The book is heavy in my hand, a tangible reminder of why I am parting with it.
I had waited until my final day in Atlanta to receive it in the mail: Michael Cunningham's newest book, based, I am told, on Joyce rather than Woolf. The title, however, alludes to Andersen's Snow Queen, displayed prominently on a blue jacket with white flakes of snow (but perhaps ash). It was, I realized, the first book I read in Poland. The first week was spent on trams, learning to navigate the city (a laughable task in retrospect), and reading the chapters of this precious book which anchored me in a bizarre way to the familiarity and routines of a home where I no longer lived but yearned for, none the less. It allowed for the comforts of home, the memories of the ordinary to exist simultaneously in the chaos of novelty, the thrill of living in an entirely new place.
However, for the trek back to America, a hardcover book is a criminal luxury. Simply holding it I could feel the tinges of pain in my lower-back. Should I take this with me, I would have no resolve. I would rescue the Margaret Atwood novel, the Cormack McCarthy novel, the Brecht play. They would all make the journey tucked into my backpack. They had become, I realized, heavy burdens that were once enjoyed, cherished for the moments of enjoyment and entertainment they offered. They were like seashells issued from a beach, soaked in a bucket of bleach water to remove the smell of the ocean and toted the stretch of highway between Tampa and Gainesville as part of the annual Shook family pilgrimage to the Florida coast. Upon arrival, they would sit on a shelf in the garage, blanched, dead, and only nominally reminiscent of the ocean at all as they collected dust until being thrown out a few years later. These books, I decided, would be left for someone else to enjoy (or perhaps dislike and disregard in their own time).
I look out the window at the skyline. It is uninspired and dull against the iron-grey clouds that antedated a summer shower. The concept of summer is used lightly here. It is 61 degrees and I am in the same flannel and sweater that I wore in those early days of October. Small drops of rain shatter against the glass and I realize this will most likely be the last time I look at Poznan, wedged on a tram between the endless gray spiral of a reconstructed medieval city fortified by concrete apartments and other monuments to thrift and the perfectly angular Lake Malta, organized into rows for the easy of kayakers and rowers, the ghost of a winter ski slope jutting out in the distance.
*****
I am writing now from the twin bed of a modest, though tasteful, hotel room within view of the airport. The sky outside has turned ice-blue with the linger of a perpetual summer twilight which illuminates the late evening with a stubborn diligence. It seems as though I am waking from some sort of spell. The past months have flown while still creeping slowly. I had not anticipated their termination, realizing my time's swift conclusion casually, gazing at the year like sand in an hourglass, impossible to track but only visible in accumulation. I am prepared now to close the curtains, to release this year into space and have it dissolve into the cool summer air like the bronze chimes of vespers bells that I could hear from my bedroom, followed by the metal call of a trumpet, like the woodsmoke that lingered on cold evenings as I walked the dark sidewalk from the tram stop to my apartment, a distance I dismissed as irritatingly far, but also perfect for thinking and unwinding from the day's events.
In twelve hours, I will be on a plane, arching over the ocean back to the familiarity of home, of long-absent friends, of the eager family that must grow tired of my inability to remain.
In twelve hours, I will look down on the place from where I currently look upwards and say my final goodbyes to an unlikely home, a quiet place that managed to surprise me at every turn with its ghosts walking side-by-side with the living, the ones who look at their days as something infinite, uncountable, and filled with the promise of twilight morphing into tomorrow's sunrise.
It feels right and wrong at the same time.
With Love from Warsaw
06/21/2015
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