Almost every week, I wrote letters to Sergiu, which he found hidden in his laptop in the morning. I was giving him validations that I actually needed.
It wasn't long before we left the sidewalk in front of the fountain and moved into my orange kitchen, and then onto the red sofa in the living room. On August 20, 2014, we saw together The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, American History X and a bit of Trainspotting. Then, while Renton, Ewan McGregor's character, was injecting heroin into a filthy room, Sergiu reached out and lifted my long, black-gray striped dress slightly, almost without touching me.
We looked at each other briefly and began to kiss and undress at such a fast pace that the clock seemed to stand still, with paralyzed tongues, and the red couch spinning and throwing me into Renton's trip, numb. of heroin. When our movie was over, we were naked and confused, lying on the couch. "And now what do we do?" He asked me. "We are not doing anything. We had sex and that's it, we don't have to do anything. I mean, I'm not expecting anything, you know, ”I replied with a line that I had repeated in my mind so many times that when I finally said it, I felt a trace of pride. It sounded natural, convincing.
The next day we talked about the mistake we had made and promised ourselves that it would not happen again, but 40 minutes later we kissed so hard that I could feel my bones completely entering the wall of the block we were leaning on. .
We continued like this for eight months, during which time we wrote poems almost weekly and we broke up dozens of times with the same promise. That's the last time. We kissed and parted our hands with difficulty, and he left. Then we ended up together again in my apartment on the red couch. We had sex before work, then we went to the office together and, after hours, we went back to my living room. Every night ends the same way. He was going home to Ana's house, and I was telling him, "I can't wait for you to come and not leave."
He promised me for a while that he would end his relationship with Ana, but something always happened. Maybe the fact that he still loved her, maybe the habit, maybe the fear again. What is certain is that their relationship was complicated. For a year, Sergiu was in Bucharest, at college, and Ana finished high school in Suceava. When Ana moved to Bucharest, Sergiu was working, and she could barely catch the taste of the student, already accustomed to the independence that a long-distance relationship offers you, so they could no longer find their place in the same house together.
Despite my dysfunctional love history, I did not understand how Ana did not notice the absence of the man who, until then, had gravitated around her. I often thought about her whenever I got on the phone and wanted to write to her, but I always stopped. I thought just as often that I couldn't get out of this love triangle.
Sergiu never asked me to wait for him and he never conditioned me in any way, but I had started to love him, so my adventures in clubs suddenly stopped. The rest came naturally. Sometimes he talked about parting with Ana as if it was just a matter of time, and that made me accept to live in his rhythm, which had a different dynamic from mine. His time, which became ours, was short. My time, spent in constant waiting, seemed to never end.
Although it was painful to share it, I continued to do it until, on a Friday night, after work, Sergiu told me again that we had to stop. We stopped at an almost empty restaurant in Pipera. When I tried to grab his hand, he rejected my touch on the other side of the table and avoided my gaze. He told me that his relationship with Ana would not end too soon, that he did not want to hurt me anymore and that I should take care of my life. It was cold and serious and all the words I would have liked to say to him then stopped at the tip of my lips.
I cried all night, locked in the kitchen, on the floor, leaning against the radiator. I reproached myself for hours that I was not better or smarter and I had not learned anything from the relationship with Andrei, who had proved to me again and again that I would always end up crying for pity because of things I do on my own. . I knew that Sergiu was a good man, so the problem was obviously with me. I was not worthy of anything good. I was looking for harmful contexts, because I deserved so much.
The next morning came with too much light and headaches, and in the evening I received a message from Sergiu, asking me if I wanted to go to a concert together. As in many other turning points in my life, I would have said no, but I said yes. And he was, perhaps, the wisest "yes" in my life.
We went together to see Kistvaen, a Romanian black metal band, where he told me that he had broken up with Ana and was moving out of their apartment. He was nervous, agitated and vaguely sad, but he took me in his arms, kissed me and told me he loved me. Then, all evening, he squeezed me so hard, so many times, that I seemed to get under his skin and feel all his pain, which made me very insecure about us.
I could see that she was suffering from Ana and I saw her in the following months, during which time we were together almost every day. And it hurt, because I knew he wasn't just tired, as he told me. But I never said anything, for fear of pushing him back into her arms.
The separation from Ana was, therefore, a suffering that we both experienced somehow. In time, however, the wounds healed. At least his, because mine got deeper. Sergiu brought with him waves of anxiety. In childhood, adolescence, even in the first part of my adult life, moments of silence were followed by painful moments. And when I was finally well, I couldn't be happier. Sergiu and I were vulnerable again during sex and, in the first part of our monogamous relationship, I was terrified that I would lose him.
The statements I made seemed poor to me, so sometimes, after he fell asleep, I would write him letters in which I always offered him the same guarantees: that I would never disappoint him and that it was the most beautiful thing in my life. Sergiu never needed such promises, but one of the fears induced by Andrei, namely that without realizing it, I could do something that could make Sergiu doubt my feelings and fidelity, was still life.
In time, Sergiu managed to get rid of some of the insecurities, and sex became more than a method to test my own emotions. We gave up any kind of barriers that we unconsciously put between us. I didn't need words or guided knowledge. Pleasure is born of the pleasure of the other and of a warmth that we still think, at times, that no one knows it as we know it.
We have been together for four and a half years and I hope, more lives, are waiting for us, all together. Sounds childish, maybe. It sounds like love at first, still untried and superficial. But so far we have surpassed together more than we would have liked. He suffered an insurmountable loss and, during the same period, I had my first depressive episode and my first suicide attempt, during which time, instead of four legs to lean on, I had two: his.
Then I rejected him dozens of times, tortured him with stupid reproaches, out of nothing, and told him countless times that I wanted to break up, convinced that he was the only one who prevented me from breaking contact with this world. I planned to leave almost every day.
But, no matter how much I kicked him out, Sergiu stayed and that's how I think I stayed. In time, once I learned to understand my suffering, Sergiu turned from a hindrance to death into the lever I cling to whenever I feel like I am collapsing. We have changed each other enormously, and I feel that I grew up next to him more than I grew up in all the other years, in which I was either educated or I educated myself badly.
