Swimming in the Dark

by Tomasz Jedrowski

I think of your face while I get up, while I move in the darkness from bed to window, clothes lying around the floor like unfinished thoughts.

I don’t know whether I ever want you to read this, but I know that I need to write it. Because you’ve been on my mind for too long.

Some things cannot be erased through silence. Some people have that power over you, whether you like it or not. I begin to see that now. Some people, some events, make you lose your head. They’re like guillotines, cutting your life in two, the dead and the alive, the before and the after.

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.

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.

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.

Sometimes, she’d compare our country with Haile Selassie’s Ethiopia and declare we needed a similar revolution.

Work had seemed like the beginning of the end, university a prolonging of youth.

we couldn’t read what we wanted and were meant to see the decadence of capitalism in all Western texts, even if most professors barely pretended to care about the Party.

“I guess it’s nice to be away from the crowd sometimes, to be able to hear yourself think. I go mad when I’m surrounded by others all the time.”

“And the swimming clears my head,”

“Entirely. It’s like I’m bathing my mind.”

And you? What clears your head?”

“Reading,” I said without needing to think.

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.

It was the first time you had called me that; you’d changed my name affectionately.

“So why don’t we—”

“Let’s drop it,” you

“We haven’t had the same lives. We won’t ...

Later, when night had fallen and we had exhausted ourselves, we lay facing each other, the tip of your nose on the bridge of mine.

Nothing else mattered in the dark.

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

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

“There are ways to live a good life,”

you went on, as if hearing my thoughts.

“I’ll figure things out. Can’t yo...

Your eyes pleaded in a way I had neve...

No matter what happens in the world, however brutal or dystopian a thing, not all is lost if there are people out there risking themselves to document it.

Little sparks cause fires too.

You didn’t say anything, looked down, your face still flushed, not moving. “It’s not that easy,” you finally said. Somehow, I believed you.

I felt more sadness than anger. Maybe because the year is drawing to an end. There is only so much hatred you can produce, only so much resentment you can hold inside of you.

All this time, I realize, I’ve lived like my departure was temporary, your words preventing me from ever really leaving or arriving.

I’ve held on to the idea of us,

When really, the familiar had already turned alien, and home had ceased being home. Both have gone on l...