Time Slipping Away

Last Wishes in Krakow

On my last day in Poland I frantically scrambled through the cobblestone, congested streets of the city center in Krakow in search of last minute souvenirs.  A Polish shot glass and a couple of t-shirts later my work in Krakow was finished.  Or was it?

It wasn’t so easy saying goodbye to a city I’d come to call home for so many months.  And knowing that I would be leaving later that evening to begin my long journey back to the U.S. only made life more difficult.  

I didn’t want to leave.  Standing, watching the crowds of people pass by, the street vendors, and the performers, I took note of the immense beauty of the place I had been fortunate enough to live in over the past 10.5 months.  I had always known I had been living in a gorgeous city, only now, when I had only a few more moments to appreciate it, every detail took on a whole new light.

Since when had the scaffolding been taken down from around the Sukiennice?  Since when had I missed that fountain next to Kosciol Mariacki?  All of the sudden my mind was flooded with hundreds of ideas of things I had forgotten to do, to see, or to experience.  There was still so much I had hoped to accomplish.  And then all of the sudden it hit me: I was finally out of time.

With all 60 kilograms of my packing still awaiting me at home I made some irrational, yet in my mind very reasonable decisions: I would see some last minute sights which I had somehow forgotten to visit in the 320 days prior. 

In Poland, tradition holds that whenever one enters a church for the first time, he or she is entitled to one wish.  Luckily, Krakow has so many hundreds of churches that it is next to impossible for even locals to find and visit them all.  So with that in mind I decided to visit one last church. 

For sure while living in Poland some of the uber-Catholicness of my Polish compatriots had rubbed off on me.  I mean honestly, it doesn’t take many days in Catholic-school mandated recollection before one will begin to adopt a bit of piety.  So I knelt down on the hardwood pew of a gothic-style church, uniquely designed with one huge center column situated in the main aisle, and thought.

I thought about all the good that had happened to me over the course of the past year.  I thought of all amazing sights I had seen, the countries I’d visited, the people I’d met, and the changes that had occurred in me.  I tried to remember when I first arrived in Poland and how strange and different everything seemed.  I thought too about how my host mother had cried the day before as she told me I had been like a second daughter to her.  I thought about how one year ago I didn’t want to go to Poland and about how now, one year later, I didn’t want to leave. 

And of course I thought about how I had fallen in love and how difficult it would be to say goodbye.

And then, just before leaving, I made one very last wish.