Swimming in the Dark

by Tomasz Jedrowski

we enjoyed the wetness after a scorching day, our hair glued to our faces like seaweed. I remember Beniek vividly like this, running, aware of nothing but the game, joyous, utterly free.

Did you ever have someone like that, someone that you loved in vain when you were younger? Did you ever feel something like my shame? I always assumed that you must have, that you can’t possibly have gone through life as carelessly as you made out. But now I begin to think that not everyone suffers in the same way; that not everyone, in fact, suffers.

Suffer

This is how I lived back then – through books. I locked myself into their stories, dreamt of their characters at night, pretended to be them. They were my armour against the hard edges of reality. I carried them with me wherever I went, like a talisman in my pocket, thinking of them as almost more real than the people around me, who spoke and lived in denial, destined, I thought, to never do anything worth recounting.

Me

I had always liked the act of leaving, the expanse between departure and arrival when you’re seemingly nowhere, defined by another kind of time.

Nowhere

It felt as if the words and the thoughts of the narrator – despite their agony, despite their pain – healed some of my agony and my pain, simply by existing.

Books

‘There is no other currency than time. And it’s cheap.’

Time

‘You need to hold on to what you have,’ she murmured, more to herself than to me, her veiny hands clasped around a cup of tea. ‘You never know when you’ll lose what you hold dearest.’

Home

And yet, it occurs to me now that we can never run with our lies indefinitely. Sooner or later we are forced to confront their darkness. We can choose the when, not the if. And the longer we wait, the more painful and uncertain it will be.

Decision

people can’t always give us what we want from them; that you can’t ask them to love you the way you want. No one can be blamed for that. And the odds had been stacked against us from the start: we had no manual, no one to show us the way. Not one example of a happy couple made up of boys. How were we supposed to know what to do?

I’ve held on to the idea of us, scanning faces for a scrap of something known, searching for the familiar in the alien. When really, the familiar had already turned alien, and home had ceased being home. Both have gone on living and changing without me.

Relate