Tomasz Jedrowski

I remember how I left our country and how I thought my nightmare of
loneliness would return. The nightmare of fossilized time, where I walk
through the desolate landscape of overgrown gravestones, not a soul
around, condemned to a life among the dead. But it didn’t. I came to a new
country, a new city, and decided to leave my loneliness behind. America is
good like that. Even if it isn’t true, even if you can’t ever completely shed
your past, no one here will tell you that. It makes it easier. Easier to fool
yourself. You, of all people, must know what that feels like.
And yet, it occurs to me now that we can never run with our lies
indefinitely. Sooner or later we are forced to confront their darkness. We
can choose the when, not the if. And the longer we wait, the more painful
and uncertain it will be. Even our country is doing it now—facing its
archive of lies, wading through the bog toward some new workable truth.