Do czytelnika , jeżeli taki się znajdzie…

I am not a writer.

I didn't graduate with a degree in literature, or any other degree for that matter... I don't know how to analyze my own texts. I don't know all the rules you are supposedly required to follow when writing.

I am just an ordinary woman.

I worked in a theater as a prompter. I was a cleaner, a kitchen assistant, I managed the back of house at a restaurant, I learned pastry-making in France, my husband and I ran an antique shop, and I cooked lunches for children in a school cafeteria. For most of my life, I just did whatever needed to be done at the time. The Theater of Life kept casting me in new roles...

I didn't rebel. I didn't scream. I didn't know how to fight for myself the way others do. I accepted successive roles with humility.

Not because I thought they were right. I simply knew that if I started fighting the whole world, I wouldn't have the strength left to keep going.

I had my own way of resisting.

Every morning, I got up.

And I kept moving forward.

It was as if I were saying to fate:

– You can make me tired. You can hurt me. But you will not break me.

I didn't have an easy life.

But I know there are millions of people just like me.

That is why I don't write to tell my own story. I write because I believe that within the most personal story, another human being can find a piece of their own life.

For many years, I felt like I didn't have the right to write yet.

That first you have to finish the right schools, read the right books, gain the right experience, take a course... Get the right to write on a piece of paper...

And then I realized that I had the experience all along. In life.

For years, I carried stories inside me that I never told anyone. Not because they were extraordinary. But because there was no time.

Life was rushing by.

I had to earn a living, raise the children, survive another month.

I stored everything away inside.

Once, my ex-husband said one of the wisest sentences I ever heard from him:

– You have the same mess in your head as you do in your closet.

He was right.

There was no time to organize anything.

Not the clothes.

Not the memories.

Not the pain.

Not the joy.

I threw everything into one closet.

One thing on top of another.

My whole life.

Today, for the first time, I am opening its doors.

I don't intend to write an autobiography.

Memory doesn't work chronologically.

I will pull out memories the way you pull old postcards out of a suitcase.

At random.

One day it will be the theater.

Another day, the antique shop.

And yet another day, Andalusia, which was my refuge my entire life, even though it never truly existed.

And today... Today, one memory tumbled out of that suitcase.

In the late nineties, I was left alone with three children. Everything came down to a lack of money. Poland back then wasn't very supportive... You looked for any work you could find.

One day, I found a cleaning ad in the newspaper. I traveled to the other side of Kraków. A huge villa, modern, beautifully decorated... I cleaned all day. The owner, in a celadon green peignoir, followed me around to make sure I didn't steal anything. She left rings and banknotes out in plain sight... In the end, she didn't pay me my full wage. She deducted the cost of the pancakes she had treated me to earlier... I rode the bus back home tired, disappointed, with a sense of injustice...

I no longer remember that woman's face. I only remember one thought that stayed with me then, and that kept returning throughout my life. This situation is happening for a reason. One day I will understand it. One day I will write about it. Maybe one day, because of it, someone else's burden will be a little lighter.

That is exactly how these texts are born.

Not from a need to show that I know something.

Not from the conviction that I have something important to say.

They are born from a need to tidy up.

After my mother died, I cleared out the family apartment.

I carried out old clothes, boxes, hats, photographs, objects that no one needed anymore.

At one point, I realized that I carry a similar apartment inside myself.

Full of stories.

Full of people.

Full of sentences I never spoke aloud.

Writing became a way for me to slowly empty that apartment. Not to forget everything. But so that every story could find its place.

I am 58 years old. Only now have I found the courage to begin. I don't know if this is literature. And to be honest, it doesn't really matter to me. I just want to speak with my own voice. The one I have.

If among these memories you someday find your own, we will be just a little less foreign to one another in this universe... And maybe that is what this is all about...