It happened many, many years ago but I still remember it like it was yesterday. It could have been yesterday, too, for it was a cold winter night, just like the last.
The kitchen was a bright spot of light and warmth. I leaned against the wall as I sat on a stool reading a book, my boyfriend sat beside me working on his homework project. An artist, he was drawing a coffin, with someone’s face inside it. I looked up from my book now and then, peeking over his shoulder.
It was so peaceful, so quiet, so very domestic. I thought that, I remember. My eyes slid past the boy’s dark head, over the light blue walls, touched the stove briefly and…
“I will leave”.
I felt that, I realized that, suddenly I knew that. With an utter certainty, with no fear nor excitement, with nothing but a simple awareness of an unquestionable fact I knew that I was going to leave.
I had no idea what in the hell that meant.
I begun to wonder, look, question — was I going to die? It did not feel like it. Was I going to move out? Maybe. Was I … ideas, explanations came and went, but none of them explained anything at all.
I was going to leave. That was all there was to it. All I had. All I experienced.
I let that be. I allowed the experience to be what it was without reasons, without logic, without a story. I had little choice in the matter.
A few months later, as I was getting ready to leave Poland and move to California, having broken up with my boyfriend, the meaning of my experience came clear…
…but in the moment, that night, that cold dark nigh huddling outside warm, bright windows of my kitchen, all I had was what I experienced. And that was as it should be. And that was enough.
