In the middle of summer, the train glides through the shining green hills. Everything shines like after the rain, but the sky is clear and dry. The silence deepens, and as I immerse myself in the ideal, all roughness disappears. The West had to be not only conquered, but also under the sign of unlimited freedom. But the attempt to conquer infinity does not fill a void, it creates a category where none existed. Winning under the sign of infinity is, in fact, becoming outside of change, a parallel life.

It was the morning of my twentieth birthday, and it seemed only natural that my future lay elsewhere. “Other” had no physical counterpart and did not need one. After all, what was the Revolution for my generation but a promise? The promise of the return of freedom, which I knew only as the opposite of freedom, was primarily a metaphor.

When freedom was in its first moments, the first miracle was not a grocery store that filled up overnight, but the fact that you could imagine the good as something other than the exception. Kindness as a category in itself meant being able to imagine that the shelves would be full tomorrow. As each day brought something new, and this seemed to be the nature of liberation, the future loomed as endless potential. How chronic lack and inadequacy as a means of control shaped my mind, I saw normalization as transcendence. This phenomenon that happened to you, not something that was deeply yours, was how my generation overcame our conditioning: we didn’t know what it meant to be free, but we were free to dream. Freedom as a limitation was not a direct consequence of the revolution, but a learning process parallel to experiencing a miracle.

It was the morning of my twentieth birthday, and I continued to search for miracles in the everyday, the unreal richness of the shelves filled overnight still searching for an echo. We collect ideas about freedom like we once collected stamps or chocolate wrappers. The thought of leaving came later and almost caught me off guard. You might think that an act, a concrete movement from suffering to relief, is required to fulfill the metaphor, and you might be right. It’s just that I’ve been mistaking lightness for relief all this time.

I no longer believe in the absolute West, but I will forever miss the ideal it represented. I remember the certainty of the moment when I knew I was going as the last absolute truth, any absolute truth after that was and is a negotiation, a sign that reality does not fit into the dream. To say that it is better here or there remains a simple truth that the complex reality does not accept: there is a dream abroad only when the dream is to leave Romania, and to stop believing in the Western dream does not mean denying the West and its quality, but the purification of the Western idea.

In the middle of summer, the train glides through the shining green hills. With every word I read in the local paper, with every conversation I overhear, I grow deeper into clarity. When I’m in the West, the illusion always precedes the experience, because it was a dream at first. When I lose myself in comparison, the virtue of wanting to grow becomes the sin of conceptualizing, trying to avoid the conclusion of direct experience. Without context, the ideal always takes the place of the real.

As a symbol of ideal goodness, the West was a necessary concept to signal contrast and facilitate transition. Purifying the idea of ​​the West is a chance to correct a set of identity assumptions and rethink potential. _

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