The city speaks if you learn to listen with your eyes. 

It tells you the story of the people that live there. A story of yesterday and the day before, of the anxious now and the ever grinding wait for tomorrow. 

A long walk through the tangled mess of car infested streets, passed the architectural cacophony complemented by the social extremities found in very close quarters, there’s a silent story. Poverty blended with wealth, old with new, beauty with ugliness, an awfully confusing mix that would not let you draw a definite conclusion. Such, I learned that there is no coincidence in how cities look, but that there’s a profound link between habitation aesthetics and the general mentality of its inhabitants that, to some extent, works in a feedback loop.

In this relationship, one thing that fascinated and inspired me, ever since I moved to Bucharest in the mid 90’s, was the people that were somehow innately interlinked with their surroundings. 

Back then I was only seven years old and I felt like I'd entered an alien world. One where people passed by like fleeting ghosts, some locked in metal cages on wheels that bellowed noxious fumes, others caged up in mental solitary confinement that bellowed out noxious thoughts.  

Almost immediately I started noticing some people that exhibited very unusual behavior. Whenever I asked someone about them, I always got the same vague answers: they’re crazy, they’re stupid. Of course, these sorts of answers deeply irritated me and only fed my curiosity. The past few troubled years, before I got to the city,  pushed many into a mental minefield that left them psychologically maimed to various degrees and dragged on through time, life and their surrounding social environment like emotional tornados.

As a child you don’t know much about anything and you become engulfed by raw, abstract feelings that instinctually drive you to ask essential questions like: what is wrong with them? How did they end up like this? Can they recover? Is it temporary or permanent? and most importantly how can I protect myself from ending up in this condition. Gradually, I discovered psychology which seemed to answer some of the questions, but only a few, as the most important questions kept their answers hidden in a hazy mist from which all manner of beliefs usually come out. 

Bucharest is unlike any other city I’ve seen. To some extent, every city is different in its own way, as the people that live there are different, but Bucharest is an exception amongst exceptions that practices a sort of functional chaos where nothing is fixed, there’s a deficiency of certainty spiritually transposed in the surroundings by the sum of its inhabitants and it can never settle on a clear path. A selfish reluctance to actively participate where critical voices of reason are drowned out by echoes of dismal lamentations. Life there is not great but it’s not terrible either. There’s a lot of opportunities and just as many failures, and achievements are more likely to be met with bitterness. Romance and the joy of life pops out in the most unusual of places, like a dandelion that springs from the cracks in the pavement, having a glorious short-lived existence only to be crushed under the foot of a jealous and angry pedestrian, thinking that beauty is unacceptable in a dreaded place like this where only existential misery can grow.  

One other specimen that attracted my attention were homeless people, exotic invisible creatures that went against all basic principles you were taught or felt to be wrong. They were unwashed, ate from the trashcan and sleept on the garbage infested sidewalks. They too had a toxic relationship with the city, one that consumed and almost destroyed them. Sometimes I would go and talk to some of them and discover that behind the foul appearance sat hidden a vulnerable soul that, although reduced to a garbage-level existence, struggled to retain some of its humanity. They were broken by the system and failed by their fellow human beings. They refused to give in and they were spat out but kept around like a chewing gum stuck to the shoe. In such a place, the ones that thrive are usually those that exchanged most of their humanity for the toxic love of the city. Those that spiritually manifested and were driven by the most wretched and destructive of human emotions. In-between were those that often found a way out of the city, even for a couple of days, or in their dreams that maybe, one day, they would leave for good.
When I was in college I used to half-joke with newcomers and would laughingly tell them “Be careful! this city eats people and shit’s monsters.”, not the kind of monsters that populate your nightmares, but the pathetic kind.

I’m speaking in general terms but, naturally, there’s also the exceptions and, in a place like this, exceptions are truly exceptional. You learn to really value kindness, courtesy and compassion where there’s very little to be found, they stand out like the a beacon shining a piercing light through a sea of darkness.

Like with any toxic relationship, it comes a time when you have to move on or collapse into a crippled state of existence. So I did, almost a decade ago with no hard feelings. Nowadays, I occasionally revisit the city with the same eager curiosity I did when I first set foot on its streets. Only now, I realise that I’m the alien that always rejected the city's cold embrace.