My schools: exuvii from Constanta

Unfortunately I can't say the same thing as Mișu Foarfecă, but maybe it's for the best. Constanța is the place that formed me. This is increasingly clear to me, especially since I no longer live there. The more you distance yourself from something, the clearer it becomes, as if, once embedded in the layers of memory, it preserves those parts of it that really matter to you. After more than ten years in Bucharest, when I look back to Constanța, I can't help but see the city I grew up in as amber, static and somehow spectral. So ghostly has this place become for me that, even when I still go there, it seems closer to the imaginary than the concrete.

Maybe that's why images of it come back to me more and more often. I see the old streets with the black cable-loaded poles on which seagulls stand, the old center with the statue of Ovidius surrounded by parked cars, I see the ruin of the Casino where the gangs of kids used to go parkour and, further up the coast, the crowds