My parents were arguing for fear that I would have sex or because I had started defending my mother. I felt lonely and misunderstood.
I couldn't see him, I didn't know what he wanted or what he was going to do and I didn't find anything pleasant in what I was going through. It hurt, something I was prepared for, but that wasn't the problem. Neither the cold nor the darkness, but how impersonal everything was. When she stopped, I almost breathed a sigh of relief. However, I was happy that I had kept my promise and that I would get it back. The next day, I waited for a sign from him, which came only in the evening. He wrote me a message that sounded like this:
"Mada, I'm sorry, but I decided to stay with Iuli. I hope we can stay friends. ”
He had stolen from me an experience I should have enjoyed. I felt broken, decomposed, with parts of me thrown in all corners of the world, and I thought I shouldn't have gone out the door that night. Just before I left home that day, I felt the first strong earthquake I remember, 5.3 degrees. After the earthquake, a noisy and violent storm followed, which made the poplars on the street bend as if they were made of plasticine. The air was full of dust, and on the road lay branches and trees torn or uprooted.
She should have been paying attention to the signs.
Weeks followed in which Andrei continued to look for me, even though he was with Iulia. And I answered him and, more than that, I did everything he told me. He forbade me to sleep with my girlfriends, he told me he didn't want to go out after school and he decided who I could talk to and who I couldn't. Until, on a friend's birthday, I lied to him and stayed at her house overnight. He called me over 20 times and sent me about eight messages. When I answered him, he began to swear at me, to tell me that I was a whore, that he could not trust me, and that if I was really a virgin, I could not lie to him.
Whenever she wanted to make me feel guilty, she would play the same card: "If you were a virgin, you would listen to me." Sex had to make me submissive to him. And he made me. I started to cry and ask him to forgive me and I did this for minutes on end, until I realized that I didn't owe him an explanation. I closed them and for about a week I received no sign. Then, one evening, he asked me to help him with some paperwork, because "only I had a printer." Even then I didn't know how to say no, so I went out to give him the papers and I wanted to leave, but he stopped me and started talking to us about us. He told me that he broke up with Iulia and that he loved me, that he was sorry. Then I would have been strong enough to reject him, but I didn't.
The first time we went out to the village disco together, Iulia was there. Her hair was straight, neatly trimmed, made up naturally, and she wore a red, school-looking, disciplined dress. She had always seemed beautiful, good, delicate, too good for him. When he saw us together, he began to cry. I felt awful, because I knew she was suffering because of me, so I watched her most of the night. At one point, I realized that he was no longer inside and then I noticed that Andrei had disappeared. I went out and, on the corridor leading to the bathroom, Iulia and Andrei were talking, and she was crying. When he saw me, Andrei blushed with anger, jerked his arm and asked me if I should go with him or stay with her.
"If you stay, you have nothing to talk to me about."
I stayed with her and, through tears, Iulia told me that she had sex with Andrei for the first time on May 2, his birthday, as she had promised. Then, all of a sudden, he left her and came back to me. We both stayed in that cold, stinky hallway, took her in our arms, and let her cry. I didn't really know how to react, what to do, what to feel, but I told him how Andrei had done the same to me. In less than two weeks, he had stolen a valuable experience from both of us, which would influence all our future relationships.
Even so, I didn't leave Andrei. I continued the relationship for five years, I had sex a second, a third and a fourth time, and then I didn't count. He offended me, he cheated on me, he didn't answer my phone for days and I was physically hurt by everything he did to me, but I couldn't say "enough, that's enough". Self-esteem was, like sex, an alien notion in my childhood.
He often used sex, which was not a pleasant experience for me, as an object of blackmail. I remember one night he told me we had to see each other. I was upset because I hadn't been able to find him all day, and I told him I didn't want to see him, let alone have sex with him. He replied that that is why we are together and that, if I refuse him, he will look for this elsewhere, which made me like him, with the hope that he will apologize and we will overcome and this. He started the car without saying a word and drove to the end of the darkest street in the village. He stopped, undressed and had sex. I didn't talk, I didn't move, I just sat there, livid, empty-minded, crying, and I did my duty as a girlfriend.
In the end, we dressed quickly and quietly. When I arrived at my gate, he told me he wanted us to break up. I had not behaved properly, I had violated the terms of our agreement, so he had every reason to break up with me. "Is that sex?" How can I feel good when you sit and cry like a fool? ”
Then I told him, amid screams and tears, that what he was doing to me was not right and that I would not get out of the car until he promised me that he would not behave like that. I knew that a promise from him was worthless, but I was wasting my time because I was not ready to leave. I took his car keys, and he grabbed my hair and hit me with his head on the dashboard, snatched the keys from my hand and started throbbing. "If you don't want to go down to your house, I'll leave you in the field, you damn thing!" And it got dark.
I found myself lying on the ground on a cobbled road. Andrei was holding me in his arms and crying, telling me that he was sorry, that he loved me and that he would never hurt me again. But nothing has changed. And I, just like my mother, stayed, loved him and forgave him.
I broke up with Andrei before Bac. I was going to go to college, which he didn't agree with, because I would have become a whore in Bucharest. Despite the things I've judged my parents for years, I know they've always done everything in their power to make my brother and I have better chances in life than they did. They transferred me from the village school to a good school in the city, convinced that an urban school environment would have made me ambitious and would have helped me grow differently, more harmoniously. Although I was never a wealthy family, in the 5th grade they hired a driver who had to take me to school and bring me back home safely, because I didn't know the city.
As for Andrei, I knew I didn't want a life with him, but I didn't know how to stop. Then, suddenly, I stopped.
One day, I was preparing to go out with a group of mutual friends, when he called me nervously and threatened me that if I went out he would come after me and step on me in front of everyone. I told him I was going anyway, and the conversation ended. I went out, but I didn't enjoy the moment of going out, because I was afraid. Andrei had come to do what he had promised me. Our friends stopped him when he rushed to hit me, so he took a glass from the table and threw the beer from it at me. Then, amid insults, he spat at me and threw a cigarette still lit in front of me. All this time, my ears were ringing and I was afraid that if I opened my mouth, the lump in my throat would turn into a cry from which I would never be able to stop. When he stopped swearing at me, I walked away and vomited.
In the evening he called me insistently. I answered her and she told me that she loves me and that she wants us to be together, that I am an ordinary whore. "At least go out and slap you, calm down, or I'll come and take the gates off your hood." I told him all he had to do was do it and I hung up. He kept looking for me for a while, then he finished.
After Andrei, I couldn't stand the thought of letting someone else touch me. Then, in the summer vacation after my first year of college, I wanted to prove to myself that sex doesn't give a man absolute power over me. I was having a party with some friends when I met Cătălin. It came straight from his father's funeral, which he had never been very close to. And today, that's all I know about him.
That night, I had sex. I didn't think, I just left my body there, with my eyes closed, and I took my mind elsewhere. Every now and then I would open my eyes, then close them again. I was sick when I saw the outline of his head, neck and shoulders, in the dark, moving rhythmically above me. When it was all over, I got dressed and hurried out of the room. I had gained emotional freedom through a sex match that had made me feel a strange mixture of disgust and pride.
In my second year of college, I used to spend a lot of time in three clubs in Bucharest, where about the same people were involved. I went out about three times a week, and the next day I ended up in the newsroom where I worked with my make-up on and my brown circles that made me look sick. Sometimes I danced with my girlfriends, other times I kissed dizzy men who covered my waist on the way up to six meters from the booth to the bar. I would tell them my name was Maria or Anemona and then I would get lost. That's how I perceived emotional independence at the time: as an unbroken series of erotic experiences that helped me feel in control.
There I met Liviu. He was about 26 years old, his roommates lived, but he called me to him when his family was gone. His small, blue-walled room, the brown furniture that surrounded the bed upstairs, on the wall, and the cluttered gaming desk reminded me of The 40-Year-Old Virgin.
After a few jokes and discussions, we started looking at Gadjo Dilo, and I started kissing him and picking up his shirt. I stroked his chest and ran my fingers lightly along the boxers' line, from one end to the other. Liviu got up, grabbed me by the waist and hit me against the wall in front of the bed, and a few minutes later I was having sex on accordion rhythms in his room as an old teenager. In the middle of the year when we met regularly, I spread my sexuality in all directions, like you spread a chewing gum already soaked in saliva. Liviu made me realize that you don't have to be in love to enjoy sex.
Our meetings gradually ceased as I began to spend time with Sergiu. I met him in 2013, in the newsroom where we both worked, and after work we went either to Șurubelnița, a tavern where you had a discount on beer if you were a student, or on the sidewalk in the tram station 16 on Armand Călinescu, near a patch of grass and an artesian well. Ana, his girlfriend, was away from Bucharest during the summer, so no one was waiting for him at home, and something was holding me back.
