The playground was a battleground. There were the generals: the teachers, whom you’d glimpse once in a while as they hurried to and from mysteriously crucial errands. Then, the officers, of whom there were lots: the bullies. Last, and certainly least, came the common soldier, the conscript: runts like my friends and I, struggling to survive in a world not made for us. That was the simple truth of it. We did not consider the ones above us our enemies. The playground was theirs to command, our permission to spend time out there a fragile privilege, one we went through (sometimes literal) hoops to keep. Far from us the notion of stepping to our masters, of claiming by force what we believed we had no rights to in the first place.

Once, though, I forgot my place and almost stood up to a bully. This big Romani kid, who sported a full beard and was two heads taller than anyone else—whether because he’d been held back several grades, as was sadly common with people of his ethnicity, or because he didn’t even attend our school at all and was just a visiting officer, I never found out—started a show of belittling me in front of a crowd of my friends. He delivered his graceful blows, then sauntered away like a medieval thief. As he turned, I felt my cheeks flush, my fists clench. Hot, wet salt burned at the corners my eyes as I stared at his monolithic back and before I could rein myself in I spat: “Hey! Bushman!” A word we Romanians use to describe a particular brand of homeless person, the kind that shows no drive to improve his situation. I do not know what psychological effects my words had on the boy, but inside of a breath he was abreast of me again, his supersized torso conquering the noonday sun. His palm went up. Then it sliced down, karate chopping the brim of my hat so hard it dropped like a heavy curtain over my eyes.

Fucking loser, he said, words to which I bowed. His battlefield, his rules, and I’d just tried to break the most important one.

Don’t start battles you know you can’t win.

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From the archives:

The Golden Boy - A true story of school, isolation and self-discovery.

The Lords of Summer - Childhood friends, green fields, and bygone summers.

Firstly, it’s the first piece of nonfiction I ever wrote, back in early 2022.

Secondly, Drunk Monkeys picking it up gifted me my first notable publication credit. I mean, this was a magazine that used Submittable. It was that cool.

Thirdly, as you’ll quickly glean, this is a very personal story. It’s about the first time I stood up to a bully, an episode that, in many ways, made me the man I am today.

I cherish this story, and since I never published it on Practice Space and Drunk Monkeys is now defunct, I wanted to include it in the first few months of Ants’ life.

When I think about middle school, I picture it as its own pocket universe—a boxy, bleached white, Communist building that exists apart from everything around it. This otherworldly plane is encircled by a bubble, which I call the playground bubble, on account of the important lessons that the courtyard, rather than the classroom, taught me. I was a clear-eyed kid with hair as black as my obsidian irises, I chattered like a broken radio, and my ears perked up at any mention of the word superheroes. I was, on more than one occasion, the boy at the other end of a soccer ball.

I think most people felt isolated in school. But back then I didn’t know any better; I felt like a lone earthling on Mars.

In truth, I was not your typical middle schoolboy. In the late 2000s, other boys in Constanta, Romania were playing football in the mud all day, getting scrapes and bruises, and spitting at each other from a hundred meters, while I was very often deep in thought, exploring a mind palace of my own making—one of cartoons, video games, and comic books. Unfortunately for me, cartoons were a rarity, like television caviar, and comic books were almost impossible to find and very expensive. I stashed my few prized possessions, Romanian translations of Marvel comics, in a leather box under my bed. My classmates talked about reality TV, sports, and popular music. At the time, rap was beginning its ascent, and groups like Parazitii and B.U.G. Mafia were all the rage. That was the pop culture of the period. Spider-Man, the Justice League—my heroes—were immigrants, and nobody was interested in them.

Obviously, I imagined there was something inherently wrong with me. It was as if my classmates and I spoke a different language, and I was the one at fault for that. When you couple that with my suspiciously robotic, graceless movements, my two left feet, and my debilitating social anxiety, you’ve got a picture perfect nerd. I completed the look with a pair of round, thick Harry Potter-style glasses. My mother’s choice.

I realize now that I’ve been thinking about my early life as some kind of origin story. Memories of that school and that courtyard are so deeply ingrained within me, they possess a kind of immediacy, a timelessness, as if I could at once reach out and grab any of them. The time my music teacher called me an android might have happened yesterday, just as well as back then. The climax of this origin story, one I often come back to, is the moment I stood up to my first bully.

I have described myself as a social pariah, but I did have friends—two. These boys were outcasts like me, and we were drawn together by time and circumstance, like flies on a spider’s web. We had each other’s backs when it counted, or at least we suffered together. We created a game of make-believe in the courtyard, where we each assumed a fictional identity, whether a superhero, an anime character, a British wizard or a ninja turtle, and then we made like we were fighting; sometimes each other, sometimes the world around us. We imagined we had extraordinary strength, that we could fly or shoot lasers out of our belly buttons. Naturally, we kept these esoteric rituals to ourselves. I was grateful for that—that self-containment, which proved that my friends deemed our allegiance enough and had no wish to let strangers in.

There was another side to this coin, however. I often arrived at school early, owing to my father’s penchant for either delivering me at first light or dangerously late; there was no in-between. This meant that I had nobody to talk to in the early morning, and nobody to protect me from bullies, of which there were many. For the courtyard was a battlefield and, on any battlefield, there are lords who demand their dues.

he kings of the playground. Two of them are important to this story; they are those that left marks. I shall call them R and P.

R still gives me nightmares. But P was the one who served as my teacher, so it is he who deserves the place of honor in this story.

I tried to engage my classmates in conversation on those lonely mornings, and, although most of my efforts went uncrowned, I managed to befriend this classmate, David, a huge boy for 12-year-old standards. David was sweet and innocent; in fact, he had the kindest eyes I’d ever met, deep pools of benevolence and good intention. I liked him; sometimes I liked him a lot. The only trouble was that, on account of being so big, David received a free pass to hang out with R and P. So instead of gaining another protector, I had dragged myself further into the fangs of the wolf. To make matters worse, whenever my two best friends were late, fate played its tricks on me and made it so David, R and P arrived early. David would motion for me to come hang out. He didn’t realize I’d be a fawn hanging out with black bears.

During these encounters, R was always silent. He was a short, burly boy with incredible physical strength. Rumors circled around about his prowess in combat, and he was surrounded by an aura of dominant self-possession. I remember he once lifted a much bigger boy by the throat and held him up for so long it seemed ridiculous. If R talked to you, it was bad news. P, by contrast, was much more liberal; he talked to anyone, because he liked to make fun of everyone. I was his almost daily punching bag. He made fun of the way I walked, of the way I dressed. I used to wear baseball caps (I still do) which P loved to snatch and hit me in the face with. He also spat on me, a couple of times.

Sometimes, when I truly wanted to avoid encounters, I paced around the school, in circles, trying to will time to pass until my Dynamic Duo™ arrived to save the scene; P had a field day whenever that happened, and would watch me from a distance and mimic having a controller in his hands, shouting after me, “his remote controlled robot.”

At the time, these events rarely bothered me. I had my head in the clouds and distractions aplenty. Also, for all my capacity for fantasy, I found it impossible to imagine a different world, a world in which I had a “normal” amount of friends, a world in which I could comfortably talk to people.

At the the edges of my vision, my classmates talked among themselves, shared jokes that I was not privy to. But those were only peculiar Martian behaviors, I thought—something to observe, not imitate. It did not occur to me to link my social anxiety with the way they treated me. For this reason I kept most of my thoughts to myself. Most times I was even sure that it was normal. Other times, I was confused, and wondered why the world had handed everyone else an instruction manual, but not me.

I believe that moments in life are possessed of inherent significance; that turning points exist, and that they are not random. But I will also grant that the day that changes everything might not appear special, except in retrospect.

On a day that began like any other, I saw my first crack in the bubble. I got to school early and exited the car to meet the rushing autumn wind, clad in a pair of synthetic dress pants, a cheap shirt and a vest, and a two-ton backpack that made a preteen Atlas out of me. My father always left me by the school’s back entrance, which meant two things: I passed two huge, dripping garbage bins every morning, and I was in danger of encountering the various starving and, in my mind, rabid dogs that paced the area. That day no dogs were there, but the rancid smell coming from the garbage made me gag and sparked my imagination. I thought of corpses, broken down, infested, decaying human and animal carcasses that, why not, people in the neighborhood killed for sport and dumped there. When I stepped into the gap in the rusted iron fence, as ever, morbid thoughts were replaced with anxiety.

P usually reserved his teasing ways for courtyard scuffles, but on that day someone called him up to our classroom to hang out. He was in our year, but in a different class. In my country, students, from primary school up to high school, are divided into years of study, but also into “classes”, groups of roughly 30 students that occupy a single classroom for the duration of their studies. My school had four such classes, as was the custom at the time, from A to D. We were class 6D, and he, as I recall, was class 6C, meaning we had different homeroom teachers. P started making fun of me as usual, and I took it in my stride. He and David, my Brutus, made fun of my new glasses, which were gold with a pink hue, tantamount to social seppuku. Then, P said something about my sister. Something cruel, unforgivable. It’s been eleven years, and all I remember is the word “whore.” My sister was four years old at the time and a stranger to my classmates. I erupted like Mount Vesuvius, in a way I’d never have thought I was capable of. I was a pretty big boy for my age, the second or third tallest in the class, and I was decently strong, though back then I was capable of no such self-assessment; I just saw red. I stepped towards P slowly and stuck my hand into his throat so hard he clucked. P was on the shorter side, so my elbow went slack as my fingers wrapped around his neck. Thus gripping him, I began to walk, pushing him toward the front wall. I slammed him into the blackboard, rattling it, and I yelled that if he ever talked that way about my sister, or any of my family, again, I would kill him. I probably meant it, too. I had never been that furious, and I don’t believe it has happened on many occasions since. Gone was the anxiety, the self-consciousness. Gone were the dreamy thoughts. Pushing him had been so easy that, thinking back on it after a few days, I was baffled. A classmate told me that, in my anger, I had bashed his head against the wall. I’m not sure that was right.

I bumped into P in a nightclub in college and we shook hands like old pals. By that time, we had made up. I had earned his respect. Not R’s, however; R did not respect anyone. But it was enough for me. I had learned something about myself. I had learned that I, too, could be a fighter. That I, a stereotypical nerd, a weirdo, an outcast, an-oven-with-four-burners (national idiom for people wearing glasses), could stand up for my beliefs, for my family. Also, my current dog loves me, so I suppose I’m all right.

Sometimes, in my dreams, I am a knight, fighting to save my princess from dragons and evil wizards, or a superhero locked in an intergalactic struggle for the salvation of Earth. Those are dreams, of course, and I am only human. But I have since learned that this is quite enough.

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From the archives:

Wrong Battles - The playground was a battleground.

Carsick - Turning your trauma into effective small talk.

I have this very vivid memory.

I’m around ten years old, and sitting cross-legged on the carpet in my grandmother’s living room. My living room, as I still think of it, because she raised me from a baby until about seven years old. I’m older now, yes, but not by much; old enough to begin forgetting details about my time here, not yet to start grieving for them.

I am not alone. My father’s here, silent in an armchair at the corner of the room. A large mahogany display case filled with China brought from China blocks my view of him.

I’m playing with an empty silver teaspoon, turning it this way and that so its taffeta-like contours can catch some light from the monstrous chandelier above us.

Suddenly, I get the urge to see it fly. Discover if its wing-tipped handle was designed with aerodynamics in mind. My thumb and index finger grip the teaspoon like they would a paper plane, pinching it just at the point where it begins to curve, otherwise known as its neck. I weigh for control and speed, exaggerate the speed. As soon as it leaves my hand, the spoon disappears from view.

I do not see where it lands. Instead, my father’s scream fills my ears like some kind of screech from hell.

The next thing I remember feeling, as my ears settle into the excruciating sound, is the weight and texture of the thing in my palm. Like a little ticklish marble, a gummy bear clothed in lashes.

My father’s diffuse scream soon solidifies into a plea:

“My eyeball! Please, my eyeball! Somebody help find my eyeball!”

With a start, I realize what I’m holding. I raise my eyes to watch my father cup the right side of his face as though preserving some precious liquid oozing out of his newly-denuded eye socket, and close my hand into a fist.

If my father blames me for his loss, he’s too preoccupied to show it. Like a man on fire, he starts shuffling erratically around the room, then makes a run for the kitchen, situated to the right as you exit the living room into the central hallway of the apartment.

For a while, everything quiets. Whoever’s in the kitchen must have calmed my father down. As always: easily set off, just as easily pacified.

I take this opportunity to inspect my treasure. This is his missing eyeball, alright, no doubt about it: that infinite black pool of iris cannot be easily replicated. I flip it around, suddenly curious about its back. A mass of veiny, boring white greets me and I realize my treasure might not be worth keeping. Might not, in fact, be a treasure at all. Just a misplaced piece of someone else. A foreign thing, unusable because unearned.

I crawl towards the kitchen and knock on the solid white door. It opens and there stands my father, large as life, his naked emptiness obscene, his hand outstretched in my direction.

You were easily able to picture all this, weren’t you?

What if I said it was all fake? Fake not like fiction, but like my father never having lost his eyeball and me never, ever having held it in my hand.

Why, then, do I remember it all with such clarity?

Once, in primary school, I told this story to my teacher, in front of the whole class. She was a wise and understanding woman, so I was hoping for an honest judgment. Laughter boomed around me. She quieted everyone down, then made the gentle suggestion it had all been a dream. I have written before about dreams, specifically about how weird it is that we remember some and not others, so I suppose it’s possible.

The trouble is, I don’t remember waking up from such a dream. One day, the memory was just there, as though a video file had been downloaded into my brain.

I play it back sometimes, when in need of an escape. Real or not, it sits as one of my most cherished memories, because it preserves a side of myself I no longer see much of these days: an Andrei innocent enough to believe something like that might be real.

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From the archives:

Funeral Blues - On the death of my first teacher.

On Dreams - Why do we remember some dreams and not others?

I once wrote a short story about a guy so obsessed with food he ate himself inside-out.

I did not say this guy was part of me.

That mornings in the mirror I sometimes catch myself gazing down towards my belly with a feeling uncomfortably close to fear, wondering where it would lead me today, if I can trust it, if I’ll be able to resist it.

Inside me there are these two wolves: the first screams of high cholesterol, dangerous blood sugar levels, and unhealthy BMIs; the second replies that each moment our bodies are fighting a losing war with time, so why not let ourselves win a few battles?

When I eat, I am Legion. I’m chomping teeth, swirling tongue, overwhelmed taste buds. I’m the saliva whose enzymes penetrate the food I’ve just eaten, breaking it down to irresistible fuel. I am my throat, that crafty usher swindling the finger-licking goodness all the way inside. I can feel a burger’s juices, or the nuggets of minced beef in a spaghetti bolognese, steal inside my veins and make my blood sing.

Sometimes even the food in front of me is not enough, so I supplement it with videos. Zach Choi is my absolute favourite, closely followed by Winny Hayes and The Notorious Foodie. I’m caught by the decadence of their art, by how perversely commonplace they make it look, like playing GTA Vice City pumped up on cheat codes or living in a world with no famine, a world where one can make and consume anything they wish as long as it looks good on camera, and watching them baste, boil, chop, fry, deep-fry, and double-deep-fry in crushed Cheetos chips, it seems I am transported to that world too.

In my story, the end arrives when Bob the gourmand loses control of his body. But maybe that’s not such a bad way to go.

So what if I also succumbed to the second wolf’s rationale, that life is short, but living well is worth making it shorter? If my heart gave up at fifty, in the middle of a ten-course meal spanning all the world’s cuisine, right as I’ve swallowed my first teaspoonful of black sturgeon caviar, would that really be so bad?

Or should I trust that the first wolf’s good intentions are also good ideas, follow his instructions to the letter, and live a long, if regimented life? Is such a life, defined by equilibrium and compromise, objectively preferable?

Some days, the second wolf gains ground, and it looks like the answer is no. Then, step by step, the first wolf beats him back into a stalemate and me back into confusion. I can’t wait to see which of the two will win, if only so I can stop wondering.

Right now, there are a few simple truths I can rely on: that eating is a ritual I derive great pleasure from, that my favourite dishes are an integral part of who I am, and that the Holy Trinity of Meals is the highlight of my day. Like Bob, my character, I love food. No matter which wolf prevails, this will not stop being true.

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From the archives:

The Wrong Family - On all the pets that got away.

Wall Sockets - Our fascination with power and its link to growing up.

Most people don’t pay attention to their feet. Not unless they smell, are cold, or hurting.

Well, mine hurt. All the time, it feels like. I have what’s known as pes planus, fallen arches, or flat feet, meaning my feet meet the ground with their entire surface all at once. This doesn’t sound too serious, until you realize how much the body relies on the feet. When the arches fall, they drag everything down with them. The knee position shifts, resulting in pain radiating from the patella all the way down the shin. With weak knees comes weak posture, which leads to lower back pain, general clumsiness, and the grating sound of dragging feet. Also, they’re damned expensive: regular shoes are not designed to handle them, so I go through a pair of good quality sneakers in one season. For as long as I remember, I have hated my flat feet.

This fixation has made it so I notice other people’s feet, as well. Beauty catches my eye—long shapes, clear skin, healthy colours—but what I really admire is function. The most stunning feet are like well-oiled machines. A gymnast’s, for example, or a boxer’s. What matter they’re battered like chicken breast soon to become a schnitzel? Those feet carry careers. Like locomotives, horses, or martial artists, highly functional feet trigger some kind of primal awe in me. It’s not just their sheer physicality that compels me, either. Feet are the body’s foundation, and a strong one is easy to spot. People with strong feet look confident, self-assured, and full of energy. Beholding them, it seems to me impossible that they don’t also feel that way. When you can trust your body to carry you where you need to go, what could stop you?

Conversely, weakness of the body begets weakness of the mind. Without a strong foundation to rely on, the ground you stand on shifts to sand. Your sense of self erodes, becomes porous, like concrete. I’ve never felt that I possess a clear vision of who I am. My identity is easily corrupted by my circumstances, and I find myself more or less direct, fashionable, talkative, amusing, erudite, depending on where I am or whom I’m speaking with. I have grown to blame all this, and more, on my feet. Every time a superstitious relative or friend prompts me to make a wish—upon a falling star, on New Year’s, or just before eating something for the first time—all I can think about are normal feet. I’ve often “gotten drunk on cold water”, as we say in Romania, convincing myself that should my flat feet go away, they’d take with them my anxiety, my acute need to be acknowledged, my introversion.

As I get older, I find it easier to accept my predicament. Because one can’t live well in a constant state of war, I’ve been looking for ways to improve the rapport between my self and my feet. I’ve taken up an exercise routine for my arches, designed to make them strong and handsome, and this has somewhat alleviated my pain. I’ve also tried to be more mindful in my choice of footwear, placing comfort and support above looks. I won’t say it’s made a world of difference. Just that some mornings I get out of bed and the first thing I notice isn’t how rough the carpet feels on my insteps, or how deformed a new pair of slippers has gotten, or that another callosity has developed somewhere.

I’d love to one day find a positive side to pes planus. Discover something only a guy with pancake feet can do, like those lizards able to run on water on their weird, fork-like legs. Until such time, I will settle for a little less pain, a little less wishful thinking, and a little more trust. If my inadequate frame has borne me this far, the least I can do is relax, breathe deeply, and believe it will keep doing so.

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From the archives:

Bones - How many have you broken?

No Mayonnaise, Please! - The weird things we do to belong.

In an apartment I rented some time ago, there was this chair.

A beaten-down tabouret devoid of back support, its once off-white upholstery now dimmed towards a sad greige, a sickly stain spread out on its left side. It fit so well in an apartment with mold between bathroom tiles and brick dust under the sink.

I spent two years there, enough to intimately discover its nooks, corners, and hidden pockets. The chair I found in the bedroom, under an Ikea desk, hidden as though ashamed of its present looks. I couldn’t help dragging it out, prodding it, testing it. It was the most comfortable thing in that house.

I often worked remotely, and for sanity’s sake I decided to relegate various aspects of my life to discrete physical spaces. The bedroom, its desk too crammy for my taste, remained for sleeping only. A couch the size and smell of a dog party in the rain made the living room unusable. By far the largest remaining space, the kitchen table became my bastion. I trisected it: the left for dining, the center for work, and the right—where the table was within hugging distance to a corner of the room—my writing nook. In here, because nothing else would fit so well, the chair found its place.

Squeezed between wall, laptop, and table, I began receiving complaints: my back ached, my right leg fidgeted—violently enough sometimes to send my knee flying into the green wood above it—and my elbows chafed from the roughness of the table’s texture like a nose blown too much during a cold.

Yet my creativity flourished. Some of my greatest pieces were born in that nook, on that chair. The fact that I was so fenced in had on me much the effect of a cardboard box on a cat. I felt held, protected. More than that, I felt grateful. That forlorn chair had been integral to the creation of my very first writing space. That its previous owner had neglected it had not diminished its value. Had, in fact, immeasurably increased it. It could as easily be lying in a landfill somewhere, its repudiation perfected. Yet here, against all odds, it still was.

With time, the psychic link between the chair and my right hemisphere only increased. When I was not on my pathetic throne, it might as well not have existed. But when I wrote, we merged.

This reflected an overarching theme within my life: developing affection for the things I own or use. Some last with me, like a certain moose figurine I got from Germany as a kid. Mostly, though, these relationships are fraught with impermanence, and parting with a beloved thing is never easy. The brusquer the separation, the stronger the feeling, and the more it lingers.

I don’t think anything has ever been more forcefully removed from me than this chair.

You see, my landlady was a close friend. One afternoon, I discovered she’d cheated me out of some money. I confronted her, and rather than confess, she tried gaslighting me, getting me to believe I was at fault. I decided I couldn’t stay.

I didn’t think to put the chair back where I had found it. No notion of it having existed anywhere but in the nook remained in my brain. I left it there, closed the door, walked on.

A few days later, she texted. On a post-Andrei inspection, she could not find the greige chair. She did not state it, but the implication was obvious. I suggested she should learn her home better before placing blame, and promptly blocked her.

Months, the anger held. I considered really becoming that thief. Break the lock, tiptoe inside, drag out the chair, and put a spotless new one in its place. The house would lose its soul. But I’d reclaim mine.

The feeling faded. I habituated to the new place. No longer felt like punching walls. But I still missed that damned chair. The Mario-like way it bounced you if you dropped on it too hard. The confidence it gave you, like it had been storing it up for you.

I know nothing of its fate, but I like imagining it escaped. Found someone better. Someone who knew what to do with it. Because things too deserve a life of their own. A full one, not an interlude, like what the chair had with me.

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From the archives:

T-Shirt Talk - What my favourite T-shirts say about me.

Wall Sockets - Our fascination with power and its link to growing up.

What is it about kids and wall sockets? Come on, I can’t have been the only one. The only youngling hypnotised by two forbidden holes the perfect size for my fingers, the promise of the power just beyond them captivating, daring me to reach, to push on past the nagging of my parents and the socket covers they eventually installed which were so easy to remove that they more often added to its thrill than helped to discourage my hunt. My first explanation for this phenomenon was some sort of fascination with fear. In the preface to his short story collection Night Shift, Stephen King posits that the reason horror media is so popular is our deep-seated obsession with our own deaths. Viewed through this lens, good horror fiction functions as “rehearsal for our own deaths”. Though I much like King’s theory, this feels like a more sophisticated sort of obsession, out of reach for the average toddler. More primal, and more likely, is a fascination with power. With the pure electric death coursing just behind that flimsy piece of plastic. There is, indeed, something to be said about the beauty of power. It’s the quintessence of bodybuilding, monster trucking, big game hunting, and other such extreme endeavours whose participants, despite significant risk to their person or others, and the stigma often lurking in the background, still engage in them, even dedicate their lives to them. Reaching for power is dangerous. Lucky for us that our parents were there to stop us. But what about after? What about now? What happens when we reach adulthood, and it stops being another’s duty to protect us from ourselves? The last few years have taught me that we don’t grow up. Not automatically. It takes a short walk in the park or through a busy metro station to notice them: the middle-aged still-dream-of-rappers, the mothers scrolling down their tailored feeds whose babies scream for all but them to hear, the angry men, the TikTok divas, drama queens, pot-bellied still-bullies and lawmen drunk on power. It seems to me that growing up, like anything worth having in this life, is the result of a deliberate process. It’s hard work. I also think that, at its core, it's a defence mechanism. A shield against the scammers and the criminals, the heartache and the disappointments of the world, but also against someone far more dangerous: the person in the mirror. Growing up, we learn to curb our power lust, our jealousy and ennui and our desire to see beautiful things burn down only to gain the opportunity to build them up again ourselves. We slowly come to better understand ourselves, our fortes and our shortcomings, the things that drive us on or block us in our path, our patterns of behaviour and thought, the way we lie to make ourselves feel better (or worse). We get to know our enemy so well we can predict their every move. And then, ideally, we move on. We start seeing past ourselves, to the people around us. To our community. We see the way we all connect to something larger, beyond human but so very human. Something like love, the present moment, or stories. We begin to cherish this new discovery, make a mission out of its protection. Ideally. But some of us never get there. It isn’t easy, trying to move beyond ourselves. Not in this day and age, when we don’t own our cars and houses and can barely think our way past this week’s war, when personality is everything we can depend on. But I think we owe it to ourselves to do much more for the person in the mirror than apply a filter to their face. Because the kid who stuck her fingers in that wall socket could be the girl losing her life in the next motorcycle accident. All because she wasn’t able to control her fascination with power. Because she wanted to own it, she wanted to own it, she wanted to own it.

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From the archives:

No Mayonnaise, Please! - The weird things we do to belong.

The Wrong Family - On all the pets that got away.

Hello all,

I missed you dearly.

I have an exciting announcement to make.

I’m back to writing essays online. Full-time, weekly, with all my strength.

Why now? Because I spent the last year and a half driving myself crazy by writing two short novels, and I got so near to burning out that I decided to quit writing.

I was so sure I’d be going through with it. I knew I couldn’t ever not create, so I settled upon a nicotine patch of sorts: I started drawing.

I did it for two months, and it was amazing: no social media, no computer, just me, a mechanical pen and a crisp white page.

But it just wasn’t the same. I liked drawing quite a lot, but it didn’t give me nearly the same level of satisfaction that writing had. I experienced no mad rush to fulfill an artistic vision, my curiosity was lukewarm except at the best of times, and practicing dozens of hours just to get a straight line or a perfect circle, while deeply relaxing, quickly became far too boring.

Turns out, me without writing? No such thing.

So I’m back. But not the way I have been. The last few months have crystallised a few conclusions for me:

1. I’m not competitive, except with myself. Writerly death-matches for attention, like the kind going on here on Substack, drain my vital energy and replace it with nothing of worth.

2. I believe literature should be experienced quietly and deeply, away from screens, color, and music.

3. I want to be read, but I’d rather my audience find me organically and not through aggressive marketing, sponsorships, or anything else that cheapens what I do.

4. Though I much enjoy reading fiction, when it comes to writing, creative nonfiction is where I feel most comfortable and fulfilled. The process of writing memoir, or really any kind of nonfiction, enriches my experience beyond measure.

5. I. Hate. Social. Media.

Which is what Substack, for better or worse, has become. I don’t hate the platform itself or its founders, but this is no longer the place for me.

So I’m creating a new place. It’s called Ants, and it’s a blog/newsletter focused on very short essays that carry the weight of the world, delivered weekly. It’s being hosted with the help of Magic Pages, an independent Ghost-based endeavor that handles everything for me in exchange for a modest monthly maintenance fee.

Ants will officially launch on July 5th. I will be porting my entire subscriber base there, so you all should receive the inaugural essay in your inboxes without the need to do anything, as though was sent from Substack. If you don’t, please check your spam.

Of course, you do not have to follow me there, or anywhere. If you’re not interested in further emails from me, I urge you to unsubscribe at any time, either here or on the new website.

That said, I’d be glad to have you there.

If you’re curious to see how this thing looks, you can find it at antson.page.

It’s been a pleasure writing to you these past four years. I hope for four more, or maybe forty.

That’s it from me right now. I hope to see you July 5th.

Yours and mine,

Andrei

Later edit: I’m giving Substack another chance. I will stick true to the principles outlined above, but the discoverability features Substack offers are second to none, and growing a newsletter without any kind of support is close to impossible. Plus, it’s free. So I will keep experimenting with it, see if I can make it work for me. Stay tuned.

For a time, when I was five or six years old, I pretended to be allergic to mayonnaise.

It did not come from nothing.

At one point a few weeks earlier, I had developed a slight rash after eating a McChicken. Since then, whenever I ordered one again, I specified to the person at the counter—while lifting myself on my toes to be able to see them— that I was allergic to mayo, so they should make sure not to put any on my sandwich.

Looking back, it seems that I have always had a problem with how healthy my body is. I have written before about my anxiety caused by not having broken any bones yet.

I have also never been extremely sick, other than a bout of pneumonia as a child. I suffer from no chronic illnesses, have good, straight, strong teeth, am naturally rather muscular (especially in my lower body), boast a full head of hair, and nothing about my face stands out as out of place.

Paradoxically, perhaps, the resilience of my body has always made me feel a tad isolated. Surrounded by people being markedly affected by viral disease, genetic bad luck, and just their own folly and laziness, I alone stood untouched by the vagaries of cosmic chance. And because I did not share other people’s problems, I had a hard time relating to them.

The allergy pretension, I see now very clearly, was an attempt at belonging.

Presumably because I had seen it in some cartoon, I had gotten it into my head that it was cool to have an allergy. Hence, I took advantage of the little rash that went away after a few days with no treatment and never reappeared, not even after, years later, I began eating mayonnaise again, and whenever someone asked—and I’ll have you know that a few people did ask—I would proclaim with chest-swelling pride that yes, I too had an allergy, that I too was as feeble and vulnerable as the questioner and all the rest of humanity. And it felt good. Boy, did it feel good.

What I’ve just told you is quite weird, I realize that.

And this is exactly my point.

The desire to belong is an integral human need. It no doubt stands as one of those old-as-the-species facets of our survival instinct, a way our reptilian brain makes sure we are not left to fend for ourselves in a wild, unfeeling world.

In fact, according to a paper I read recently1, the need to belong has been proven to be one of our fundamental behavioral motivations. In other words, being accepted as part of some group is crucial to us, so important, in fact, that failure to meet this need can have severe pathological consequences.

And sometimes, in order to belong, we end up doing some pretty crazy things.

Here are a few more of mine:

1. To fit the mold of the American movie “high school boy”, as a sophomore I joined together with two guys I barely knew and formed a punk rock band called Red Twist (it was to be called Green Twist, but the guy who owned the studio we practiced at thought it’d be too much of a Green Day rip-off—as though substituting green for red could take away the fact that 50% of our repertoire consisted of covers of their songs). As the bass player of that band, I even dyed my hair blonde. I admit that it was loads of fun, but I never quite got over the feeling that I was playing a role, that I was trying—and shamefully failing—to fake it till I made myself into the kind of person for whom partying and getting drunk and dancing on stage felt natural. The fact that I’m sitting in bed drafting this essay instead of practicing guitar against the backdrop of protesting neighbours may serve to show you I never succeeded.

2. In law school, in order to seem to have more life experience than I did, I pretended to be an occasional smoker. For a while, whenever I went out with my mates, I made sure to buy a cigarette off of whoever was loaded that time, just to have it on me, ready for the rest of the night. If the others began to light up, so would I, and I would hold that cigarette until it succumbed to its own combustion, taking just enough occasional, shallow puffs from the death-dealing thing to look like I was helping it along. In fact, there exists a picture, taken at a students’ union party, of me dressed to the nines and looking thoughtfully at a night sky as devoid of stars as a cup of black coffee, all while holding a half-consumed cigarette the way only a neophyte would.

3. Once (and this story still makes me cringe, so consider yourselves lucky I’m telling it to you), when I was in third grade or so, I went with my father to a one-week karate camp on the beach. At that point in my life, I was a thickly-bespectacled nerd and chronically friendless, so I was comically unaware of just how one did make friends. We went there as part of a larger group representing our club, and one night, after the day’s activities were done and beatings dealt and taken, I took the proverbial bull by its black belt and asked the other kids, who were about to collect in one room and hang out, if I could join them. Most were older than me, so that night, I felt I had to prove myself to them, to let these karate kids know that I was tough enough to be amongst them, that I was street and worldly and wise beyond my years. So I began swearing like a sailor. In fact, to hear what filth was spewing out of my mouth that fateful night, I think any sailor worth his salt would have turned lobstery with shame. I was swearing so much that I began to forget all those people’s names and just addressed each one using the previous insult I’d used. I became so unhinged that the group—and I can scarcely blame them—made a secret plan to get rid of me. At one point, faking a stomachache, one of the oldest boys asked everyone to get out of his room. Then, using what I can only assume were the balconies, the others climbed back into that room. I was utterly confused, and made even more so by the cacophony that could soon be heard from beyond the door. Surely, I thought, they couldn’t have…One by one, I started banging on the doors to all their rooms. I hit the wood so hard and so thoroughly that at one point, maybe one or ten or thirty minutes later, the clatter subsided and the guy with the stomachache opened his door, with nothing more than a towel tied at his waist, and pretended everyone had gone to sleep. Judging by the muffled laughter coming from behind him from voices I recognized, I understood that to be a lie, albeit a graceful one. The next morning, I apologised profusely to the few of them who’d still meet my gaze, but it was no use. In trying to act the way I thought would ingratiate me with them, I had alienated the karate kids.

It seems to me that quite often, belonging is nothing more than a role-playing game. In order to fit in, we assume the guise of someone appropriate for the task. We become a rogue, a fitter-in, the kind of person who belongs.

Thus, like many other endeavors we undertake in this circus we call our modern society, belonging becomes a game of pretend.

And we are experts at that game, aren’t we? We’re full-time, professional, award-winning pretenders.

We pretend to be stronger than we are. We pretend to be happier than we are. We pretend not to care about our outward appearance. We pretend not to mind that our best friend of two decades hasn’t called us on our birthday. We pretend to respect the neighbor who throws his trash out the window each weekend morning. We pretend to be happy in an abusive relationship, or that it’s not as bad as it looks. We pretend to like what’s on TV and how Instagram makes us feel. We pretend to know where we’re going and how to get there. We pretend to be serious adults, all while yearning for any opportunity—a funny T-shirt, a drinking game, a Marvel movie—to let the children inside us see the light again.

Just like that, I believe that we pretend to have much more in common than we actually do.

Recently, I read a short novel called Cold Enough For Snow by Jessica Au. In the book, the unnamed narrator takes her mother on a trip to Japan, outwardly as a gift to the latter but really mostly because the daughter wants the opportunity to be alone with her mother, to engage her in uninterrupted conversation and have a chance to get to know her better.

To her surprise, things prove confusingly difficult. Over the course of a hundred or so pages of plotless narrative, the narrator-character begins to realize how difficult it is to truly know another person, not just because it’s hard to get anyone to talk about themselves or understand the answers they give to your questions, but how hard, in truth, to even formulate any pertinent questions. How do you know what to ask somebody?

What is the limit of our capacity to know one another? This is a question my wife and I have pondered quite a lot over the last few years. If you live with another person for long enough, you expect that you’ll arrive at a certain level of understanding of that person. That they, in effect, will no longer be able to surprise you. But that’s so not the case! We surprise each other all the damn time, in ways mostly good but also, sometimes, bad. So the question has stuck.

And yet, even if there exists such a limit to our understanding of each other’s minds and hearts, the need to belong still exists. We want to be accepted, to be loved, to be validated, to be seen, to the extent that it is possible.

That’s all well and good so far.

The issue is that there are healthy ways to fulfill this need, and there are more destructive ones.

A lot of people, I’m sure, after arriving at the height of human folly in their youth and treating themselves to a look down at their lives from there, eventually sober up and grow to form healthy, lasting relationships with other people. But many don’t. All around me, I see examples of adults stuck in the minds of children2, adults who stay in stale, cold relationships because it’s less of a bother than breaking up, adults who strain to purchase automobiles they can’t afford because they believe the rest of us care what brand or model they use to get around the block, adults who drink because it used to be cool and they think it still is, adults who talk dirty because all their buddies do, adults who have children because everybody else is doing it and they don’t want to miss out.3

Adults who betray who they are in favor of who they think other people want them to be.

But if we sacrifice so much of ourselves on the altar of belonging, if we replace our likes and dislikes, our hopes and fears and dreams and uncertainties and talents and passions and styles, with ones which do not and have never belonged to us, then who is the one actually doing the belonging? Is it still us?

Or is it the kind of person who would do the kind of thing we are doing, the kind of person who, by our hypothesis, we are not?

There is a way to do it right, of course. But it means coming to terms with the reality of rejection, of people finding out the real you, and some of them potentially giving you the boot. The process of belonging is, in many ways, the natural continuation of the process of self-discovery. Only by looking at ourselves not through a glass darkly, but with honesty and openness and courage, can we discover who we really are, or as much of that as we are able to piece together at any one time, and only once we’ve done that should we begin to contemplate searching for people of our ilk.

Unless we approach this process honestly and without shame, we might live our lives surrounded by people, some of whom we may even consider friends and family, but we will still feel empty, our need to belong severely unfulfilled.

This is not an advice column, but let me tell you how it’s been for me. Every time I tried to fit in by changing something about myself or adopting something new (a phrase, a whole speech pattern, an article of clothing, a certain behavior or activity I’d never tried before because I instinctively knew it wouldn’t be a good fit and it always turned out that it really wasn’t), no matter the result, I did not feel good. Among people who were genuinely like that, I was out of place, a tortoise in the sea.

Instead, all the true friendships I’ve made, all my achievements in activities I’ve stuck with for years, have been the result of self-honesty. No, I never made friends with the cool people (the tough guys, the bullies, the popular kings and queens). No, I never became a professonal athlete or received a black belt. And no, I never stopped eating mayonnaise—though it turns out I don’t even like it.

But I did learn who the actual cool people were (the down-to-earths, the readers, the wide-awake-dreamers, those for whom popularity is an alien concept). I did learn how to listen to my body and let it instead of my dictatorial mind show me what it needs. And I did embrace my nerdiness, my love of comics and video games, and my flat feet.

In truth, I don’t have many friends. I don’t belong to any secret clubs or openly secret societies. I’m not a popular, in vogue writer or really anything else. I don’t smoke, seldom drink, and I don’t gamble or drive a powerful car. I’m just a late-twenties writer with a wife, two cats, and a dozen or so people I hold very dear.

Some might call me boring.

But I feel like I fit in.

Where?

In the only place that matters.

My own life.

I did it again.

I guess we all have our weaknesses. Our obsessions, our proclivities, the holes we always seem to stumble into no matter how well we think we’ve cemented them over.

For me, it’s pushing when I should be letting rest.

More specifically, it’s the belief that no matter what else is going on in my life, no matter how much I’m struggling or how tired or morose or uninspired I feel, I should be writing.

I’ve hinted at this before, though never said it outright. In 2023, I told you I’d be taking a lengthy break from Substack because I was approaching burnout. What I did not tell you was that, at the time and alongside writing to you here, I was also attempting to write a book. This was supposed to be a realistic novel called Alexandru (the Romanian version of the first name Alexander), which would present the life story of a boy with humble beginnings, who eventually immigrates to Germany, changes his name and becomes a bigshot writer. It would have been many things: the first full-length work I’d have ever finished, my first piece of fiction composed in my native tongue, and maybe, why not, my literary debut. I had high, no, huge hopes for it.

Naturally, I did not finish it. I couldn’t. Early on I realized I was way out of my depth. I had not taken the time to plan ahead, so the novel had no structure. But more importantly, I had pushed myself too far again.

This came after, a year before, I had gone through a massive spell of writer’s block because, you guessed it, I’d pushed myself nearly to the breaking point by trying to write newsletter pieces while also studying for a legal exam.

Looking back on all the years that have passed since I started writing seriously in the late days of autumn of 2019, I have been doing this exact thing every year. Pushing myself too far, not listening to my body and the desperate cries of the little person inside my mind who writes all my stories.

Naturally, then, it standa to reason that this year, it was bound to happen again.

In early summer, I finished the book I’ve been working on for nearly a year (working on it even though I also needed to study for the most brutal exam I’ve ever taken). I then spent a few days drafting a synopsis and a book proposal, and sent the manuscript to two major local publishers.

What did I do afterwards?

Did I rest?

Did I revel in my own awesomeness and allow myself to feel good about what I had just accomplished?

Did I even stop to take in that special moment, the moment when my index finger clicked the left mouse button to close the Word doc which contained the final version of the manuscript for the last time?

No. Nuh-uh. Absolutely not.

I started another fucking book.

This time, I did not get stuck. I planned away, did my research, and in close to three months wrote a 17k word first draft of a new novella called Cezar, about a blind dog and the criminal who becomes his newest master.

When I set out to edit it, the irresponsible use of my mental resources these past few months finally caught up with me. I found that my creative well had dried up. No matter how much I tried, no matter how many passages in the book evoke more complex thoughts than those already written, no matter the potential I can see and feel this book has, I could not in any way bring myself to further develop it.

So after mulling it over for a few excruciating, humbling days, I decided to shelf it. I closed the printed manuscript, put it away next to my pile of unread books, and surrendered to the chaotic whims of the universe.

I have not written a single word in over a week (excepting, of course, this little missive to you), and it feels kind of weird. Like, who am I, now that I am not writing? And when will I start again? And what, pray tell, will I be working on when I do?

Will I continue developing this new book? Will I write more of my patented personal essays I used to publish on this Substack?

For the first time in a long, long while, maybe ever, I don’t know.

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​

Bob loved being fat.

​The sixth of seven farmer’s sons, he relished occupying more than a broomstick’s worth of space, being all but impossible to ignore or budge without consent. His bigness grounded him, made him feel real.

​There was also a simpler explanation. Bob liked food. Reallyliked it. As far back as he could remember, there’d been a hunger inside him, a bottomless pit demanding attention. When his first paycheck enabled filling that pit, he found he could not stop. Satiating his hunger was the most fulfilling thing possible. Being fat, then, meant he kept doing it. Kept being true to himself.

​Eating at night was best. City life took its well-earned rest then, and it felt like just Bob and his food existed in the world. It was his mindfulness practice. Nightly he ate not for sustenance—not for energy to face another day behind the cubicle—but pure pleasure. He paired his baked, broiled, fried, frozen, and double-fried friends with horror favourites, so that in time, they intermixed. The Thing meant caramel corn as much as it did Kurt Russell, and The Fly would forevermore be grafted onto a plateful of pickled onion rings.

​One night, however, Bob posted himself in front of the open fridge, scanned its shelves for treasure—five pizza slices, a two-pound bucket of strips (extra crispy), a five-pound bucket of coleslaw salad—and found he wasn’t hungry. Not in the usual way, anyway. The feeling still existed, but came dulled, like a scream from a faraway room. The fridge’s contents seemed too heavy for such a hunger. As though trying to feed a newborn Spam. He grabbed a pack of munchies from the kitchen cabinet and returned to his room.

​Bob lay on the bed and explored his body. He touched below the sternum, whence regular hunger would radiate. Then went lower. No mistaking it. The feeling came from inside his belly button.

​Truthfully, it had always been deep. He’d always sort of wanted to stuff something in there, see how big of a thing could fit.

​He dropped one of the munchies in. With a timid pop, it disappeared. The hunger went away as well. What might it all mean?

​Before he could think up an answer, overwhelming relaxation spread through his body, and Bob fell asleep.

​He woke hungry, ate his usual heap of breakfast cereal, and went to work. At night, the belly button stirred again. Bob tried feeding it another munchy. The star-shaped thing popped in, then got spat back out. One munchy, it seemed, was no longer enough. Bob fed it an extra crispy strip. That quieted it. And Bob fell asleep without his nightly meal again.

​Night after night, it demanded bigger meals, until Bob had to pour the entire coleslaw bucket into his umbilicus. Its hunger grew bottomless, like the hole itself. Like Bob’s own used to be.

​Two weeks in, Bob stopped feeling hungry altogether. The only hunger left was the belly button’s, and its demands had gotten oddly specific. It seemed to have discovered a way to communicate with him. Not quite like hearing voices, but what the hole wanted was no less clear to Bob than if it had been whispering into his ear.

​One day, a tire iron. The next, a whole truck tire. A bag of coal. A bottle with a special mix of grease, surgical spirit, and Sriracha sauce. A wooden mock-up of his company building.

​Soon enough, the loss of his hunger began changing Bob. It showed in how people perceived him, or, for that matter, no longer did. He wasn’t used to checking himself out in the mirror, but sometimes he’d get the urge to step on the bathroom scale, then sigh with relief at the number, inevitably bigger than the last. He’d weighed 325 pounds the week before the belly button woke up. One month later, he was at 152. He stole a look into the mirror. Flaps of skin hung off an emaciated face like cheese strings from a burger.

​He tried forcing himself to eat. Bad idea. Not only could he not keep down food, he couldn’t even keep it in his mouth. Everything tasted like seashells dipped in ash. The days of Bob the foodie were over. 

​The weird thing? He found he didn’t really care. For decades, he’d defined himself by what he stuffed inside himself. Right now, he was just… Bob. The corporate IT guy. The lanky dude from troubleshooting whose last name nobody knew. The man with a seemingly infinite, talking belly button.

​And boy, did it feel good getting it to shut up.

​Six weeks later, Bob saw a sack of bones in the mirror.

​Skin stretched so tight across it that his sharp-edged skull looked about to poke through. That should have scared him; it didn’t. By now, Bob was no longer in command of mind or body. All he wanted to do—could do—was provide his Master with everything It required. The plan was nearly complete. Just one ingredient away. 

​Bob sank into the mattress and removed his billowy Videodrome T-shirt. No need to ruin a beautiful thing. He looked towards his right hand. Was it ready? It looked healthy. He’d washed it, rubbed it with lotion and a mix of spices, applied a tenderizing massage. He wanted to do it slowly, finger by finger. Savor his part of what was coming. But when the first finger entered the hole, this was no longer his moment.

​The entire hand went in, then his arm up to the elbow. The hole pulled further, and Bob’s spine began to break. There commenced a horrid symphony as slowly, relentlessly, his body broke apart.

​Crack. Shuffled.

​Squelch. Turned inside out.

​Screech. Remade itself.

​And Bob was no more.

​“At last.” The newborn stretched, its fresh jaws popping as it spoke. “At last, the Belly Button lives!”

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Pachetul ajunge pur și simplu. Niciun SMS, niciun e-mail, doar un scârțâit de roți și, deodată, o berlină neagră cu folie pe geamuri în fața casei mele. Ușa din dreapta se deschide fără sunet și un tânăr într-un hanorac negru, cu gluga trasă peste ochi, se dă jos din mașină. Mâinile-i sunt ocupate de o cutie voluminoasă, și totuși reușește să-mi întindă bonul și un pix albastru deschis.

Cutia nu-i doar mare, ci și grea, ceea ce e un semn bun, zic eu. Aud, sau mi se pare că aud, un gângurit ușor venind dinăuntru. O așez pe masa din bucătărie și, cu foarfeca pregătită, încep să tai banda adezivă din jurul cutiei, cu meticulozitatea unui maestru croitor, având grijă să nu-mi deteriorez noua achiziție. Cutia se deschide.

Bebelușul e înăuntru; un miracol roșiatic, cu aspect sănătos. Bebelușul meu, exact cum promitea broșura.

Prietena mea Berta era tare sceptică cu privire la toată afacerea și a reușit să-mi transmită și mie o stare de anxietate. „Bebeluși la comandă”, a râs duminica trecută la telefon. În timp ce vorbea cu mine, își ținea fetița pe genunchi și alăpta. ”Dragă, dacă eram în locul tău, la cum arăți și la cât de deșteaptă ești, aș fi folosit banii ăia să mă întorc la facultate. N-ai făcut decât să hrănești mașinăria capitalistă pentru o promisiune goală.” În fundal, se auzea suptul fetiței. Ce târfă ipocrită, m-am gândit atunci. A fost nevoie de toată forța mea interioară să nu trântesc receptorul.

Mâinile-mi tremură. Bebelușul—Finnegan, de acum încolo îl va chema Finnegan—îmi zâmbește, dezvelind o gură lipsită de dinți și niște gingii roșii, acoperite cu salivă. Un smoc singuratic de păr blond îi împodobește capul ca o coroniță.

Acum sunt și eu mamă. Berta poate să se ducă naibii.

For example, a scant few years ago, I was a cat-less bachelor. That state of affairs is so far removed from my current experience that I cannot even begin to picture what it was like.

For another example, just last year, if someone were to ask me what kind of writer I thought I was, I would unabashedly have answered something along the lines of: “An essayist, are you daft?! Have you even read anything I’ve written?!”

Well, ladies, gents and nonbinary friends, today I stand before you as something else. Something new. The kind of writer which, as the years went by, I stopped believing I would ever be, nay, could ever be.

A novelist.

Because today, more precisely fourteen hours ago, I put in place the final edits of my book.

So I can finally say it. Scream it, were I the kind of person that manifests themselves that way.

I. AM. A. NOVELIST!

OK, if you want to be a nerd about it, what I have written is closer to a novella than a novel.

It is a 35k word literary narrative, written in Romanian, about an old widower who has convinced himself that he cannot live without his beloved wife, so he’s decided that, on the first anniversary of her death, he will hang himself.

On the day of, however, through the window he has left open—so the stench of death would not bother the neighbours—enters a cat. A skinny, dirty, wounded runt of a cat. And that cat may just turn out to be his salvation.

You likely see why I say this is closer to a novella than a novel. But you know what? If The Old Man and The Sea is being marketed as a novel, then why not this one, too?

Anyway, I am now entering the third and (hopefully) final phase of the journey that has been this book. I have drafted, edited, and now am pitching my manuscript to local publishers.

I think I do not even need to say this, but I will anyway. The experience of writing this book has changed me profoundly. It has forced me to face every single one of my fears and uncertainties. I have learned to plot, develop characters, write long-form, realistic dialogue, fix pacing and continuity issues, and likely most important of all, have patience.

With patience, I have written a book.

With patience, I may write many more.

With patience, and a little luck, I’ll find my name in bookstores sometime soon.

That’s all for now.

I just wanted to check in, let you know I’m not dead, and that I’ve been keeping at it.

I hope to have something more meaty to share soon, including an English translation of the first chapter.

I also hope I’ll bring myself to cease neglecting y’all and write on here more often.

Until then, peace.

God knows all of us need that right now.

—A.

A lot’s happening behind the scenes, including, but not limited to:

• drafting a story for a Molotov Cocktail flash fiction competition in May

• further edits on the book—the second draft of which has been well-received by friends and family

• final preparations for my exam

The unfortunate result of all this has been that I’ve had neither time nor creative energy left for newsletter-exclusive stuff.

Apology delivered, I hope you’ll enjoy this collection of bite-sized essays, originally published nearly two years ago to fewer than a quarter of you.

Prater, 2005

I don’t remember the first time I left my country. When I was little, my parents and I did a lot of sightseeing. After Communism fell, the world opened up, and they wanted to see it all. They believed travel was integral to one’s education, and looking back, I think that’s true.

It was on a trip to Austria that I received my first lesson in darkness.

I think I was about eight. We went to Vienna to see Prater, one of the oldest European amusement parks. I’d only glimpsed these shrines to entertainment in American cartoons, so when the real thing flooded my senses it felt surreal. I remember roller coasters, a ferris wheel, and a ride with spinning sombreros that made my father instantly sick.

I also remember we never left the hotel after dark. There are pimps and whores out there, I was told, though of course I didn’t know what those were. I pictured grotesque figures in black overcoats several sizes too big for their wiry frames, with sharp knives wedged between their thin lips, lying in wait for a hapless boy to fall into their grasp.

During the day, as I ate sandwiches so big I had to hold them like steering wheels, I wondered where the pimps and whores were hiding. Had they squeezed further into the dark corners of the world, or had they simply gone home to sleep away the light? Did they even need to sleep?

At times I wish I was that child again, a child who could afford to separate monsters from men.

I think I know why children’s stories teach us to love people, and fear monsters. It’s because the world feels safer when you have only the latter to fear.

Wood

A boy once gave himself a test. His girlfriend sometimes cut her wrists, so he told her every time she did it, he’d hurt himself too—he’d rub his hand against the margins of his desk until he drew blood. He kept his word, and when next she did it, young flesh met wood again, and then again, and the flesh held firm, and he wondered could he keep it up, until finally a trickle of blood appeared. He proudly showed it to her, and she never mentioned self-mutilation again. He never found out if she’d stopped.

Porcelain

In our first year of college, I shared a room with my best friend. We were about to plunge into uncharted waters, so sticking together felt natural. We’d known each other for twelve years, so it would be like living with family. We could create a home away from home.

That year of living together nearly destroyed our friendship.

The signs were there from the start. The first night, I discovered he was a snorer. The room was so small our beds were close to touching, which prompted many a gay joke, and meant his snoring trumped whatever efforts my headphones could make. There was no way to escape that sound. And soon the problem grew worse. You see, I was a snorer too, especially when very tired, so after a few sleepless nights we began to duet. He’d fall asleep first, keeping me awake for hours with his snoring, and when I finally fell into sleep, I’d wake him up with mine.

Don’t get me wrong. We enjoyed ourselves a lot, too. We’re foodies, and his talent for cooking made dinner a delight. We washed down steaks and hamburgers with country wine from my uncle, and laughed about the stupidity and brilliance of people, and the senselessness of college life. At night, we shared ghost stories so terrifying they disturbed our already precarious sleep schedules for weeks.

But there were other things that bothered me. His discarded clothes lined every surface of the room, to the point where I had no space for my books. And he never washed his dishes, not even when he was by himself.

At our worst moment, I almost punched him in the face.

It was late December. A group of us were gathered in our room, drinking. Out of the blue, my best friend called me out for not having washed the dishes that day. I shot to my feet and went to the armchair he sat in, sprawled like a sheikh. Since he was the one who cooked, washing the dishes fell to me, and that day, indeed, I had failed in my duties. But coming from him, that accusation was the height of arrogance. A few weeks before, I’d gone home to study and left him alone for one week. At the end of that week, he went home himself, assuring me I’d find the room spotless. On my return, the place smelled like a pigsty. I looked in the sink and I saw he’d left a mound of filthy pans floating in toxic-looking water. In effect, he was admonishing me for swatting a fly after he’d killed an elephant.

So I shoved my hand in his throat. It was pure instinct. The room got silent like a cemetery in midwinter. And then he said, I’m joking, man.

We lasted like this until the summer holidays. The following autumn I moved in with someone else, and he decided to live alone. This is how our friendship escaped catastrophe.

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Acum doi ani, la muncă, mai mulți colegi s-au accidentat la genunchi. Prima dată când s-a întâmplat am rămas toți interziși, dar începând cu al treilea caz toată treaba devenise deja o glumă între noi. Locul nostru de muncă era locul unde genunchii vin să moară. Toți ceilalți râdeau, însă eu mă înfiorasem de-a binelea. Îmi masam proprii genunchi, dintotdeauna slabi, și-mi imaginam că era doar o chestiune de timp până când și ei vor exploda. Îmi era frică de acest nou soi de ciumă. Dar asta nu-i tot.

În secret, tânjeam să devin următoarea ei victimă.

Vedeți voi, eu nu mi-am rupt niciodată vreun os. Iar acest fapt aparent lipsit de importanță mi-a provocat o grămadă de anxietate de-a lungul timpului. Când eram copil, tata mă captiva cu povești despre aventurile lui de la vârsta mea de atunci, pentru majoritatea dintre ele fiind recompensat cu fracturi. Să-ți rupi un os părea insigna supremă de cercetaș. Îmi uram corpul sănătos pentru că mă priva de ea. Cu siguranță, ceva era în neregulă cu mine. Și pentru că a-mi urî doar corpul nu părea suficient—pentru că problema mea, în mod cert, depășea sfera fizică—în scurt timp am început să mă urăsc pe mine, cu totul.

Mai târziu, oasele rupte au devenit un semn de bărbăție. În a opta, un coleg a intrat în sala de clasă cu un ghips la mâna stângă, mândru, așteptând reacții. Când i-am intrat în joc și l-am întrebat ce pățise, a răspuns cu îngâmfare că „trăsese un pumn în pământ cu atâta forță încât nici corpul lui nu reușise să-i reziste”.

N-am crezut niciodată că ar trebui să fac ceva special pentru a-mi rupe oasele. Părea un eveniment corporal natural, la fel de inevitabil ca apariția primului coș. Atunci de ce eram tocmai eu ocolit? Cine mă numise nedemn pentru un accident cu fracturi? Da, eram un tocilar tăcut care nu știa nici să meargă pe bicicletă, însă luasem parte la destule bătăi, de două ori alegându-mă chiar cu luxații de încheietură. Dar oasele de găină din mâna și antebrațul meu rămâneau cu încăpățânare intacte. Cu fiecare an ce trecea, ca un coșmar de care nu mai scăpam, dorința de a-mi rupe oasele ocupa din ce în ce mai mult spațiu în mintea mea.

Un psiholog mi-a spus că am „tendința nesănătoasă de a mă compara cu alții”. În facultate, comparând trupurile pline de cicatrici ale colegilor mei cu torsul meu rușinos de curat, credeam că am descoperit sursa încrederii lor în ei înșiși și, prin extensie, sursa anxietății mele. Ei își rupseseră oasele în timp ce eu nu. Ei trăiseră din plin, în timp ce eu, nu.

Așadar, când colegii de la muncă au început să dispară, binecuvântați cu lucrul pe care eu mi-l doream de atât de mult timp, mă gândeam—nu, eram sigur—că aveau să se întoarcă schimbați. Mai încrezători, mai drepți, mai rezistenți la ale vieții varii capricii.

Unul câte unul, s-au întors din concediul medical, mult mai repede decât mă așteptasem. Dar inevitabilele schimbări nu s-au manifestat. Erau tot oamenii care fuseseră, întorși la viețile pe care le părăsiseră numai temporar. Niciodată n-au vorbit despre accidentările lor. Era aproape magie pură, felul în care tot episodul s-a evaporat din memoria noastră colectivă. Ca o frunză răzleață suflată de vânt.

Numărătoarea s-a oprit la trei. Ciuma genunchilor n-a ajuns până la mine. Dar dintre toți, eu eram cel pe care-l schimbase.

Știam acum.

Știam că nu pierdusem nimic.

The first time I ran away, Dr. Hao broke every bone in my body. He’d created me, he said, so I belonged to him.

Eventually, I escaped. But the outside was too much for a malnourished mutant. I made my home in shadows, and ate what I could take.

Then, one day, I saw him.

I’d heard of love, but never felt it before.

He was big and black and beautiful, with sharp, hungry teeth.

I reached out. When I moved, he moved. Our hands touched and I felt glass.

That magnificent beast was me.

Maria wakes at six. Before bed she ties her hair with red string, but come morning it’s always undone, a jungle of bleached white hair let loose down her back. She screams in her sleep, like my mom every night that summer in the motel with the pool, after we ran away from Jimmy. This is not the only thing they share.

My shirt engulfs her, covering the bruises from last night. I’m sorry, I want to tell her—feel like screaming at her—Forgive me, I’ll be better. But we both know that’s bullshit. I wasn’t raised for better.

Were you raised for better? Then why not feed some hungry kids?1

For the next few months, alongside (hopefully) lots of new stuff, I’ll be sending out translated versions of previous essays. As I’ve stated before, one of my goals for this year is to make this newsletter bilingual (English and Romanian), at least to an extent.

For this reason, I have created a new section called Practice Space (RO). English readers, feel free to unsubscribe from this section (instructions here) if you do not wish to receive future posts written in Romanian.

You can find the English version of the below essay here.

Cât despre tine, cititorule român, ți-am pregătit o mică introducere pe care o poți găsi aici.

Într-o piscină am gustat pentru prima oară moartea. Aveam cinci ani. Tata mă înscrisese la un club de înot de stat pe care el însuși îl frecventase și, mai impresionant, îl supraviețuise. Cluburile astea publice, deși destinate copiilor, nu se pretau bălăcelii fără noimă în piscină; erau terenuri de testare a viitorilor campioni olimpici, iar acești copii cu potențial suprauman erau cei care primeau toată atenția antrenorilor, în timp ce noi, restul (fraierii), rămâneam la statutul de recuzită sau, dacă aveam noroc, obstacole. În prima mea zi acolo, am pășit în capătul mai puțin adânc al piscinei împreună cu ceilalți cursanți și am crezut că pot s-o fac. Că pot să-l fac pe tata mândru învățând să înot în timp record. Antrenorul, un ochelarist burtos și mustăcios care aducea mai degrabă cu un actor porno ieșit la pensie decât cu un atlet, a suflat în fluier și a răcnit o serie de instrucțiuni ce s-au pierdut în învălmășeala ce a urmat. Lecția începuse. Ceilalți băieți alergau, săreau pe burtă și se scufundau, în timp ce eu înghețasem, neștiind ce ar trebui să fac și fiindu-mi frică să nu comit vreo greșeală fatală. Apoi, antrenorul m-a împins. Și așa mare cum eram—mereu fusesem înalt pentru vârsta mea—am căzut, ca un stejar tăiat cu drujba, pe spate. Nu apucasem să inspir, așa că plămânii mei erau goi. La fel și mintea mea. Nu puteam găsi în mine forța să ridic măcar un deget. Era ca și cum cineva mă învelise cu o pătură cu greutăți, invizibilă. Îmi amintesc cum stăteam în apa aceea—omoplații mei atingând din când în când gresia piscinei, ochii mei deschiși către luminile tavanului ce răzbăteau prin apă, neauzind nimic și nevăzând nimic altceva decât acele lumini tulburi şi difuze—și mă întrebam dacă voi muri. După câtva timp, antrenorul m-a ridicat. Nu m-am întors acolo niciodată. Și au trecut ani buni până să pot păși din nou într-o piscină.

…

Citește restul în revista Zugzwang.

Sunt Andrei Atanasov, un scriitor cu visuri mari născut în Constanța.

Probabil că nu mă știi—decât dacă suntem prieteni în viața reală—fiindcă până acum am publicat exclusiv texte scrise în limba engleză. Așa că hai să-ți spun câte ceva despre mine:

• Scriu de vreo cinci ani. Am început cu ficțiune (prima mea povestire a fost o chestie morbidă despre un tip care se sinucide dându-și foc în propria mașină, după care au urmat povești mai drăguțe), apoi, când am descoperit Substack, am trecut pentru o vreme la eseistică și memoir, adică povești adevărate care se citesc la fel de ușor ca ficțiunea. Mai nou, le combin, așa că nu vei ști niciodată la ce să te aștepți de la mine (mai ales fiindcă nici eu, de fapt, nu știu).

• Câteva dintre textele mele în engleză au fost publicate în reviste literare internaționale, cel mai recent în Sky Island și Short Reads.

• Mai nou, am început să public și în română. Eseul meu Lecții de înot a apărut în Zugzwang, iar Revista Ficțiunea (coordonată de Șerban Pavlu) a publicat un capitol din cartea la care lucrez.

• Am absolvit Facultatea de Drept a Universității din București, însă pasiunea mea adevărată e literatura, încă de când (în clasa a unșpea) am cunoscut o anumită profesoară de română care mi-a deschis ochii, să zicem, în sensul că m-a învățat să citesc ca un cititor, nu ca un critic învechit și formalist. Cu alte cuvinte, mi-a arătat că tot ce învățasem la școală despre cum funcționează cărțile era total greșit. Dacă știi engleză, poți citi întreaga poveste aici. Pot spune cu mâna pe inimă că dacă nu ar fi fost doamna Samson, eu n-aș fi devenit niciodată scriitor.

• M-am născut la finele secolului trecut. Copilăria mi-a fost marcată de desenele alea mișto cu supereroi (știi tu: Spider-Man, X-Men, Batman, Liga Dreptății, ș.a.m.d), dar și de popularizarea masivă a jocurilor video. Generația mea a fost, cred, printre primele care și-au petrecut mai mult timp jucându-se în casă decât afară, astfel că (încă) știu tot ce mișcă în materie de jocuri video, în schimb nu mă pricep la fotbal, nici la baschet, nici la volei.

• Andrei Atanasov e un pseudonim. E destul de asemănător cu numele meu adevărat, doar că sună mai bine. Am ales să public sub pseudonim pentru a-mi separa cariera juridică de cea literară.

Cam astea ar fi bazele. Vei afla mai multe despre mine citind acest newsletter. Mă rog, nu chiar atât de multe, pentru că până la urmă opera contează mai mult decât autorul ei, nu?

În prezent, mare parte din acest newsletter este în engleză, însă anul ăsta mi-am propus să traduc câteva dintre cele mai bune (și populare) eseuri și povești publicate aici, pentru a ajunge mai ușor la tine, cititorule român.

Sper să-ți placă. Iar dacă da, nu uita să te abonezi (folosind butonul din josul acestei pagini) și să dai un like (butonul în formă de inimă) povestirii respective. Lectură plăcută!

Momentan, sunt disponibile în română următoarele:

Hello!

I want to share an essay I’m really proud of, published by the awesome folks at last November. It’s about pets, and how they affect and are affected by family dynamics.

This was my first publication in a major outlet (Short Reads has published the likes of Dinty W. Moore, editor-in-chief of Brevity), so I was super excited when I got their email.

Some of you may have read a previous draft of this essay, but I hope you don’t mind reading the final version.

You can find the essay here. Enjoy!