Swimming in the Dark

by Tomasz Jedrowski

I am done with pretending that I’ve erased you from my mind. Some things cannot be erased through silence.

Tears started to slide down my cheeks like melted butter. For a long time I felt nothing but their heat.

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 don’t know why he was so honest with me, but it made me feel less alone.

I decided never to be that vulnerable again, never to feel that panic again, never to depend on anyone else.

“But I’d like to see something else. ’Cause you need to try things out and see them for yourself, right?”

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

“Waiting for nothing, queuing for a possibility, that’s what we’re all doing

now,”

I guess there is no photographic memory for emotions.

It felt like, if only I ran fast enough, all this would not be true—that the farther I ran, the farther I would be from what I’d seen.

You can’t make people love you the way you want them to.”

Did we even believe that we deserved to get away with happiness?