The Blog is Dead

2011 to 2021. Ten years during which it barely limped along there in the end. Even now I remember my enthusiasm starting it up; I was still in Toronto, inside my tiny mid-town apartment surrounded by boxes, trying to decide what's going to cross the ocean and what's staying behind. I left so many things. I didn't fully believe in the permanence of the move, no expat does. Immigrants do. And I remember thinking about how interesting it would be to document the details of my move to Romania in blog form. I chose the name expatro because I was an expat in everything but nationality. I had some family here and spoke the language, badly, but you're not anywhere close to native until you clash, repeatedly, against the new system, adapt to its rules, and blend into the tapestry by adopting local mannerisms.

My return to Romania, though expatriate in form, was at its core a repatriation. The motherland reclaiming a long lost son, that kind of thing. But these technicalities aren't particularly relevant except to serve as an demarcation line for the content I had planned to write and whatever followed. The expat phase came with the rose-tinted glasses of novelty and youthful naivety. The repat phase was -and is- more focused on the realities of life in Romania and, well, its banalities. This was in part why I stopped writing regularly. Why would I want to write banalities? My motivation was to write about new and interesting experiences, not about the book I read last week or Auchan's new booze aisle at Iulius Mall. I had run out of new experiences and could no longer legitimately claim to be an expat. The label no longer fit and it turns out that I can't bear to be mislabeled. Or something.

Whatever it is, it's time to acknowledge that this blog has officially run its course and that when I do write, it will be with the freedom to write banalities under an appropriate name. Somewhere else.

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TudorAugust 10, 2024
Every good thing arrives to an end.
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