I stepped into her world, and since then, I’ve never found Vera anywhere again.
The day I was meant to meet her, I had asked, heart trembling, for permission to go to a classmate’s birthday party. Before answering, my father began, once again, to speak to me about the soul:
“The body is just a shell. You can doll it up to attract glances, dangerous people, but what matters is what cannot be seen: who you are inside, your personality, your divine part. We do not belong to this world. Our essence is divine. That’s where our attention should go, not to earthly things.”
I still remember the texture of the checkered dress hem I was fiddling between my fingers as I listened. I see my toes moving inside my crossed sandals, as if they were standing on burning coals drawn straight from hell.
I was eleven, and I already felt that my body was something to be hidden, and the world, a place where I would never belong.
I remembered the story of a neighbor girl, my age, who had been lured to a “bakery” by a strange man and taken into the woods, where no one knew what had happened, nor dared to ask. In my head, I heard sermons and verses about hell and pleasure, always connected, and I saw vivid images of eternal flames, boiling tar, and demons with pitchforks pushing me back inside. I screamed and looked upward, where I saw the rest of my family standing on green meadows, full of light. They—special, saved. I—the only sinner burning forever.
Then my father said, in a different tone:
“Knowing all this, it’s your choice whether you go to the party or not.”
The verdict was already written in his eyes, but he waited to hear it from my lips. A weight began to press on my shoulders. I knew that no matter what I chose, I would not find peace.
All day I hovered between shame and desire. I watched the light fade through the window, and with it, my courage. I pressed my forehead to the glass and lived that party in my mind, without music, without people, just me and my longing for life.
If I truly had the power to choose, I told myself, I couldn’t refuse the joy my friends were living. I couldn’t deny myself what I had only dreamed of. So I announced I would go.
In my friend’s house, the air was sweet, full of voices blending together like a choir without a conductor. The girls wore colorful dresses with ribbons, and I wore my checkered one. On the tables, plastic cups, unevenly cut cake, fizzy drinks, sending bubbles flying through the ceiling. I stood at the edge, my heart pounding so loud I thought everyone could hear it. I held the plate with cake like a sin, pretending I was like everyone else.
When the music started, everyone moved with the rhythm, but my feet burned, frozen by the fear of hell. I danced in secret, inside my head, with the others.
That’s when I saw Vera.
A young, petite woman with the presence of a giant. Leaning against the door frame, smiling, with her red lipstick. She ran her hand, wearing a gold bracelet, through her hair in slow movements. When she laughed, she threw her head back, and her laughter rose above all the noise, clear and alive, like a flame.
When she spoke, everyone listened. There was something in her voice I had never heard before: a calm certainty, a tender warmth, and not a trace of fear.
She was so feminine, so effortlessly seductive in her short ruffled dress, with her painted nails and red lips, and she did not burn in hellfire.
If Vera had said to me then, “Come with me to the end of the world,” I would have followed her, in my checkered dress, so much trust and freedom did she inspire me.
The end of Vera’s world was Bucharest.
When I looked at her, a strange longing filled me, a yearning to be different from who I was allowed to be at home. I felt ashamed of it, guilty for my “demonic” thoughts, yet I couldn’t silence them. They turned into a foreign ache, digging deep inside me.
I never saw Vera again. She remained a heavy ghost with red lipstick, an echo of the big city whispering that the world is wider than the cold floor of my little room. She stepped for a moment into my gray universe and disappeared, as if she had never existed.
But I kept her. In a secret drawer of my mind, mixed with guilt and shame, I let her stay, a reminder that the world can be different: full of light, long roads, and freedoms no one negotiates for me.
Vera was, without knowing it, the first window I ever saw, slightly open, toward another world.
And maybe the fact that I never saw her again made her even more powerful within me.
If she had stayed, perhaps she would’ve been just an ordinary woman, with her own weariness and worries. But this way, she remained a projection, the aunt from Bucharest, the edge of my childhood world.
That night, I avoided my father’s disappointed gaze and slipped into bed beside my sisters, where I dreamed of Vera’s world.
Inside me, I could still feel the traces of guilty joy, they hurt the way healing wounds sometimes do: a pleasant tightness, yet uncomfortable.
And beneath all the guilt growing in my chest like a millstone, something else grew too. A hint of courage.
I secretly promised myself I would see Bucharest, that I would reach the end of Vera’s world, that I would look at life beyond the small windows of my village.
I didn’t know then that what I was living wouldn’t remain just a dream, or how many other windows to new worlds I would later open, first in my mind. Nor did I know whether I would ever truly belong to any of them.
I didn’t know either that, for a long time, I would carry that party like a shimmering cloak of guilt, heavy, with the label “wrong” stitched on the outside.
Years passed, layered with tones of guilt pressing heavier on my chest. I carried them. To school, to bed, to the table. I split myself in two: an obedient part for those at home and in church, and another that silently dreamed of a new world without fear.
And when, finally, I reached Bucharest, not as a girl sneaking out, but as a woman who chooses, I felt something I still can’t name. It wasn’t triumph. It was awe. And the same fear: the fear of punishment, of eternal torment, and of the possibility that my guilty joy would once again have to be hidden.
Bucharest became, for me, the meeting place of shame and guilt with freedom (which I never fully claimed). A double initiation: to learn that shame and guilt never disappear, but become lighter when I let them breathe through words. And to realize that there are places where no one knows I was once a girl with downcast eyes, trembling with fear of hell and disconnection from family just for dreaming of a party.