Part I
Arriving
I honour the women from my land, women that fought their way through the wars of their men. Who fought silently, with no guns to carry and bullets to load, but with bread baking and blisters on their knees from so much praying.
This, I do for them. I return after so long for them, to show them my heart filled with gratitude.
They fought their wars in the kitchen, baking god in their bread to strengthen their men. They fought their wars carrying children on their backs, infants clinging to their breasts, sucking, mothers grieving. These are the women that had to flee their homes, that had to sell the fruits of their land with their palms bleeding, breaking. Only those growing out of a hard place like this know what it’s like to have to leave your home barefooted, in search of a life.
As I land after almost a decade, I see two words written on the airport building: misiune îndeplinită. Mission accomplished. The words that welcomed me, back home. I shout look! mission accomplished! and he laughs, him who I barely know yet I find in his eyes my home. He laughs, look at this scenery, dry and desolate, what mission, they must have stolen that from somewhere, you’ll be eaten by wolves when you get out of this plane! Yet within, my body feels it all: welcome, welcome, welcome. You have arrived.
Mission accomplished.
I feel my aliveness on the soles of my feet as they feel the familiarity of home pressed into them. Life tells me: see? Trust. You can trust me.
***
To be in a land that speaks your words.
I got used to not being understood, to speaking knowing that even if they heard, they wouldn’t know what I am saying. Comforting, yet isolating. But here – the buildings, the streets, the people. They know me. This is home. They can smell me, even if I don’t speak. This is home.
I wake up early the next morning. My first breath – I lengthen it, breathing in the air of home. I wake right in the middle of the neighbourhood where I grew up. I can smell the almost-spring. I remember spring here, the earth warming itself up with anticipation. My first breath here is perhaps a new beginning, like the breath of a newborn right at his arrival. I am in awe: how much I resonate with this place, how my body recognises this, finding itself again. Those pieces I rejected for a long time.
Only a few blocks away from here, I spent the early years of my childhood on the ninth floor of a twelve-floor-block. I remember buying hot pretzels with spare coins I’d find. I remember running away from older ones chasing me and my sister, threatening to steal our keys, shoes and everything else.
I am back on these street and remember not a certain memory, but a feeling. I almost see my Self there. I almost become that again, I let myself become Her again.
I look at the elders of the neighbourhood. It’s a Sunday morning and they are all freshly out of the churches in their beautiful tapered skirts, well-pressed trousers – the elders that have never changed with time, maintaining a simplicity, an innocence untamed by this mad world. You can see the hard work of a lifetime on their palms, in-between their wrinkles and tired skins. They are still smiling, praying. I want to hug them, to tell them I grew up here, I dug this very earth with my hands and ran here and I am one of you too. I missed them but I am back and I love them and can you see how I belong?
I wanted so much to say this to them, with an urgency in my chest. Yet they stare at me suspiciously for I don’t look like I belong. I am wearing a summer dress on a rainy cold April morning. I’m smiling to myself like a madman, joy seeping out of my skin. To them perhaps I am a traitor, I left and refused to come back for eleven years. They never left, even when it was hard, even when they were starving, they never left.
***
My eyes swell with tears with regularity here. Each street holds a different memory. Another secret, a story. A feeling. This street here, my old school where I had my first kiss, during class. I remember the message “meet m3 @ toilet down plz <3”. School, nerves, my stomach churning, chemistry class – yet a chemistry-less kiss that was wet and uncomfortable. Is this what I was desiring for so long? Is that IT? I go back to class with red cheeks and disappointment.
And this street here – the music classes, the concerts, the mosh pits that I’d throw myself in, always searching for belonging, to find my tribe. And on this street I fell in love, with precision and a certain finality that maybe I found IT. This street, right round the corner, the heartbreak that followed. This street – I was fighting a boy that touched my breast and laughed with lust, I remember ripping his shirt, scratching his face, him running and crying, bleeding. I see the school grounds and remember rebelling, fighting, hurting at the injustice, the unfairness that no one seemed to speak about.
I walk again in the parks where I grieved each time the summer would end and winter would force her way in. The bookshops where I would spend days drowning myself in books on god, philosophy and love. Jung. Freud. Dostoyevsky. Eliade. I promise myself to read in Romanian again. I crave the familiarity of my language, things that my soul understands only through words spoken in her mother tongue.
I pause on each street and honour its story. I make space in me to hold that which I was then. To hold Her.
See, I came back for you. I’m here now, little girl. I search for that inner part of me that I left here – the fighter, the little girl that perhaps then did not want to leave her home, to fly to foreign land. I search for her in-between these benches, these trees. I can almost hear her. My stories echo through here. I am back, different now. My hair is short, my body is strong and capable of holding the miracle of my return. This embrace of my hometown heals me deeply. I feel immensely blessed.
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