I’m back in America. I have been for almost a week now. And I feel awful. Just as I suspected/expected I would. Even “just as I feared I would.” “Tell me that it’s nobody’s fault, nobody’s fault but my own,” sings Beck now, and I guess that’s somewhat appropriate. I don’t know if “fault” is the best word choice, but all the same . . .

I feel like I have a huge choice to make in about six months or so: stay or go. The implications are huge. I want to go back to Lipnica so badly it’s killing me — paralyzing me with depression sometimes. Yesterday I just lay on the couch, thinking, “I have to go back, and yet I can’t go back.”

Let’s way the pros and cons again, beginning with what I wrote some days ago — about a week ago, flying home:

As I write all that stuff, I think, “Now, most of these things aren’t really problems if I’m honest.” There’s plenty of people I have there, and the fact that the disco is now at Quattro (which is primarily a bar) seems to show how silly my worries were. My life there would be just what I want it to be. It’s simple: I work my ass off and become as nearly fluent in Polish as I can possibly be (barring grammatical perfection, that is), and who’s to say what my limits are?

My life here could be just what I want it to be if I’m honest. I can make anything of my life I want to here in Boston. The thing is, I don’t really want to.

So what are my options? One option seems most promising: go back for one year to see. I don’t know that I can ever stop thinking, “I might have made a terrible mistake in leaving,” unless I go back for a while and test the hypothesis. At any rate, that’s what I want to do. The implications of that are fairly substantial, though. I could say to Chhavi, “It’s just for a year — I just have to see for myself if I made a mistake,” but the obvious correlative of that is, “. . . and if I decide I did make a mistake, I’ll want to stay there.” When I left for Lipnica sometime next year, it would be worse than the first time I left (by then it will/would have been five years ago).

And here’s the shock: four years ago I’d just finished my first day of training in Radom. It’s around 4:30 in Poland now — I’d be just about to finish the first day. Four years ago. Four years. That’s 1,460 days ago. A long damn time. No, quite the opposite. Four years is almost nothing. Two years is nothing. I guess it’s true what they say about time going faster the older you get.

What I don’t want is to realize that I’ve been back from Poland for four years and think, “I’ve done nothing important with my life in that time.” I don’t want to think at the age of sixty, “I wasted my life, by and large.” And that’s exactly what I’m afraid will happen — unless I go back. I keep treating that as if it’s my only option, and it really isn’t. But it’s the only one I’m aware of; it’s the one I feel is sure to bring me happiness and fulfillment.

Two quotes — from the same song — seem particularly relevant now:

The nearer your destination,
the more you’re slip slidin’ away. . . .
A bad day’s when I lie in bed
and think of things that might have been.

What makes all this so difficult is that I could talk to someone in Lipnica about my dilemma — Teresa Wojciak, for example — and she would simply reply, “So come back.” How I wish it were that easy! I would have talked to Jasiu about coming back for this coming school year. Can you imagine the reaction of the students?!