The dream began on a Tuesday in March.

Every Tuesday night he dreamed exactly the same dream. At first, he hadn’t noticed. Perhaps the dream had begun a few weeks earlier and he had simply failed to remember it. He remembered very few dreams and, in general, paid them no attention. But on the morning he woke with the unmistakable feeling that he had been there before, he began paying attention. After that there were no exceptions. Every Tuesday night he dreamed the same dream.

He had been driving the same bus route for more than ten years. Every morning, before pulling out for his first run, he tapped the steering wheel twice with the palm of his left hand. It wasn’t superstition. He had done it on his very first day and had never given the gesture another thought.

He knew the route by heart. Every bend, every pothole, every traffic light that stayed red longer than it should. He knew the people, too. He knew who boarded the first bus before sunrise and who never appeared until midday. He knew who always got off two stops before the end of the line and who fell asleep almost every day in the last row.

He knew the house as well. An old house on a street lined with acacia trees, which he passed every morning. There were grapevines in the yard and, in summer, geraniums everywhere. He liked that house, although in all those years he had never seen anyone go in or come out.

In the dream he drove the same route.

Only there was one extra stop, directly in front of the house with the geraniums.

The bus always stopped there. The doors opened. The engine idled for a few moments. No one got on. No one got off. After a few seconds, the bus pulled away.

For the first few weeks, what occupied him was not so much the stop itself as the fact that the dream stubbornly insisted on keeping to the calendar. He mentioned it to a friend, but the conversation quickly drifted toward one of their usual subjects, and before long they were talking about Sunday’s football match, for which his friend had tickets.

He went to see a doctor, who simply shrugged.

“There’s nothing unusual about it. I’ll run a few tests anyway, just to be sure.”

The results came back perfectly normal.

He even considered visiting a fortune teller, but he was a grown man and couldn’t imagine himself doing such a thing.

After that, he stopped telling anyone about the dream.

One day, as he drove past the house, he noticed that a bench had appeared beside the road. Its position struck him as odd, so close to the traffic, and he assumed someone must have put it there by mistake. The following week a brand-new trash bin appeared beside the bench.

Only then did he realize it was Wednesday. And when he had first noticed the bench, that had been a Wednesday too.

A few weeks later, a passenger he had never seen before pressed the Stop button just as they reached the bench. Petre intended to continue to the next stop, but the man jumped to his feet and began shouting, agitated, that he wanted to get off there. So he pulled over.

He shouldn’t have stopped. It wasn’t a bus stop, and everyone knew it. But what could really happen if he lost a minute and let the man off?

Over the following weeks, a few more passengers pressed Stop as they reached the bench. Not many. And always on Wednesdays.

By June, the garden was full of geraniums and rose bushes.

Without ever meaning to, he had begun looking toward the house a few seconds before the bus reached it, as though the entire route existed only to bring him there.

Meanwhile, the Tuesday dreams continued without interruption, and nothing new happened in them until one morning he woke with an unusually vivid memory of the walnut tree beside the bench at the stop that existed only in his dream.

That day, as he drove down the street lined with acacias, he saw that someone had planted a sapling beside the bench.

“I think it’s a walnut tree,” he said, without realizing he had spoken aloud.

The woman waiting to get off at the new stop looked out the window as well.

“Strange. I never noticed it before.”

For the rest of the day, he wondered whether he had seen a sapling, or the beginning of the walnut tree from the dream.

By July, the stop had become, without anyone quite remembering when it had happened, one of the busiest on the route. At first only drivers who gave in to insistent passengers had stopped there. Then people had begun waiting there as though it had always been a stop. One morning the city installed an official sign, as though it were simply acknowledging something that had existed all along.

Acacia Street. Route 7.

A week later, she appeared in the dream for the first time.

She was coming out of the house with the geraniums. She wore a large straw hat, unusually red, and a loose white dress that almost reached the ground. Strands of gray hair escaped from beneath the brim, and from the way she walked he guessed she must have been around fifty.

She stepped out of the house and, as she passed the walnut tree, rested her hand against its trunk for a moment. Only then did she sit down on the bench beneath its shade. The bus stopped. She didn’t get on.

In the weeks that followed she was there in every Tuesday dream. The red hat never changed, but the dresses did. Sometimes she smiled and waved at him. Sometimes she sat perfectly still, her gaze fixed somewhere beyond the road, as though she hadn’t even noticed the bus had stopped in front of her. She never got on.

Several times he went to bed determined that, if he saw her again, he would get off the bus and ask who she was and what she was doing there. But in the dream he could never do anything except what he had always done. He stopped. The doors opened. He waited a few seconds. Then he drove on.

On that morning at the end of summer, which was, of course, a Wednesday, he saw her before the bus turned the corner.

She was sitting on the bench, wearing the same red hat.

For a moment he wondered whether he might still be dreaming.

He pulled into the stop, and the woman stood up and climbed aboard through the front door. As she came closer and he saw her properly for the first time, he realized she was younger than she had seemed in the dream.

She paused for a moment, looking at him. Then she smiled and held out her hand. She wasn't holding a ticket, but a small white envelope.

“For you, Petre.”

That was all she said. Then she walked to the back of the bus and took a seat.

He didn’t open the envelope until that evening, after he got home.

Inside was a single sheet of paper. Just a few handwritten words.

“It’s time for a new dream.”

Field Note

REALITY LEARNS FROM DREAMS.

IT NEEDS TIME.

Grandmother had three drawers.

One for documents.

One for money.

And one for keys to houses that no longer existed.

The houses that no longer existed were very important, even more important than the houses people left behind when they moved somewhere else.

That didn’t happen very often in Ada’s grandparents’ village. It happened mostly in the city, where she lived with her parents.

In the city people moved from house to house, or from one apartment building to another, and they never seemed to care very much about the places they left behind. There was always something better: a larger apartment, an east-facing balcony, closer to downtown, closer to the forest so they could breathe some clean air instead of all the traffic fumes. Countless other reasons.

The important thing was that people moved because they wanted something better.

In Ada’s grandparents’ village it was different.

People didn’t move into other people’s houses just like that, for no particular reason, because a house wasn’t simply a temporary solution to a problem of space, light, or neighbors.

If they needed more space, they built another room. If they had money, they replaced the roof. If they had more money, they built a better cellar, a sturdier attic, or a larger house on their own land, and if things went well enough, they bought another piece of land from the neighbors. But they rarely left.

Leaving was regarded with a certain suspicion, as though you had abandoned a conversation halfway through.

Perhaps that was why Grandmother kept the keys.

Not all of them, of course. The keys to houses where people still lived were kept somewhere else and used every day, which made them rather uninteresting.

The drawer was for the keys left without doors, without locks, without thresholds, and without people coming home in the evening. Keys to houses that had been demolished, collapsed, or forgotten by relatives who had moved to the city and then farther away, to other cities where they probably had nicer balconies and cleaner air.

One had belonged to an aunt who had moved to Canada and sent Christmas cards every year, although after a while nobody was entirely sure whether she still remembered exactly where the house had been.

There was also a large, black, heavy key that Grandmother said had belonged to a house that had ceased to exist before she herself had been born.

“If the house doesn’t exist anymore, what’s the key for?” Ada asked one day.

Grandmother shrugged.

“It isn’t for anything.”

“Then why do you keep it?”

Grandmother didn’t answer. She looked at the key for a few seconds, turning it between her fingers, then put it back in the drawer.

That night Ada was awakened by a sound.

It wasn’t loud, but it had something precise and metallic about it, as though two objects had lightly touched somewhere in the house. She lay perfectly still, her eyes open in the darkness, trying to decide whether she had only dreamed it.

The sound came again.

This time it was quieter, almost hesitant.

Ada sat up a little in bed. She wanted to call out. She wasn’t exactly frightened, but she wasn’t entirely at ease either. She thought about Grandmother’s drawer, about those useless keys that opened nothing.

She stayed like that for a few seconds, holding her breath. Then the silence settled back into place.

Ada lay down again, telling herself that by morning everything would make sense.

The next morning, she found Grandmother in the kitchen. She was already sitting at the table, her hands folded.

Ada stopped in the doorway.

“I heard a noise last night,” she said.

“It happens sometimes,” Grandmother said.

“What happens?”

“The keys.”

She said it simply, without mystery, as though she were explaining why water boils or why rain falls.

“Why?”

Grandmother shrugged.

“I don’t know. Maybe when nobody remembers them anymore.”

Ada didn’t ask any more questions.

A few weeks later, one of the keys disappeared.

It was small and rusty, and Ada thought it was one of the ugliest and most insignificant ones in the drawer.

Grandmother emptied the drawer.

Then she emptied the wardrobe and put everything on the bed. She cleaned the whole room. She carried the rugs outside. She went into the next room. She emptied the wardrobe there too. Then she went into the third room. Finally, she went down to the cellar. There she began wiping every jar. She picked one up. Looked behind it. Put it back. Picked up the next one. Looked behind it. Put it back. Ada counted thirty-seven jars before she grew bored and wandered away.

That evening Grandmother invited two neighbors over. They sat beneath the walnut tree and talked for a long time, in low voices. Ada found something to play with nearby, and they let her stay, although they had sent Grandfather away to “mind his own business” when he came to ask what had happened.

They talked about the house whose key had disappeared during the night. About the blue gate. About the room that faced the sunrise. About the large tiled stove in the guest room, one of those made in Aiud by a famous stove builder. About the well, which had stood a little to the right of the house, some thirty paces away. They talked about the roof, about the tiles. Ada understood very little of what they were saying, but she listened as they rebuilt the house piece by piece, room by room.

“The cellar was very large,” Grandmother said. “Twice the size of ours.”

One of the neighbors was silent for a few seconds.

Then she said,

“It was old Dinu’s house.”

Grandmother nodded, satisfied.

That evening the key was back in the drawer, and nobody seemed surprised.

Years later, Ada was returning by train from her grandparents’ village.

The keys were in a cloth bag, tucked inside her suitcase. She wasn’t entirely sure why she had brought them.

She had inherited the three drawers and had spent almost the entire summer putting papers in order, airing out the rooms, and wiping the dust from things.

She had tried to decide what to do with the house. She told herself she could come at least during the summers, walk through the forest during the day, and write beneath the walnut tree in the evenings.

It had rained almost all day, and the carriage was nearly empty. At one of the stations an old man boarded the train and sat down in the seat beside her. They talked for a while. About the rain, about trains, about how much the villages had changed. Then they sat in silence for a while.

When the train reached his stop, the old man stood up, picked up his bag, and held out his hand.

“Dinu,” he said.

Ada watched him step off the train, his figure disappearing into the rain.

She reached for her bag. She could feel the keys inside, cold and heavy. Back in the village, she would have taken them out and counted them. One by one.

She remained like that for a few seconds.

Then she took her hand away from the bag.

She turned back to the window.

The rain was erasing the fields, the houses, the roads.

Field Note

ABSENCES HURT ONLY IF YOU GO LOOKING FOR THEM.

RESULTS VARY DEPENDING ON LOCATION.

This story is another possible interpretation of the door in Ada’s grandparent’s village (see The Door in the Wall - by Notes from Elsewhere)

The story starts the same:

But … this time Ada doesnt go asking around the village

The door was always closed and that, more than anything else, bothered Ada.

Not because there was anything remarkable on the other side. If she stood a few steps to the left, she could see perfectly well what was behind it: a field, some grass, a path leading toward the creek and, farther away, the first houses at the edge of the village.

And yet the door remained closed.

Every day during the summer she passed it several times. On the way to the well. On the way back from the store when her grandmother sent her to buy bread, yeast, or the small sour candies she pretended not to like. On the way to Tanti Tanta’s house carrying apples, eggs, jars, messages, and occasionally information that seemed far too complicated to trust to a child but was entrusted to her anyway.

Every time she passed the door she wondered what would happen if she opened it.

Not what was behind it, that was clear and visible, but what would happen. These seemed to Ada like two entirely different questions.

That summer she was reading Narnia, and the situation became considerably more complicated.

The fact that she could see a field behind the door no longer proved anything. Books had already established that wardrobes were unreliable, mirrors were suspicious, and ordinary-looking objects frequently concealed entire worlds. There was no reason a blue door in a village in Muntenia should behave more honestly than a wardrobe in England.

For several weeks she became convinced that the field was merely a disguise and the real world would reveal itself only after the door opened.

The difficulty was deciding which world she wanted to uncover.

She considered Narnia itself, it seemed like a promising outcome.

On the other hand, if she opened the door and found herself in the story of the Three Little Pigs, she would be deeply disappointed. The entire story irritated her. Everyone made poor decisions and the ending felt undeserved.

Some fairy tales suffered from similar problems. The handsome prince was rarely the most interesting person in the story and even Ileana Cosânzeana, despite possessing exceptionally beautiful hair, appeared to spend too much time waiting for other people to solve her problems.

Winnetou was more attractive. A Journey Around the World in Eighty Days also had potential. Narnia remained a strong candidate.

The summer passed. Then another one. Then another one. The door remained closed.

Ada continued thinking. She got more and more convinced that choosing the wrong story could have serious consequences. If the door opened into a world she did not like, she might be forced to stay there. Books were strangely vague on this subject.

She decided to wait until she was sure.

Years later she realized that she had never opened the door.

The door, meanwhile, appeared perfectly willing to wait.

Later she wrote down the explanation.

EVERY DOOR LEADS SOMEWHERE.

TECHNICALLY CORRECT.

THE DIFFICULT PART IS DECIDING WHICH STORY YOU ARE ENTERING.

There was a door in her grandparents’ village that no longer belonged to any house.

The house had disappeared long before Ada was born. First the roof collapsed, then one wall, then the other, and after a few years nobody was entirely sure where the yard had ended and the road had begun.

Only the door remained.

It was painted a vivid blue, though nobody remembered who had painted it or why they had chosen that particular shade, which seemed more appropriate for a place by the sea than for a village hundreds of miles from any real body of water.

Every spring it disappeared beneath purple blossoms. The tree was one of those trees that seem to take flowering personally, covering itself with so many blooms that within a few days you can no longer see the trunk or the branches, only a violet explosion that appears to have landed accidentally in the middle of the world.

The tree seemed to have grown out of the wall, while the wall seemed to have grown around the tree. If you stared at them long enough, you began to suspect that neither had come first.

“Who planted it?” Ada asked.

Her grandmother shrugged.

“It’s always been there.”

By then Ada already knew that this was never the real answer. Adults said it’s always been there when they didn’t know the answer, or when they had forgotten it.

So she began asking around the village.

Aunt Victoria was convinced the tree had been planted by a woman waiting for her husband to return from the war.

Mr. Pandele insisted there had been no woman and no war. According to him, the tree had been planted by a retired schoolteacher who wanted to prove that flowers grew better beside doors than beside windows.

The pharmacist claimed it was a rare variety brought from Bulgaria.

The priest believed that some things did not need to be explained.

This was also his explanation for a great many other things.

Ada kept asking questions all summer, and by the end of August she had collected seven different explanations for the tree, two serious disagreements about its blossoms, and a nearly twenty-minute argument between Mr. Pandele and the pharmacist over whether Bulgaria produced lilac varieties hardy enough to survive winters in Muntenia.

She had learned nothing about the door.

Only then did it begin to seem strange.

Everyone talked about the blossoms. Their color. Their fragrance. The woman waiting for her husband to return from the war. The retired schoolteacher conducting botanical experiments.

Nobody seemed interested in the door.

One hot afternoon Ada sat in the grass and studied it for a long time.

That was when she noticed something.

Nobody was entirely sure on which side of the door the house had once stood.

Her grandmother was convinced it had been on one side. Mr. Pandele was equally convinced it had been on the other. The pharmacist agreed with her grandmother. The postman agreed with Mr. Pandele.

The more people Ada asked, the harder the house became to find.

Eventually she realized that the door had survived the house for so long that people had forgotten what it had once separated.

Later she wrote down the explanation.

EVERY DOOR LEADS SOMEWHERE.

TECHNICALLY CORRECT.

The problem is that, given enough time, nobody remembers which direction.

The piece is currently on display at Macrina Bakery in Belltown, Seattle through the end of July. See Lilian’s body of work at Gallery | Glass ArtoGraphy

EXPLANATION #43

YOU CAN TAKE A PLACE WITH YOU.

THE METHODOLOGY IS DISPUTED.

The first time she moved away, she took two jars with her.

One contained sour cherry jam.

The other contained soil.

The jam had been made by her mother from the sour cherries that grew in her grandfather’s garden. She never opened the jar. Years later it still stood on the blue shelf by the window, exactly where she had placed it when they finally moved into their own house, after so many rentals and so many changes of address that sometimes it took her a few seconds to remember which part of the city they had lived in during a particular year.

The house had a garden.

It also had a kitchen sink facing a window, something she had wanted for a long time, ever since seeing a woman washing dishes and looking outside in a film. The film was probably American, although she could no longer remember the title or any of the actors.

When she washed dishes, she could see the children playing in the yard.

If she turned her head slightly to the right, she could see the jar of sour cherries as well.

Every now and then she did exactly that.

The children outside. The cherries on the shelf.

The soil came from the Meadow, her favorite place since childhood. At first she went there with her grandmother, who would let her run through the grass until she was out of breath. Then they would sit in the sun with their eyes closed while her grandmother told stories. Later she began going there alone, carrying a book. Later still she went there with Ionel.

Ionel told stories too. At the time they seemed very different from her grandmother’s stories. Looking back, she was no longer sure they were.

The jar of soil traveled with her through all those rented apartments. It sat on shelves, in cupboards, inside cardboard boxes that were barely unpacked before the next move began.

On the day they moved into the house with the garden, she dug a hole behind the house and poured the soil into it.

Ionel planted a walnut tree.

The years passed. The tree grew.

One autumn they harvested their first walnuts. She placed them in a green basin and stood there for a while, looking at her hands stained dark by the husks.

“Did you hurt yourself?” Ionel asked.

“No.”

The second time she moved across seas and countries, she took three jars.

The first contained sour cherry jam made by her mother from the cherries in her grandfather’s orchard.

The second contained walnut jam she had made herself from the walnuts of their tree.

The third contained soil.

It came from the flower bed beside the walnut tree, where the children had played for years and where, from spring until late autumn, there was always a forgotten ball, a plastic shovel, or a toy soldier left behind after some important battle.

She packed it carefully in her carry-on bag.

At the airport, a security officer picked up the jar and examined it for a few seconds.

“What is this?”

“Soil.”

“Why?”

She thought for a moment.

“Just in case.”

The officer looked at her for a long time.

Then handed it back.

In the new country they rented again for the first couple of years, carrying the three jars from one home to another.

Eventually they settled in a small house at the edge of a forest. They no longer had the large garden they once had, but the woods began so close to the fence that they called them “our forest.”

The children left for homes of their own. One across seas and countries. The other across the street.

The three jars stood on a shelf in the kitchen.

Enough years passed that she sometimes had to look carefully to remember which jar held the cherries from her grandfather’s garden and which held the walnuts from their tree.

One day she realized she was no longer entirely sure where the soil had come from.

Beside the walnut tree?

The flower bed?

Had a little of the Meadow found its way in there as well?

She placed the jar back on the shelf.

A linden tree had appeared beside the fence.

She did not remember planting one.

Marea Migrație de Vară

În fiecare an, pe la sfârșitul lui mai, românii din diaspora intră într-o stare specială de agregare.

Nu este panică.

Nu este entuziasm.

Nu este nici măcar nerăbdare.

Este o stare intermediară.

Ca apa înainte să fiarbă.

Ca bagajul înainte să fie făcut.

Ca omul care știe că peste cinci săptămâni va explica pentru a douăzeci și șaptea oară de ce nu s-a mai întors definitiv.

Primele simptome sunt discrete.

Începi să te interesezi mai mult de vremea din România decât de vremea de acasă.

Știi exact câte grade sunt la Cluj.

La București.

La Constanța.

În orașul în care locuiește mătușa.

În orașul în care nu locuiește nimeni cunoscut, dar pe unde ai trecut într-o vacanță acum șaptesprezece ani.

Despre Seattle nu mai știi nimic.

Dacă plouă, afli uitându-te pe geam.

Apoi începe operațiunea „să vedem pe cine apucăm să vedem”.

Este o operațiune complexă.

Necesită planificare strategică, rezistență fizică și capacitatea de a fi simultan în trei județe.

La început lista conține opt persoane.

După două zile conține douăzeci și șase.

După o săptămână înțelegi că vei avea nevoie de o vacanță după vacanță.

După aceea începe etapa cadourilor.

Nimeni nu știe exact cine a decis că un român nu poate traversa Atlanticul fără să transporte obiecte pentru alte douăzeci și șapte de persoane.

România are ciocolată.

Are parfumuri și lumânări parfumate.

Are chiar și căni cu mesaje inspiraționale.

Acest lucru nu are nicio legătură cu subiectul.

Este posibil să existe o lege.

Nu am găsit-o.

Dar nimeni nu pare dispus să o încalce.

Cu aproximativ două săptămâni înainte de plecare începe etapa întrebărilor.

- Câte zile stai?

- Unde ajungi prima dată?

- Mergi și la mare?

- Dar la munte?

- Dar pe la noi?

Întrebarea „pe la noi” este deosebit de interesantă.

Pentru că răspunsul corect este întotdeauna da.

Chiar și atunci când „noi” se află la trei sute de kilometri în direcția opusă.

În ultima săptămână înainte de plecare începe etapa actualizărilor.

Primești informații.

Multe informații.

De obicei contradictorii.

Toate reale.

Recomandări.

Avertismente.

Păreri.

Toată lumea pare să știe ceva foarte important pentru tine.

Un drum s-a stricat.

Un altul s-a făcut.

Un restaurant s-a închis.

Altul s-a deschis.

Cineva are un copil care este deja mai mare decât îl ții tu minte.

În acest punct cineva spune inevitabil:

- Lasă că vezi tu când ajungi.

Este o expresie misterioasă.

Cu câteva zile înainte de zbor apare și primul moment de panică autentică.

Pașaportul.

Nu contează că l-ai verificat de șapte ori.

Îl vei verifica și a opta oară.

Și a noua.

Și încă o dată înainte să pleci spre aeroport.

Există români care și-au verificat pașaportul atât de des încât au ajuns să-l cunoască personal.

Și apoi, într-o dimineață, te urci în avion.

După luni de planuri, liste, calcule și conversații, totul devine surprinzător de simplu.

Te așezi pe scaun.

Închizi ochii.

Și nu mai verifici vremea din România.

Iar România, care te-a așteptat cu răbdare tot anul, va avea imediat o întrebare.

- Cât stai?

Seasonal Migration

Every year, sometime around the end of May, Romanians living abroad enter a special state of aggregation.

It is not panic.

It is not excitement.

It is not even anticipation.

It is an intermediate state.

Like water before it boils.

Like a suitcase before it is packed.

Like a person who knows that in five weeks they will be explaining, for the twenty-seventh time, why they haven’t moved back for good.

The first symptoms are subtle.

You begin paying more attention to the weather in Romania than to the weather at home.

You know exactly how many degrees it is in Cluj.

In Bucharest.

In Constanța.

In the town where your aunt lives.

In a town where nobody you know lives, but where you once spent a weekend seventeen years ago.

As for Seattle, you have no idea.

If it’s raining, you find out by looking out the window.

Then comes the operation known as “Let’s see who we can manage to see.”

It is a complex operation.

It requires strategic planning, physical endurance, and the ability to be in three counties at the same time.

At first, the list contains eight people.

Two days later, it contains twenty-six.

A week later, you realize you will need a vacation after your vacation.

Then comes the gift stage.

No one knows exactly who decided that a Romanian cannot cross the Atlantic without transporting items for at least twenty-seven other people.

Romania has chocolate.

It has perfume.

It has scented candles.

It even has mugs with inspirational messages.

This is entirely beside the point.

There may be a law requiring this.

I have been unable to locate it.

No one seems willing to break it.

About two weeks before departure, the questions begin.

How long are you staying?

Where are you going first?

Are you going to the seaside?

What about the mountains?

Are you coming by to see us?

The last question is particularly interesting.

Because the correct answer is always yes.

Even when “us” happens to be three hundred kilometers in the opposite direction.

During the final week before departure comes the update phase.

Information starts arriving.

A lot of information.

Usually contradictory.

All of it true.

Recommendations.

Warnings.

Opinions.

Everyone seems to know something that is extremely important for you to hear.

A road has been closed.

Another one has been built.

A restaurant has shut down.

A new one has opened.

Someone now has a child who is older than the version of them you still remember.

At this point, someone inevitably says:

“You’ll see when you get there.”

It is a mysterious expression.

With a few days left before the flight comes the first moment of genuine panic.

The passport.

It doesn’t matter that you’ve checked it seven times already.

You will check it an eighth time.

And a ninth.

And once more before leaving for the airport.

There are Romanians who have checked their passports so often that they are now on a first-name basis.

And then, one morning, you board the plane.

After months of plans, lists, calculations, and conversations, everything suddenly becomes surprisingly simple.

You sit down.

You close your eyes.

And for the first time in weeks, you stop checking the weather in Romania.

A few hours later, Romania, having waited patiently all year, will have a question of its own.

“How long are you staying?”

It was winter, and we were doing homework in the kitchen.
The oven door was cracked open, not to bake, but to warm the room. The air smelled faintly of boiled potatoes. My fingers were stiff inside the gloves my mother had cut the fingertips off.

The candle on the table was the only light. Its flame bent every time the wind found a gap in the window frame. My mother sat across from me, marking papers, her head bowed so the shadows deepened in the hollows of her face.

My little sister was hunched over her exercise book, her legs swinging under the chair.
“When is the hot water coming back?” she asked.

“Saturday,” my mother said, without looking up from her papers. “Will wash your hair then”

“And we have to go queue tomorrow morning. I heard they will bring chicken.”

I added.

“Not too early,” my mother said. “They won’t unload before nine. Take a book with you.”

She finally glanced up from her marking. “Speaking of books… have you finished reading Baltagul?”

“It’s boring,” I muttered. “I want to read Logodnica locotenentului francez.” The French’s Lieutenant’s Woman. “Why do I have to read Baltagul?”

She set down her pen. “Because Baltagul is ours. It’s in our language, our mountains, our way of telling a story. You can’t understand the rest of the world if you don’t understand first where you’re standing. Vitoria Lipan walks into the snow for the truth, not for romance. That’s rarer, and harder.”

The candle flared once, stretching our shadows long across the wall until they leaned toward each other, almost touching. My sister noticed, her pencil paused mid-word.

The flame steadied again.

The smell arrived. Not from the candle, not from the potatoes, but sharp and sudden, almost sweet.
The air smelled of oranges.

Bright. Impossible.
The kind of smell that didn’t belong to rationing winters, but to memory, to thought.

My mother went on marking. My sister bent over her exercise book.

Some nights the power would return, and the TV would hum back to life. Two hours a day, one channel, if we were lucky.

But not tonight. Tonight there was only the quiet scrape of my pencil and the slow turn of the pages.

We kept working until the candle burned low, until the pencil lines blurred and the page grew heavy under my hand.

And still the air smelled of oranges. Bright, impossible, like thought itself lingering when everything else was gone.

Excerpt from The Doors Between Our Selves.

The Girl Who Wouldn’t Wait

The smell of boiled milk clung to the kitchen air. My mother sat at the table, a book open in her hands, her voice carrying the story across the small room. I leaned against the chair leg, the words sliding over me.

I loved this part of the day. The small world we made between the table and the stove, between her voice and my listening. I could have stayed there forever, wrapped in stories.

But more than anything, I wanted to read them myself.
Sometimes I didn’t like the ones she chose. Other times, I’d fall in love with a story and ask for it every night until she grew tired of it. “No more,” she’d say. “Not again.”

I didn’t know the word for it then, but what I wanted was to decide. Not just the stories. I wanted the choice. The power to return to the ones I loved, to read them again and again without needing permission.

She was a teacher. I asked her to teach me to read. “You’ll learn in school,” she said. “No need to do it before.”

But waiting has never been easy for me.

One early spring afternoon, when I was about four, I took a blank sheet of paper and laid it carefully over a newspaper page. The paper was stiff. The pencil dragged. I didn’t know what the letters meant, but I copied them like someone trying to steal a secret. My hand cramped. The pencil smeared. But I filled the page.

It was not writing. Not really. It was mimicry. A child’s quiet defiance.

When I brought the paper to my mother, I felt pride gather in my throat like a song. “Look,” I said. “I can write. Will you teach me to read now?”

She looked at the page, then at me. Her voice was flat. “This isn’t writing,” she said. “It’s nonsense. Scribbles. You’re wasting time.”

I stood there, still holding the page. Something inside me collapsed. Not from shame, but from the sudden quiet where I had expected recognition.

“I only wanted to read,” I said. “You wouldn’t help. So I tried. This is all I could do.”

She softened then, her voice quieter.

“You’re not going to give up, are you?”

I shook my head.

“I need to read now,” I said, with the certainty of someone who had decided she would not wait to be invited into her own life.

Behind her, on the far wall of the kitchen, sunlight made a perfect rectangle.
It was too precise for the way the curtains hung. Sharp at the edges, steady as if cut into the air itself. Inside it, the dust in the air seemed to pause, each speck suspended, unmoving, like they were listening.

For a moment, the dust aligned, not randomly, but in crooked rows. Lines. Almost like writing.

The spoon in my mother’s hand stopped mid-stir. The clock ticked louder, each second echoing in the pause. Even the milk seemed to still, its surface holding its breath.

I blinked, and the marks blurred, but for one breath I thought I could read them, as if the air itself were copying the page I held.

I glanced back at my paper. They were uneven, bent, stubborn.

I didn’t tell my mother. She wouldn’t have believed me, and maybe I didn’t believe it myself.

The kitchen smelled faintly of boiled milk, the way it always did, as if the air had kept a memory of mornings before

An excerpt from The Doors Between Our Selves, a memoir about migration, identity, and becoming.