Bucharest has no centre. It is a patchwork of identities. Here, I cannot help but feel young and restless. All the alternate dimensions split open like in a movie. A myriad of decisions to be made, endless distances to navigate, so many people, never-ending enumerations of (almost) anything: streets, cinemas, bars, creeps, haunts, (hi)stories. Unveiled hidden gems broadcast nationally, place names that become common nouns (Grozăvești, Kiseleff, even satellites like Voluntari and Snagov), some written on Monopoly boards: Berceni, Cotroceni, Rahova, Magheru. It’s uncanny how I came to know the approximate value of the real estate in these neighbourhoods before I ever set foot there. An alienated and alienating metropolis with infrastructure problems becomes almost legendary to outsiders like me, like Shrek’s Far Far Away, except dirtier. 

In the first episode of the fifth season of Sex and the City (notably the first one after 9/11), Carrie Bradshaw calls New York her “one great love” and talks about how she feels accompanied by the city even when she goes out on her own on Paris Date Night at the cinema. New York is not just the backdrop, but a main cast member. Carrie tries to live outside of New York at the end of the series, when she moves to Paris, but doesn’t like it. She is somehow tied to the city even though Paris has always been her fantasy place. (We do not get to choose which city we actually love, unfortunately.) 

As a provincial who moved to Bucharest, I know this city is a New York to some and a (little) Paris to others – either way, it eats you whole in the long run. Like Carrie, I let Bucharest fill my life daily. Although paradoxically, I find it physically impossible to take advantage of all the now-or-never opportunities. In the end, it’s just a question of what you choose to let go. This constant need to consume media and spaces with my eyes oscillating around and my feet wandering on the ground underlines a particular void inside myself. 

My home is in my body, and I carry it around like a snail.

Now my home has no windows, nor a roof. 

What does coming home even mean? 

Different districts feel like different cities. Inequality is laid bare. 

The contemporary commodity is time – time-consuming-anxiety-ridden late capitalism. 

For me, homecoming in Bucharest means dreaming of the past. I stand in Revolution Square and see Ceaușescu’s helicopter flying overhead. Here is where the generations before me had the space to manoeuvre (my) history and birth the future. 

In the subway, I feel the weight of all the (un)known streets, buildings, and people above me. The second-heaviest building in the world might crush me in the Unirii station at any moment, and the lost Uranus neighbourhood might resurface inwards, underground. Past, present and future buildings fight to survive in Bucharest. Their clashes make discontinuity an aesthetic surprise and a postmodern necessity, kintsugi art for the scars of the past instead of their erasure. The destroyed parts of old buildings are either left behind or transformed, just like wild fanfiction fills in the gaps of the original.

The crushing feeling that anything might happen freezes me dead in my tracks.

A car horn wakes me from my daze. I forgot where I was going. But surely, I am running late.