For someone who has been the class ugly duckling (and the kindergarten group's) their whole life, from the first year to the last, it's very hard to get involved in any situation where they might show their face to the world gathered at the gate.
Even in my last year of university, when I invited my colleagues to my wedding, I received a very unusual compliment from one of them the moment she saw the groom. That's how she intended to show her admiration and fascination for the miracle that had happened: "Girl, you're amazing with this guy, what could he have found in you? Fantastic!".
So Anca's invitation to reveal texts that were initially meant only for her and a very small number of confidants seemed completely irrational to me. I feared they would only upset, shock, and divide.
I no longer have anything sublime and good to show; all I possess is a locked dowry chest, riddled with woodworms, sitting under cobwebs in the attic of Saint Sunday from the story – you don't even have to touch the lock, because only snakes and crocodiles will come out.
I don't have anything to give you to put in the sun, I told her.
But she took my bad things, washed them clean of commas, trimmed their nails round and with paragraphs, and hung them right in the porch, where guests hit their foreheads on them if they don't bend back enough to avoid them.
My column remained the ugly oasis of the magazine, with the untold and Long unwritten.
The only place where the ugly duckling complains about the peeled skin from scraped knees – and that's how she forgets them, forgives them, endures them, shares them.
The ugly duckling's problem is that she's become addicted to this new invention, the online magazine. The paper one you can hide in the library and not see in the dark, you might lose it around the house, but this one opens suddenly and appears brightly lit on the screen just as you swipe your finger across the glass while setting the alarm on your watch. If before she didn't open her phone at night, like all the brain-fried members of her generation, now the class ugly duckling checks it between two cups of water in the heatwave and looks for comments on the articles she follows. And she reads at night what she didn't read on time on the tram between two jobs. And she seeks out her wise men and children and places them as a bandage, a pillow, or a radiator. And a trampoline she jumps on from night till morning.
A fierce form of slavery!
So be it.
Cosmina Dragomir
Photography by Noemia Prada