Ela Vasilescu

It’s hard to be a grown-up, they say. It’s not as easy as you’d think, they say. Like any child, I wanted to grow up faster, to be able to do more, to not be conditioned. The grown-ups always looked at me and smiled, telling me that they are conditioned more than children. ‘There are more rules than you think, and all you have is responsibility and no joy,’ a family member once told me. I...

We face things. We set goals. We strive for more. What would we like to hear from the people close to us? There comes a time when even the most solitary human needs to be encouraged or know that he is being thought of by others. Depending on the moment and the set goal, each of us has different things we would like or need to hear. Those words often don’t match the words that come from the mouths...

“I hate hiking.” I stood by this statement no more than three years ago. Despite my active background, despite years dedicated to a professional sport, I believed a picture of a mountain top could be admired just the same without making an effort to walk up that mountain. I was the laziest person I knew. “I hate mornings. I hate new people. I hate moving.” I had a lot of...

A writer’s life is a constant carousel of emotions. We place our soul and thoughts on a silver platter and offer it to be dissected, judged, enjoyed, shared. A writer’s life is also a solitary life; most writers I talk to tend to lock themselves in a room and spend their time with their characters, building a new world. I, for one, surround myself by people, sit in a square and watch...

I’ve been thinking a lot about this post lately. I abandoned the online environment for more than two months; two months during which I experienced emotions for almost a lifetime (at times more than I bargained for). I wrote less, and I worked on existing projects more. I planned my next steps. All done in silence and far away from the ‘social’ of nowadays. I disappeared, yet I...

Today my eyelids cursed the morning sun rays who managed to sneak in and rest on my face. I took my daughter to school and hugged her, already missing her presence for the rest of the day. I had coffee with my husband and chatted about meaningless things because our brains were still not fully awake. I wrote a story about a loved one I had lost and took a stroll in the center to have coffee with...

We never hope for the best. That’s just a saying that screws up our entire emotional, co-dependent system. Hope for the best even when you desperately want to die. Hope for the best even when the world implodes. Hope for the best even when your whole being is just a piece of paper, all used up, written on and ready to be thrown into the trash. Why hope? Why not do? Do the best, be the best or at...