The Favourite Embrace

I used to live in a high block of flats. Most people in Warsaw do.

Almost twenty years of my life have passed on the eleventh floor out of twelve, my windows facing west, and no buildings of equal height stood close enough to tarnish the views. To me this meant a greater share of glorious sunsets, racing clouds and vast skies in unreal colours than others may see in a lifetime. Let’s not forget about rainbows too, their colours all too predictable, but always inspiring fresh awe no matter how often observed.

I am a private person. I like to keep to myself. And, probably because of the long-term predilection for working from home, what I can see through my windows is important to me. In every place I inhabited, having no neighbours close enough to peek into my life or make me an unwilling witness of their goings on was one of the necessary conditions, just like hot water and a watertight roof. That eleventh floor flat gave me all this, along with a huge bonus of a view that allowed me to feel the thrill of being held by the fluffy effulgence of the clouds while lying flat on my sofa.

I have several folders full of photos presenting the ever-changing view from those windows. Not that easy to choose one only. So many memories! Twenty years of the weather’s wonderful displays sit in my computer memory, gathering pixel dust.

Was this really my life?

This photo was taken not long before moving out, shortly after I have learned that my new place would be located more than one thousand miles away in a straight line. A lot of photos were taken during those last months. I still lived there, but could already feel the yearning of a stranger about to miss familiar sights. The urge to save their fleetingness, to make them stretch into perpetuity, was strong in me at the time.

I sit in a different flat now, look through different windows at the distant hills, the local greens, or a row of terraced houses, depending on which window I choose. So many options. Back in Warsaw, I only had one sky that felt new every day.

That eleventh floor flat first saw me as a hopeful twenty something girl eager to settle in the big city, impatient to sample everything it had to offer after some dull years of growing up in a small town. Finally on my own, delightfully able to take care only for myself. It saw me deflated after a stifling day of office work, then elated as a business owner finally able to work from home. It saw its share of love and heartbreak, friends and traitors coming and leaving, turmoil and respite, good times following the bad. Every time I opened the heavy entrance door, my own space greeted me with its unique, faintly wooden smell, reassuringly the same whether I walked in exhausted after a late training session or came back from yet another trip abroad. I would stretch my tired limbs on the sofa, and there it would be: the sky ready to embrace me, the clouds I could sink into, the sunsets painting my walls orange and pink.

When time came to move over a thousand miles away, that sky was the most difficult thing to leave behind.

The sky is everywhere, you could say. But it is not the same, is it? Here, clouds look different so close to the sea, storms have not enough ground underneath to fully unroll their rage, and even the rain is sometimes able to fall sideways instead of pouring down from above like the nature intended. Is it bad? Probably not, just different. Unfamiliar. There was no time for me to gather as many memories here, not enough personal history has been amassed to make me properly nostalgic.

This not so old image makes me think cliché thoughts. Like: so many things change. So many years have passed and cannot be brought back. I look at a piece of the sky that used to be such a routine sight, and cannot believe that the person who took the photo was me. Who I am now feels like I have moved light years away from who I used to be, not just miles. People were lost on the way, children grew up, wrinkles had ample time to creep into the hardened angles of my face framed by no longer dark hair. My younger life used to be so full of events. It feels richer within now while not that much is happening on the outside. Does it make me happier? I don’t know. Calmer, for sure. Changed, like that sky. Less stormy, unlike the world that surrounds me. Equally thoughtful, but with more time to think.

There is no going back and, frankly, I don’t think I would be willing to become that previous me once more. But, when I look at this photo, I long to be on that long gone sofa, alone in a quiet room with no lights on, once again floating through the boundless sky.

Was this really my life?