Nostalgia

Summer almost  passed. Some sort of nostalgia is around me. I used to love going at the sea side. The Black Sea side, to be more specific I used to love Vama Veche. Used to, is the exactly right word. Everything had change everywhere. In a world dominated by fashion and glamour, even though they are just a cover of the reality, everything has to be for sale, everything has to be commercial. A bored world with no values, enslaved by mass media...

Vama Veche used to be that place where nobody cared about what are you were wearing or where are you staying as long as you didn't bother anybody else. Everybody was free to feel the way they wanted; everybody was free to be his own self. Of course it used to be judge, and seen as the "shit hole" of the entire country, where people go just to get drunk and drugged and have sex and be wild... The place for the "scum’s" of society. A vulgar place full of heavy metal music and cheap vodka. Maybe. But it used to be only TRUE place that you could go to. A cheap place for students. (everybody knows that students can be wild) Well, we all are, but at that age it doesn't really matter what neighbors think. A place to put your tent on the beach and wake up in the sound of the sea and a terrible hangover. A place for brave and true people. Not a place for a family guy or "daddy's girls". 

  
A place of freedom and happiness. Running away from home with a backpack, a sleeping bag, maybe 2 t-shirts and bathing suit. If you were lucky maybe a tent, if not, sleeping on the sand is that bad... Little money in your pockets, generally for drinks and cigarettes... The ultimate adventure. "That wild summer in Vama Veche", even if they were just a few days. Who cared? You were there! Going for a swim under the moonlight. Going to a "party" on the beach where you knew no one, but shared a drink or a song around a fire, with the sea breeze on the back of your neck. Every real teenager dream. Always fighting with parents, is just the age to do that because they simply don't understand you. Parents going crazy and punishing their kids, locking them in a summer at the country side with grandparents... Parents who are forgetting that THEY TOO had have the same age and dreams and misunderstandings. The age of making friends and memories. Great memories that will live inside you forever. The age of courage. 

Used to be a legend... and so many stories about a place... somewhere in the very south of the Romanian sea shore.    

What happened to that place? 
Same thing that happens anywhere else... It has become some sort of "must" of modern teenagers. Even those who had no idea what Vama Veche is about? They started to build up places and terraces and hotels, and slowly kill the spirit of the place. 
The beach full of tents has become nothing more than a piece of ground, isolated, cause "rich" kids don't get the idea of sleeping on the sand. 
If years ago, everybody was friendly to everybody, now it has become a place for groups, like in any other place. 
This year I skipped going to the Sea Side, I didn't even go to the "FOLK YOU" festival, a huge manifestation, a movement of culture, an attempt to blast values into the "young spirits" around Vama Veche and all Sea shore and country, if you think about it better. Why I skipped? 
Last year I become just DISGUSTED of what is happening to the "younger generations", what is happening to the so called freedom and rights of the individual. I saw things that made me laugh out loud but made me cry in the same time...
"Fitze" clubs everywhere you look. Camping places completely full. Expensive cars and what they call "limousines" around camping places???... That's at least hilarious. I mean you see, basically, 3 tips of "comedy characters" around here....
1. "Cocalarul of the capital city" - which means some sort of gypsy - even if not in skin color but more in attitude. The guy who spend more time in front of the mirror that his girlfriend. Who wears designers t-short when playing football on the beach, at least one or two sizes smaller so that anybody can admire his "well worked out body" - which actually you can read as : stuffed with steroids! A narcissistic bastard who thinks that if he wears a huge watch, he deserves everything and can own everybody, and that his clothes and accessories are increasing his value or brain, maybe. A guy who shaves his legs and oil his chest, who wears tons of hair gel, in order to be "COOL". Acts like a completely jerk and believes that if he drives an expensive or big car, he is the belly of the entire world. 
He waits in the car, eating his dinner, read as - left overs from lunch - a piece of bread with pate, smiling in the mirror, with the air con at minimum but windows all down so that everybody can "delight" their senses with his sound system and  latest brutal downloaded music CD, read as "MANELE" or House. Actually he's thinking : 
"I HOPE that anyone can see me, I can't keep this working for too long, I'm out of gas and it's dam expensive... Yeah! Take a good look. I'm the master. Fuck, I have to be careful when getting out of here cause I don't wanna scratch my car, that will cost a fortune, and I'm in too many debts already...shit... I forgot to pay the bank...." 
By the time he can finish thinking, SHE appears already nervous and swearing about the sand in her 2000 Ron shoes and the bad sleep in the TENT!!!! - but they act like they are living "La vie en rose" into a 7 stars hotel - if such thing even exist.
2. Pitzipoanca de Mall - Some sort of failed model, which thinks that her beauty is the most important thing in the whole world, and guess what? ... They are not even that beautiful as they think or act. She wears the latest fashion, the most expensive shoes and clothes or copy of them... tons of make-up that you can't even see the color or shape of her physiognomy. The type of girl who spends hours in front of the mirror, telling to herself how beautiful she is, even if she doesn't even believe it. But she acts like she is the most gorgeous and sexiest one. She's bulimic or she eats salads and when she's "escaping" into a box of chocolate she'll finish it and starve two days after it. Everything at them is fake : nails, hair, eyes color, attitude, smile. 
They both deserve each other and fit to each other, cause they're both "beautiful" and empty brains. They hit the road trough the holes in the asphalt swearing and angry about anything, heading to the most "exclusive" club around, rolling with very low speed so other people can admire them. The fact is they are so miserable and unhappy like a cat in the water. Their insecurity is bigger than the Universe itself. But hey! THEY ARE SO COOL, they are in the latest trends. And the worse part is that everybody dreams to be like them.  
They both have nothing else than fake image and a bad attitude for the rest of the world. No one can ever match them! Yeah... right.
3. Those who dream being as those two above and copy them in the worse possible ways....


That is Romanian Society. That is Romania. That is the Black Sea Shore, and that is what is extending everywhere... even in a legendary free and wild place... like Vama Veche. 


I'll pass, thank you! 

Yin & Yang

"There are moments when I miss her so dam much!".... Silence.

A song that brings me a smile. Memories. Moments. Laughs and tears... My yin or yang...


Almost 9 years ago, I found myself getting off a train, in place so busy that people forgot how to smile... Loneliness. Fears. Depression. Moved into "the big city", to be with my mum, and hopping for a better life... Left behind a big noisy family - but funny and loving, many friends, a small city surrounded by hills and mountains, some beautiful lakes and caves that I didn't yet had the chance to explore... Lost in a big crowd. Middle of high school. Everybody and everything that I ever knew was behind, now.
First day at the new school. It was cold and rainy. I remember I was wearing a pair of grey "cargo" pants and an orange sweater. Mum's boyfriend took me to the school. I got into the classroom, and after that embarrassing moment of: "She's Cassandra, your new colleague", I found an empty seat in the back of the class. First hour passed, and got out for a smoke. One of the girls from my classroom started to talk with me. I felt like an outsider, I was one. Then a couple of other girls came around for a smoke... "Can I have a cigarette?"... I had forgotten how things where, if you had cigarettes you were the best friend of everybody!... The next hour went by, the next break.... and sometime that day, I meet Sharon and Raluca.
Days went by and we started to talk more and more. We started to skip classes together and go "The Dubliner" for coffee and darts, and we used to spend entire days there writing poems and crying out our "boyfriends". In an year we basically knew anything about each other, and we were inseparable. Running away from school, from home to go to some book shop, parties, coffee shops and write even more.
Me and Raluca we're sometimes running away from Sharon and go in whatever park and make plans about our future, together of course. How will finish high school and we will move in together, how will our home look like, how will our children, and how we will grow old next to each other. No human on this Earth was to split us apart. Never.
We used to stay on a bench and imagine how we'll be at 70 years old... Our friendship grew so strong, that nothing else mattered anymore. She was there for me when I felt like suicide is my only way out. I was there for her when her father came drunk at home and make her life a living hell. Nothing really mattered, we had each other.
 

I got my first job in Sharon father's pub, as a chef helper... Things went from bad to worse when I found out that my grandfather is dying and requested for time out to go home and see him. I got "No, can't do" for an answer and by the time I got the courage to quit my job, it was too late... I went home anyway, spent the summer there, but Sharon grew colder and almost turn Raluca against me. New school year started and somehow we manage to put the conflict behind us. I got another job, in a pub close to Raluca's place. Got in a huge fight with mum and ran away from home. Raluca got a job, closed to my work place, Sharon left for College in Italy. We used pick each other after work and go out, clubbing and dancing and drinking and having fun. We didn't really care that it was just the two of us. I moved in with my "boyfriend", and by the time the summer ended, started to talk with mum again. Everything was going great, but life is never that simple. Boyfriend was getting jealous on our friendship and I made out a excuse to just ended. I spend the winter holidays with her, telling him that I was going home to my grandmother. We ran away together to Piatra Neamt and had a nice Christmas. Got back to Bucharest at my mothers place, cause they were away, and planned an nice New Years Eve for the two of us. But... I got so sick, that in the "Night of the nights" I was delirious from high fever. She was there for me and cheered the New Year with orange juice, watched Disney Cartoons all night and fall asleep into each others arms, after a strange "laughing for no reason" session.

After a couple of moths I got into another relation and the same jealousy occurred in a couple of months. Somehow he pushed me away from her, and probably for a year we didn't talk. I was missing her, but how to tell her, how to make anything work?

She had changed her phone  number....her e-mail. She moved. She had a new life....

After winter holidays, I found an off-line on messenger from her. I contact and meet her. After a couple of hours of crying and laughing and telling stories... we agreed that never, no matter what, will split us apart again.

The blonde girl with big brown eyes, that I shared everything with! The girl who was my sister, my mother, my lover and my best friend.

"There are moments when I miss her so dam much".... Silence. A tear hided away in the eye corner and a nostalgic smile is on my face.... I sent her a text message. We haven't speak for a couple of weeks now... I miss her....

Life is never the way we want it to be. She had to leave. She left and become that "outsider" that I once was. I know how difficult it is. I know what it means. I'm sometimes afraid that time and distance will simply kill what we have.... But then I see her online and we talk for hours.... we remember our "good times", we laugh, each in front of her computer, alone in a room. Wishing that someday, that empty room will be lighted by her smile...