I wanted to be touched by the event in order to experience that elevating feeling similar to those gunned down during the Revolution. But I wasn?t. I had listened to so many broadcast prayers so that the gesture, the posture, all seemed fake to me and I soon felt ashamed.

Maybe those around me and whom I was touching with my shoulders, honestly believed in that prayer for the soul of the dead. I didn?t, I just involuntarily pretended because my own words seemed when empty, when perverted.

We set a protest in front of the Russian Embassy, shouting my lungs out: ?Down with the communism? and ?Bassarabia, Romanian land?. I somehow wanted to tell everybody that I wasn?t going to be fooled anymore. As far as I am concerned, there was something else beyond that protest meant to set Bassarabia free, an inner moaning, a cry: ?I managed to break free, I will never be manipulated either by you or by others!?

But it was just an illusion because I was looking for answers outside. Freedom isn?t an emanation of the government and, regardless of the place, in my country or outside of it, freedom is nothing but a state of being. One more or less important, according to age, experience, education, character. Because I would never do today what I used to do in the past and not out of shame, a vivid proof of that being the afore-written words.

Translated by Raluca Vîjîiac