"Women have a subtle instinct—they
always want to be a man's last love."
Oscar Wilde.
Alcohol dilates my arteries to their limits. My legs become too soft to resist the inexorable, overbearing gravity any longer. My perception, freed by the ethyl catalyst, surrenders to an unfettered spin. I traverse the cosmos that is myself. I collapse onto the warm sand of the beach, because remaining longer in such an unnatural, evolutionarily forced standing position proves impossible. I forget about the last links of the DNA chain. I shut them down. I throb. The starry sky is lost in the orgiastic dance of Dionysus. But all this euphoria, this damned, chemically produced substitute for happiness, turns out to be just glitter obscuring my pain. The audible sounds of the party going on in the beach house slowly gave way to a flashback served up by the remnants of my consciousness. The atmospheric strings from the first installment of Max Payne play in my head. Why did my head choose this long-heard piece to accompany this moment? A flashback was about to come. Like Max Payne, I stood on the roof of the Aesir corporation skyscraper, only to recall everything in a moment, lose myself in the chronology, and finally, once again, perform the examination of conscience, repeated ad nauseam. How beautifully those strings play! I go back to the beginning of my trauma. To the moment when we were planning our trip to Kołobrzeg. Before I begin my own trial (in which I've already pronounced my verdict), I ask myself: Why?
On August 4th, the decision was made. Me, Łukasz, and Marek—there were three of us. That's just our biography, no bullshit. We'd known each other for a long time, fighting together for our identity in this neighborhood, among the gray apartment blocks and colorful skyscrapers. We worked together all of June and July, fighting together for the cancer of this planet—for money, only to spend some of that money earned through blood and sweat on a seaside vacation. 'We'll go to Kołobrzeg, my aunt has a cottage there, but now she's abroad, so we can drink, swear, fuck, and make bamboocha!' Marek was exaggerating, of course, but you could see with the naked eye how excited he was about this trip. And I keep asking myself: Why did I have to be born an empath, a mesmer, a psionicist, and finally a sidhita? Why can I read other people's minds like they're reading books? This gift has become my curse, because sometimes I see too much. I've always been most fascinated and intrigued by people whose minds I couldn't quite crack. You know people like that. They surprise you every day, their mere presence can compel you to this irritating, tense attention. You observe them and try to figure them out. But just when you think you know them, they do something spontaneous, something that upends your worldview, forcing you to pay even closer, even more intense, sensual attention. Well, Marek wasn't one of those people.
Even before he uttered that sentence, I knew the tone of his statement. Marek—a gifted, even brilliant, mathematics student—likes to have everything presented within the rigid framework of numbers and frames of reference. He's like an autistic person—at the expense of his immense mathematical memory, his jokes, this pathetic attempt at human connection, were forced (though not without charm). There was more to his excitement than the joy of leaving, so natural to any human being. He'd been fed up with work since mid-July. We all got off, but he took it the hardest. His hands, unaccustomed to work, were mercilessly cut and cracked after two months. Now Marek wanted, desired, craved idleness. He felt like the Polish nation in the late 1980s, when it turned out that working 120% of the quota yielded nothing but a growing pickaxe. I felt sorry for him. He was a Hamlet among Fortinbrases. A perfectionist, but a dreamer. Heartfelt, but unable to express it. Longing for affection, yet dominated by empiricism. Having ideas, but believing only in numbers.
Marek worked only for the money. He drew up charts of his own earnings, and even ours, even though no one asked him to. He meticulously calculated hours worked and rates. He felt disconnected from the mothership of mathematical precision, and, as an outlaw in the chaos of the real world, he tried to measure and compare everything just to regain connection with the mothership. I'm sure that after watching the movie 'Pi - 3.14,' he would have shared the fate of Max Cohen, who lost himself searching for meaning in the number pi. The day before our departure, Marek calculated the exact kilometers of the route we would take and even planned the checkpoints. He knew what time we would arrive. He acted like a kid solving a problem: 'Train A leaves at speed X for city B.' But don't get me wrong, I liked him very much. I wasn't one of those parasites who came during the school year to solve math problems. I understood him; I was always aware of what he was about to say. My gift was a bridge between us. I often saw the relief in his eyes as I guessed, time and again, what he was about to tell me. I was a well, a cesspool into which he poured the layers of his personality. I became attached to this boy, simply gazing at fractals.
My second companion on the Kołobrzeg trip, Łukasz, was a completely different person. I bet some renowned American psychologist would classify him as an "easy-going" person. He was such an open, natural, and witty person that I probably would never meet again. Being around him was a source of laughter. And he wasn't some silly joker. He laughed with others, not at others. His cosmopolitan, tolerant demeanor must have been innate. Because his life was difficult. It was as if someone had shat on his record. His mother raised him alone. What struck me most about him was his unquenchable energy. The energy of a quasar, not a supernova. He supposedly only did what was right, but he always put his whole self into it. Whatever he touched, it was done very well. You couldn't argue with him. And not because he was a conformist, no—he had his own views and defended them. But he did it in such a way that he neither yielded nor imposed himself. I will feel the greatest pity for such people when they fade away. For such people, it's worth living according to the principles of faith. Because he will surely be in Heaven. And I want to be there with him. If we are all reflections of the Absolute, then Łukasz was it to a far greater degree than anyone else. He wasn't artificial, he wasn't plastic. There was no venom in him. What's more, he had the power to neutralize it. He could help you digest everything, swallow everything, turn everything into a joke. He lanced other people's ulcers, opened their wounds, and healed them. In conversation with him, you felt the resonance of his words within you.
Early the next morning, with the entire city immersed in an abominable sleep-induced dependence, we set off. A long journey awaited us in the worn-out Poldek. We arrived in the evening. We set up our belongings in our rooms. After showering, I suggested to the guys that we take a walk on the beach. But neither Marek nor even Łukasz were in the mood. Marek wanted to calculate our funds and create a cleaning schedule, while Łukasz simply wanted to sleep – he was the one guiding Poldek on the final leg of our road trip. It was clear that this vacation utopia, this still-sunken Atlantis of entertainment, would miraculously emerge only tomorrow morning. So I went alone. And I was alone. The evening was quite cool, so there were no people on the beach. By the way – how beautiful it was here in summer! The cottage was two hundred meters from the beach. For a tourist, a vacation sailor of a lifetime, it's a true paradise, but for this aunt (the owner), the season was probably a nightmare. Because the entire sea, so soothing during other seasons, was probably effectively and frequently drowned out in summer by crowds of beachgoers. But today it was beautiful. And though it was chilly, Mother Nature, that mother Gaia, treated me to the sight of a sunset. Not a soul in sight. Me and the dying sun. As if I were witnessing the end of Armageddon—as if I were the last of humanity, damned and forbidden from entering Heaven. These few seconds are the last moment of freedom before I find myself in hell. It took my breath away, and free radicals were bursting my lungs. Have you ever wondered how it is that it's easier for us to think about God in a group, when we are subjected to ritual encapsulation? How difficult it is to observe such a sight alone. Terror grips my heart. It's beautiful. God is in this. I feel it.
But this experience turned out to be ephemeral. As if God were saying, "Look there!" Because in the distance, I noticed the silhouette of a man sitting on a dune. An intruder—the person who had disturbed my mantra, my silence. I approached. The intruder couldn't see me because his back was to me. He was sitting. I kept approaching, and suddenly I realized that I was actually the intruder, because I saw a girl sitting there with long, blond hair falling to her shoulders. My perception, voracious as a chupacabra, noticed that she was holding a letter in her right hand. My Freudian-inflicted mind was suggesting possible scenarios. I was two steps behind her, but she still didn't notice me. She didn't even feel the weight of my gaze on her back. Finally, I spoke: "When is she coming back?" Either my voice was too loud in the thin air, or the mere revelation of my presence had such an effect on her, that she jumped. She looked at me with her absent, but believe me, phenomenally beautiful, blue eyes. I noticed her hair was white. Literally. Like an angel's, a cherub's, or an albino's. I felt blood rushing to my brain. I felt a chain reaction triggered by hormones. Her pheromones, although unconscious, were already tormenting my pituitary gland. I fell in love with her in that very moment. She was completely beautiful to me. Mentally and physically. Ideally and ethically. And yet she only looked at me! How terrifying the power of love! I unconsciously repeated the question: "When is she coming back?" She said: "Who's coming back?" It seemed to me that I wasn't the one saying: "It's 8 p.m. It's... maybe 10 degrees Celsius. You're sitting here alone, in short sleeves, with a letter in your hand, watching the sunset. So I asked: "When is she coming back?" I surprised her. Because I read the entire chapter in it at once. She replied, "I see you can't be dishonest. Sit down." I sat down. I took off my fleece jacket and offered it to her. She seemed much taller than I initially thought. And she told me her story. That her name was Anna. She was twenty years old, starting university this year – a first-year sociology degree. The letter was from her boyfriend, whom she broke up with almost a year ago – at the end of the summer. He had to go to Canada for work. He was supposed to come back, but he wrote that he had met someone in Toronto and would probably stay there permanently.
Ania must have really needed to vent, because she ended her monologue with the words, "And I loved him, you know!" We talked for a long time. Until midnight. We moved to the veranda of her house (my parents were on vacation in Turkey). She lived just a few steps away. We promised each other to meet up again. And indeed, we spent the next two weeks together. While the guys drank heavily and sobered up in the thin sea air, I spent time with Ania. I know they resented me a bit, but deep down they understood. I experienced firsthand the fickleness of time. Because when you spend it with someone you adore, the little bastard rushes like crazy. What didn't we do during those two weeks! We swam, splashed in the water, had one-legged contests, memorized the Algida ice cream price list, tested who was the best at lighting farts, and passed each other love letters with letters cut out from newspapers. Once, we got into an elevator together – I pretended to be a claustrophobic victim of fate overcoming (as part of psychotherapy) my fear of traveling in an elevator, while Ania played the role of a psychologist helping a patient. Or how beautiful it was when we went to a "30-Second Conversation with Everyone" dating event – we pretended we didn't know each other, and when we finally met at a table, we started kissing ostentatiously and, staggering in each other's arms (knocking over a few tables in the process), we left the room shouting, "Guys! This really works!" She was my other half. We complemented each other. We said more with our looks than with our words. And we always talked until at least midnight.
I fell in love with her and could never get enough of her. And I wanted her forever—that damned possessiveness, the inseparable companion of love... But she kept saying, 'If only you were HIM, I would definitely love you and we would be together. But I love HIM. Is it my fault?' Of course, she was talking about her ex-boyfriend, who was in Canada. She knew he'd moved on to someone else, but she still held out hope. Every neuron in my brain, every synapse of my spidery, empathetic sense, screamed those words! But I didn't want to push her. I loved her too much. I didn't have the heart to ruin what we had, what we enjoyed every day. But two weeks flew by. I was thinking about how to untie this Gordian knot. On our last morning, we weren't together—she wanted to think about all of that too. We weren't supposed to meet until the evening party Łukasz was throwing at our house. Time passed, and I was increasingly ready to confess the truth. I didn't feel like this before the hardest confession...
She arrived. Dazzlingly beautiful. In a bikini, a scarf tied around her hips and a pink beret on her head. We were silent for a moment. We danced together. Then we took a walk on the beach. We began to reminisce about those two weeks, to prepare the ground for final, mental, and emotional decisions on neutral ground. Something inside me snapped. I grabbed her by the shoulders and looked at her questioningly. I confessed everything. That she was the closest person to me, that I wanted to be with her forever, that I loved her eyes and the dimples in her cheeks. I waited. Ania smiled and broke through. She said she wanted to be with me too, and she was sincere. I knew this for sure – I tuned all my sensors to the stream of warm words flowing from her lips. Tears of joy flowed from her eyes. She had shed the burden of her previous love – now she loved me. She kissed me, and we remained like that. We danced, hearing more of the sea than the music from the cottage. We were happy.
But suddenly something changed in Ania's morphology. She released her grip, stopped dead in her tracks. I looked at her, and she was already aware that I knew. Yet she was honest enough to wait for my consent. I nodded. Immediately, like a gazelle unleashed, she ran to her boyfriend, who was standing a few steps behind me. I heard him say that he realized his mistake, that he loved her alone, that he wanted to be with her alone. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw her happy. I turned around and, in a sort of complete frenzy, I returned to the cottage. The music was pounding, but I was indifferent to it. Amused people were jostling me, spilling beer from cups on me. I walked with a neutral expression, and in that very moment, I lost myself. Łukasz saw me, but in a second he realized that I wanted to be alone now. I grabbed two bottles of vodka. I went outside through the kitchen and walked forward. I drank from a tap. By some miracle, I find myself back on the beach, but no one is there anymore. Her gone. Them. The alcohol expands my arteries to their limits. My legs become too weak to resist the relentless, overbearing gravity any longer. I collapse onto the warm sand of the beach. The strings play.
And I ask myself: Why? Why can't I be happy? Is it just because the chemical reaction in Ania's brain first occurred with that guy? Are those few molecules, those damn few atoms, supposed to rob me of my happiness? Is love just chemistry? 'If only you were him'—those words hit me like a bullet fired point blank in the face. I won't write to her—no, that would disrupt her happiness, I won't do that to her (I never gave her my address). Let her be happy with him. That's what she wanted, that's what she craved, that's what she craved. But why did my voracious perception make me notice that white-haired creature on the beach? Why did you allow my mantra to be interrupted, God? Why did you let me meet her? Is Ania supposed to be just a frame of reference for another girl I have yet to meet? Or am I supposed to be unhappy forever? I'll suppress that damn perception, drown it in alcohol. Today is the time for sadness. Or is it my fault? Just in case, I'll replay everything again, starting from the beginning, and once again, I'll perform the examination of conscience I've repeated ad nauseam. I'll go back to the genesis of my trauma. To the moment when we were planning our trip to Kołobrzeg. Before I begin my own trial (in which I've already pronounced my verdict), I ask myself: Why?
P.S. What is love? It's a walk in a very light rain. You walk and walk, and only after a while do you realize you've been soaked to the core.
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