Your backpack is squeaking at every step you take, protesting the groceries you crammed into it. You always misjudge how much you can carry on your shoulders. The steps you slowly and carefully take still leave dirty marks on the snowy pavement. Late afternoon, beginning of winter, the street lamps still didn’t adjust to the shortness of the day. The long street leading you home is darker and your eyes haven’t yet adjusted from the surgical supermarket lights. But you know the way to this new home where your pregnant wife is waiting for her snacks, while flakes of snow descend and cover the pavement once again as if to give you a new chance, a clean slate for your worn-out winter boots freshly on duty after a long autumn in Prague.

Now as you make your shy marks on the snow, images of a new life ahead of you shine through your mind and it warms your hands so you try to be grateful, first saying the words in your mother tongue and you are surprised at how easily the feeling readily comes with the words and it fills you to your aching shoulders and the weight of the groceries becomes comfortable and at moments joyful. And then as hard as you can, you clench your fists and try to hold this state in place like a balloon under water that you know will eventually find its way up. So you hold it nevertheless and you try to feel.

Now ahead of you, only a stoplight, a left turn and your home. Your focus starts to drift to how fast or slow you should walk to reach the stoplight and find it green and you find that silly, and it makes you think of yourself as a little boy doing errands on your grandfather’s farm and the more you think the more the thoughts take you farther to your old life in Casablanca and the balloon goes up faster, so you shift your focus back to thanking the forces that conspired to get you here.

The light is red and for once you are happier, you want it to last longer, holding not only the cars but your balloon too. But your hungry pregnant wife is waiting and the thought of her and your little unborn baby refills you with joy and deepens the waters in which you hold the balloon and it’s time to let go of it. You look up at the light again and it goes green and for the first time you feel the snow on your face, refreshing, innocent and untouched.

As you try to focus on the flakes, a tall ancient and sacred house stands in the blurry background, not sacred to you, but to the people of this land you now live in. The people who have a different faith than yours. But at that moment it seems to mirror something inside of you, so you take a picture and cross the road in a hurry.

In memory of Paul Auster (February 3, 1947 – April 30, 2024), his writing means so much to me as a reader, especially his autobiographical book Winter Journal. This is an homage to what it feels like to read him for the first time.