Only One in the Room
I do not know when it started. I know it never stopped.
I was 10, under a communist regime, in a uniform slightly too big, in front of 150 soldiers. The commander of the school unit had always been a boy. That year it was me. I do not remember what I said. I remember 150 men saluting a little girl, and the strange quiet of being seen by everyone and known by no one.
Everything after was the same girl in a different room.
In kindergarten, the one who stepped between the belt and a child. I lost, every time.
At 20-something, a 10-hour train to hand my CV to a human being, because the bank's inbox had collapsed. Nobody told me to go. Nobody knew I went. I still keep the cutting. That train became 20 years in credit risk on three continents. People call that luck. I have learned since that luck has a timetable, and you have to be on the platform.
Later, 1 woman among 7 regional managers. Then the one flying across borders to align teams of men. In every meeting there was a chair for me, and next to it, an empty one for the person who would have understood.
Then a screen with five countries on it, where I was told the problem was not what I said. It was that I had said it. Six months later that sentence was still in the room. I was not. Nobody in that room ever asked where I went.
And a foreign registration office, where the joke about my child was made in a language they assumed I could not understand. I understood every word. I signed. I held her hand harder on the way out, the only hand in that building that was on my side.
For years I called this loneliness.
I had it wrong. I was not asking those rooms for a place. I was asking them who in there carried the same values as I did. The loud ones answered first, every time. The Few answered by minute five, and they were all I ever needed. I did not survive those rooms. I chose from them.
In Romanian, one word holds both meanings. Singură: alone. Singura: the only one.
For 30 years I thought I had to pick one.
I am both. My heart will always walk alone, because nobody else walks my path. And I am grateful, every single day, for every story that walked along with me. Each of them makes me richer.
Photo: 100% real. The announcement that put me on a 10-hour train. The bank still exists. So does the girl.