Balance

For a long time I’ve had the feeling that most of us live with some kind of karmic balance. The amount of luck and rubble you get in life has to even out. That conviction crystallised in my mind a few years before Misiek died. I remember the moment exactly. I was sitting on the sofa in my grandfather’s flat. We were just about to move into our newly renovated apartment. Up to that point my life had been relatively calm, to the extent that I felt inexperienced, untested by life. I thought, something’s going to fucking go down, because it can’t stay this easy. And not long after, it did – with a bang: the accident, my grandfather’s death, Misiek’s stroke.

A few years after his death I felt a sense of inner peace. I was convinced that my karmic account had been settled with interest, and surely life would give me a break.

And in principle, it did. Apart from the abyss of dating apps and lonely evenings, it didn’t bother me too much.

***

Dan’s arrival in my life made me feel again as if I’m taking on some kind of life‑debt. I’m intentionally trying to pull myself out of the thinking pattern that every happiness hides another bill. But it doesn’t always work.

Last summer. Croatia. We’re on Mount Srđ watching one of the most magical sunsets either of us has ever seen, and I feel it building inside me. Moisture gathers under my eyelids, my throat tightens a little. But I hold it in, I swallow the tears until we go down. At the bottom, in the most unexpected moment – on a zebra crossing - I burst into tears.

Dan looks at me with a question in his eyes. “Everything okay?” “Well, it’s just so beautiful here, and I’m so happy, and I don’t want… and I’m scared someone will take it away from me.” “Okay, but what, the zebra crossing is that beautiful?”

We both burst out laughing. Happiness mixed with tears. Fear mixed with gratitude.

***

For the past few weeks illness has been circling closer and closer around us. Friends, close and distant, family members. As if life’s rubble was emerging from around the corner wanting to remind me of itself. What, you think I forgot about you?

Oh no, absolutely not. I still remember that in a matter of seconds you can take everything, so kindly - fuck off.

***

And it just pisses me off - so naively, so humanly - that the Trumps and Putins of this world still walk around unpunished, utterly unshaken. As if someone up there somehow missed that the balance sheet doesn’t add up…