...

“The Choice” stands before me on the windowsill. Written. Published. Given its physical form. At the end of summer, I felt a powerful urge to finish it. Once I began, each word and every event in the story propelled the next. I did not understand the urgency within me. I wanted to complete it as quickly as possible — and just as quickly hold it in my hands. If I am honest, I barely understood what was happening. I could not follow it all consciously. I simply came to my senses as if waking from a dream, standing before boxes of freshly printed books, opening them one by one…

Now, more clearly than ever, I understand that I was unconsciously rushing myself because somewhere in my heart I sensed inevitable change. I could not define it. I could not put it into words. Just as sudden and powerful was my journey to the ocean. The book boxes had only just been opened, and within days I was already there. What I experienced this time was immeasurably deep and intense. All I could do was surrender to it, with a strange premonition resting at the back of my mind. Everything felt so vast it seemed it might grind me like a grain between millstones. Nature revealed its force as never before — granting me the long-dreamed-of storm at the ocean’s edge, when the wind knocks you off your feet while sweeping every last fragment of thought from your mind. A wild ride across the raging sea in a tiny boat — like a shoe — toward the island that draws me with tremendous force each time I see it in the distance. Green hills, already turning rust-colored, called me to climb to their summits and beyond, until physical exhaustion became sweeter than sleep. A wedding in a castle to which I was not invited, yet where I could be quietly present — drinking tea in a wood-paneled reading room warmed by soft light, large windows opening onto a fairytale park with ancient trees, hearing every word the young couple promised to one another. And above all — the relentless crunch of stones beneath the soles of my boots. In its intensity, this encounter surpassed all my previous meetings with the ocean and the emerald hills. And within myself, I could clearly feel the crack — the sound of another shell breaking open inside me. For the first time, all the way to the airport, I wept as never before — in absolute clarity and purity. I felt I had lost something immense and gained something immeasurably vast at the same time.I simply did not know what.

Now I know. I had to finish the book exactly when I did. I had to break into a thousand pieces exactly then. Just a short while before only light would remain on the stage of my life where my father had been standing. It could not have happened differently. I needed to meet that moment as I was — open and expanded. He met the book, though he did not have time to read it while he was still on this side. Now his story in this world has been told. And mine — we will read differently in the evenings, with him looking over my shoulder, present between the words and the lines. And for now, that awareness is enough.

26.11.2025.