A letter on two sentences somebody handed me, a poem in Polish, and the twenty years I did not write.
It is Saturday and the house is still asleep. The light coming through the kitchen window has that thin quality it takes on in late August, when the heat has not left yet but the mornings have started to turn. A bag of school supplies sits by the door waiting to be sorted. Folders, glue sticks, a package of pencils still in the plastic.
I have been sitting here with my coffee thinking about the years I did not write.
A hospital bed at fourteen
At fourteen I wrote in a journal from a hospital bed. My leg was rotating forty-five degrees off center and so it had to be set in a cast. The hospital ward was full of old people and the corridor outside smelled antiseptic and rancid at the same time.
The doctor had already told me that I would most likely spend the rest of my life in a wheelchair.
I wrote that I wished I could be like the other kids and just go to school instead of being stuck in that room. Get me out of here so my life can start. I also wrote that I am going to prove everyone wrong one day, that I will run and dance and climb mountains again. I deeply believed it.
The notebook was a school notebook. Lined paper, cardboard cover, the kind you buy in a stack in September. I was not in school that year, so I wrote in it instead.
Thirty-four years later I sat next to my son’s hospital bed with a notebook in my lap, and what happened in that room belongs to him. What I can tell you is that my hand reached for the notebook before it reached for an answer, the way it had at fourteen, before I had decided anything.
The girl in that ward was writing to find out what was true and to talk herself into what came next, and she was not writing well by any standard anyone would apply. Writing well was never what those pages were for.
The sentence that cost me two decades
Between that notebook and this kitchen table sits everything, and almost none of it is on paper.
I stopped writing at twenty-one.
We were standing in his living room and I had handed him a single page, the newest poem I had written, in Polish. He was Polish too, so he could read it. I wanted him to say it was good. I held my breath the entire time he read it.
He finished, handed the page back to me, and said,
“This is really stupid, why do you waste your time on poetry?”
It landed like a punch. I was not going to cry in front of him, so I walked out with the page in my hand and dropped it in a garbage can on the way, and I decided somewhere between his living room and that garbage can that I was done.
By then I was already in America. I had almost no English, so Polish was the only language I could still be myself in.
I did not pick up another notebook for more than twenty years.
What I miss
The ache is not about the books I might have written.
What I miss is the ordinary record. What I noticed on a Tuesday in a year I can no longer date. What frightened me at twenty-six and turned out to be nothing. The things I would have understood years earlier if I had written them down and then read them back.
Those years were not empty. Fifteen years inside one company. More than one life taken apart and started again from the beginning, in a language I had to build from nothing. All of it happened, and none of it made it onto a page. I was living a life I was not keeping, and I had no idea how badly I would want it back.
What I would tell the girl with the school notebook
For a long time I thought I would return to writing once I had something worth saying. Once I understood what the last twenty years had meant. Once I could tell you how the story ended, from the safe side of it, with the lesson already extracted and tidy.
That day was never going to arrive, because that is not how the page works.
The page is not a report you file after you have figured your life out. It is where you rehearse being the one who figures it out. The woman you describe in present tense at a kitchen table where nothing is at stake becomes the woman who walks into the room on Monday. Not in one morning. In accumulation, the way school supplies become a school year.
The girl in that hospital ward was doing it without knowing it had a name. She put the running and the dancing and the mountains on the page while her leg was in a cast, and she believed the page over the doctor. She wrote her way out of a room she could not leave. Seven years later somebody said one sentence about a poem and she believed him over herself for twenty years, and that is the only part of this story I would change.
Two lines this week
Take a blank page. At the top, write the sentence somebody handed you, in their exact words, with the quotation marks and their name if you can stand it. Mine is up there in this letter, which took me until this morning to type.
Get it out of your head and onto paper where it can be looked at in daylight instead of running underneath everything you do.
Underneath it, write one sentence in present tense, as though it is already true. I am a woman who writes every morning before the house wakes. Whatever your version is.
Then look at the two lines and notice which one you have more evidence for, and which one you have been quietly collecting evidence against.
Mine went into a garbage can on my way out the door, and I did not write another line for more than twenty years. The writing came back eventually. It came back in English, the language I was still building that year out of a paper dictionary and three children who corrected me mid-sentence, and I have not written a poem in Polish since.
Yours, from the in-between,
Magdalena
P.S. Tell me in the comments, or hit reply, because I read every one: whose sentence are you still carrying, and how long have you had it?
P.P.S. The bag by my door is what started this letter. I opened a back-to-school term: thirty minutes with me, one-on-one, to write the present-tense version of what you're starting next, plus a year in the Academy, $197. Ten seats, and I close it when they're gone.
👉 If you enjoy reading this post, feel free to share it with friends! Or feel free to click the ❤️ button on this post so more people can discover it on Substack.