I moved to Transylvania

My grandfather partially lost his vision; I saw a life that could've been

When I was a kid, I'd look out of the back window on rainy car journeys and silently race the raindrops. I'd pit two against one another, watching them streak down the glass, only for them to smack into each other and become a single stream.

That's how my life feels right now. Two different directions I could've taken – the West my parents chose and the Eastern Europe they left behind – have merged into one runaway blob.

I've moved to Romania. In the liminal days between Christmas and New Year, I drove across Europe with my partner, dog and three suitcases – everything I thought I'd need for this indefinite stay.

After four days of motorways and service station lunches, we arrived in Cluj, the unofficial capital of Transylvania and home to my 96-year-old grandfather who recently went blind in one eye.

Like most immigrant families, our party line is that we left for a better life in the West. My parents emigrated from their native Romania before I was born and I grew up in England, straddling two worlds. Now I'm back and I'm not entirely sure how to make sense of it – this reversal of the immigrant journey.

Little did I know that by moving here, I opened a portal to a parallel life – one in which I never left. My grandfather partially lost his vision; I saw a life that could've been.

***

Is it moving to or moving back if you're from a place but have never lived there before?

My childhood summers were spent in Cluj, with my grandfather as my guide and co-conspirator. We'd walk to his studio, and he'd point out the remnants of the city's defensive walls, dating back to the 13th century. One year, we found a four-leaf clover patch along the bank of the river, at the foot of the dusty hill that overlooks the city.

There was also the time we rode the tram to the end of the line into the industrial zone just because I loved trams. To say nothing of the countless hours spent in his studio, making gremlins out of clay and painting on an easel lowered to my height, right next to his.

When I got older, I still visited regularly. The summer after I graduated journalism school, I came here with a friend, and we went to the funeral-slash-coronation of the Roma king. The Christmas after my grandmother had a stroke that left her bedbound, my flight got diverted to another city, and I spent Christmas Eve on a coach driving through the foggy night into Cluj.

But I've never lived here lived here. Until now.

Illustration: Léo Hamelin

Moving to Romania had been a possibility I'd turn over in my mind now and then. The reasons seemed practical enough – connecting with my heritage, living more affordably – but the real pull was always my grandparents, and all the time I wasn't spending with them.

The decision to do it for real happened quickly and unexpectedly. In November, I was here with my dad, on one of our regular visits to my grandfather. Late in the evening after we arrived, he shuffled into the living room and announced that he couldn't see out of his right eye.

He was admitted to the hospital for a ministroke. My grandfather leaned over to me and said, "My eyesight will come back. You'll see."

The next morning, his eye was bandaged, and he was sitting slumped in his hospital bed. "The shutter has come down and it's not coming back up," he said. The doctor had tried to save his vision, but the clot had hit his retinal artery, and there was no chance of recovery.

My grandfather, the artist. The former set designer for the national opera, who, since retiring in the late 80s, started a second career as an oil painter capturing abstract scenes from Romanian folklore. "How will I paint?" he asked me.

I said, "What do you think about me moving to Cluj?"

He burst into tears.

***

On January 3rd, I turned onto Boulevard 21 December 1989, a street named after a revolution I was too young to remember.

The Christmas lights were still up, wound up the lamposts on one side of the road and slung across to the others – creating a twinkling tunnel above the evening traffic. I was headed to a start-of-year yoga class – the kind of mundane activity that I wouldn't normally think much of.

But something happened on that boulevard. A feeling washed over me, it was like déjà vu, but I wasn't remembering something that had already happened. It was more like recognising something that was always meant to be. In that moment, I knew with absolute certainty that this is what the “other” Anna would be doing too. The Anna who never left.

I've always liked thinking about my parallel lives – the different versions of me shaped by each decision I took or every fork in the road I didn't. I imagine these lives existing right alongside one another, like rooms separated by one-way mirrors. We're all there, next to each other, but can only see our own reflections.

There's the Anna who switched universities in 2006, the one who didn't leave New York in 2017, the one who made it to Berlin in 2018. When I think about these other Annas, I usually ask the big questions – are they happy, who do they love, what disappointments do they hold?

But that night, something shifted. The light changed, and suddenly one of those mirrors became a window. On the other side of the glass was the Anna who grew up in Cluj, and I caught a glimpse of her life not through a grand revelation, but through this tiny, ordinary moment.

Of course she'd be going to a yoga class at the start of January. Of course she'd be walking down this boulevard, under these same lights. The timelines hadn't just crossed; they had merged. In that confluence point, we weren't parallel lives anymore – we were the same person, doing exactly what we were always going to do.

***

It hasn't rained in Cluj since I got here, but I keep thinking about those backseat raindrop races. Back then, I was small enough to believe I could control the outcome with my mind.

It's funny to think about it now – how arbitrary my pick for favourite was and yet how sure I was it would be victorious. I see now how I was setting in motion a misguided belief that life is a race to be won, a single route to be chosen and followed.

I assumed that I was the raindrop, but now I realise I'm merely the glass. I am the window that watches my life slip across its surface. It holds every collision, merger and shard of light through the broken clouds. After all, a one-way mirror is nothing but a window you can't see through. Until suddenly, you can.