The fog is coming in.
I watch it from the window of this room I did not expect to inhabit. Sixty-two years old, alone, in a city that has changed around me while I stayed still. The bay is disappearing. The bridge will follow—first the towers, then the cables, then nothing but white where the span should be.
My mother is dying in Kraków. I am here, writing.
I should explain why I'm not on a plane. I should explain why I'm at this desk instead of at her bedside, holding her hand while she slips away. I have twelve languages. I've spent my life believing that with enough words, arranged carefully enough, anything could be made clear.
I don't know how to explain this.
So I'll write around it. I'll write about what happened twenty years ago—the thing that made me the man I am, sitting here, watching the fog erase the world outside my window while my mother dies six thousand miles away. Maybe by the time I reach the end, I'll understand why I'm not there.
Maybe.
The desk is old. Oak, I think, though I've never been sure. I bought it at an estate sale fifteen years ago, when I still thought I might write something. It sat empty for a decade. Now it holds a laptop, a cold cup of coffee, and whatever this is becoming.
The room is small. A converted garage behind a house I rent from people I've never met—they live in Seattle, I send them money, they leave me alone. One window facing west. A bed I make every morning because the discipline feels like proof I'm still here. Books I no longer read. A photograph of my parents on their wedding day, my father young and sober, my mother's smile unguarded in a way I rarely saw.
She called three days ago. Or her caretaker did, using her phone, with her in the background. "Tomek," she said when they put her on, and for a moment she sounded like herself. Then: "When are you coming?"
