issue warnings. They’re the ones who tell you who is hiding the truth—who it is that doesn’t want you to know what’s actually going on. Thank goodness for these well-meaning people. And yet, I still haven’t figured out what use that truth actually serves.
But I have other concerns now: I’ve come to get my childhood home ready for sale. I had hoped to finish it all in a single day. Naturally, that’s not possible. Bureaucracy has a life of its own. Unlike us, it is eternal. And it cannot be defeated.
I stayed the night in the house where I grew up. A poor choice. I should have gone to a hotel, but it’s too late now. It’s past midnight, and I can’t fall asleep. I started rummaging through my old room—which, after I left, my father had turned into a sort of study. That’s where I found his journal: an old school notebook with a few blank pages left. The rest was filled with his messy, heavy-handed script. At first, I meant to throw it away, but I stopped—perhaps I felt a sense of guilt toward him? And so, I began to read.
It was a... political journal. Of all things! My father never wanted to hear a word about politics. Back in the 80s, they made him a Party member—just one of many, swept up in the lot. The secretary had been ordered to expand the organization, and the factory had hundreds of employees. My father had no disciplinary record; he came from the countryside, his parents had owned hardly any land, he didn’t go to church, and he didn’t listen to Radio Free Europe—he was the ideal candidate.
He never complained, but I could see the utter weariness on his face whenever he had to attend a meeting. In ’89, like so many others, he tossed his Party membership card into the fire. I remember him saying he never wanted to hear about politics again.
And yet, a time came when he actually wanted to join a party—one of the new ones. That is what I discovered in the pages of that notebook. After I had left home, my father did, in fact, get involved in politics. He first joined the PUNR. My grandfather had had some conflicts with the Hungarian administration following the territorial cession in 1940; the resentment lingered in the family. And the PUNR, supposedly, defended us against the Hungarians, who... There was a reason for my father’s choice, even though he hadn’t actively sought out such a thing.
He once ran for the local council, occupying a symbolic spot—far removed from any position that could actually lead to election. He accepted his status as an "ordinary" member until the party ceased to exist. Many of his colleagues moved on to the PRM, and my father went along with them.
He didn’t care for the PRM, though. The tone was dictated from Bucharest, and my father was too much of a Transylvanian. I smiled when I reached these pages; a wave of nostalgia washed over me. I understood him in a different light now—though that hardly mattered anymore.
The PRM didn’t last either. The tide shifted toward the PSD, but my father didn’t follow. In his typical Transylvanian, no-nonsense fashion—scrawled in cheap ballpoint pen on a page from a student notebook—he wrote: "If I had wanted to join the PSD, I would have done so from the very beginning."
From that point on, my father stopped writing; instead, he began cutting articles out of newspapers and pasting them into his notebook. He had found a new hobby: the paranormal—Nibiru, the Anunnaki, reptilians, and so on. This continued until the papers he read stopped being printed. They moved online, but my father never embraced the internet. His mother bought him a smartphone—a device he spent more time cursing at than actually using.
A few clipped articles fell out of the notebook; Dad hadn’t managed to paste them in before he died. I left the journal on his desk and went back to my bedroom to check my phone. I had seven messages. As I began opening them, a thought struck me.
If Dad was just a pawn, what did that make me??
Oct 14, 2026