In Bucharest, the desire to leave has become almost a verbal tic. You hear it everywhere: over a coffee break at the office, on the metro, at dinner with friends. No one even needs to ask; inevitably someone will say “I want to leave,” “maybe I’ll move,” “maybe I’ll save money to go abroad.” And it’s not always about passports, visas, and hurriedly packed suitcases. It’s a mental migration, a double sense of belonging: you live here, but you’re always dreaming elsewhere.

For many, leaving is a fantasy of balance. The city wears you down – the traffic, the bureaucracy, the endless improvisation of daily life – and so you imagine an “abroad” where things move more smoothly. Vienna, Berlin, Lisbon… the exact place doesn’t matter; what matters is the idea. An imagined horizon that works like a breath of air whenever Bucharest feels suffocating.

And yet, very few people rush to shut the door for good. There’s a constant tension between everyday frustration and an attachment that’s hard to break. You stay for the people close to you, for the café where you wrote your first projects, for the street where you played as a child. This city knows how to annoy you, but it also knows how to cling to you. It gives you reasons to hate it, and at the same time excuses not to leave it.

Some sociologists describe this balancing act as a form of survival. If reality doesn’t give you what you need, you construct a parallel version in your mind. It isn’t resignation—it can even be fuel: precisely because you know, or imagine, how life might look elsewhere, you ask more from your life here.

This is why so many Bucharesters live on two planes at once: a concrete one, between Piața Victoriei and Obor, and an imagined one, between the airport and a map of Europe. They choose their holidays not only to relax, but also as an exercise in comparison: “look how my life could be if I moved here.” The city isn’t judged only for what it is, but always in contrast with a vague, promising “out there.”

It might sound sad, but it isn’t. The dream of leaving isn’t a rejection of the city—it’s proof that people refuse to accept a small horizon. Bucharest dreams of leaving, and in that dream lies its deepest desire: to become something better.