Swimming in the Dark
Tomasz JedrowskiQuotes
For a moment the absurdity of it filled my throat, threatened to suffocate me. All these years they’d let us watch foreign films, allowing us glimpses of the world across the Wall, of freedoms we didn’t have. Did they really think we’d be still for ever?
I think of you. The face that my memory can conjure up with its rough outlines and fine details, with the grey-blue eyes the same colour as the Baltic Sea in winter. 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 guess you never knew that I saw you that night. Do you remember the music? Do you remember her earrings? Are there things you’ve forgotten, or things I’ve missed out? My memory has its limits, of course. It may colour in the blanks without admitting to it, dramatise or revise. I guess there is no photographic memory for emotions. But this is my truth right now, for better or worse.
— and there was something strangely focused about you, something light yet unyielding in your eyes that stirred both envy and desire in me. It was as if your presence already overpowered me, like a prophecy I was unable to read.
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.