Swimming in the Dark

by Tomasz Jedrowski

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. Not from the same things, at any rate. And in a way this is what made us possible, you and me.

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 armor against the hard edges of reality.

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.

I never wanted to relapse, to come near the sordid temptation again. I never wanted to be like him. My greatest terror was ending up alone. Yet part of me was sure that’s how I would end up, and that it was the worst thing that could happen to someone.

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.

I’d been telling myself all those years lay before me, mirrored in the narrator’s life, as if someone were pointing a finger at me, black on white, my shame illuminated by a cold, clear light. In the brightness I could examine it with almost scientific clarity, and suddenly the narrator’s pain didn’t soothe my pain anymore. His fear fed my fear. I was like him, David, neither here nor there, comfortable in no place, and with no way out.

I was paralyzed by possibility, caught between the vertigo of fulfilment and the abyss of uncertainty.

“We haven’t had the same lives. We won’t agree on this.”

It was as if that part of my life had died along with her, as if it could never return.