[Creative Nonfiction] Selves

Read the winning entry for our week of September 21 contest, Here and Elsewhere.

Selves
by Paulina Jarantewicz

I split myself into thirds every morning. Check the time zones. Check who I am today.

In Germany, my father makes coffee. The same cup. The same spoon scraping porcelain. I am eight again in his kitchen. I am twenty in my body. I laugh too loud at his jokes. I leave plates in the sink with the heedlessness of a child. My German unfurls into playground giggles. He calls me his little bird. I let him. I am a daughter first. Everything else comes after.

The train to Poland takes six hours. Six hours to shed that skin. To reclaim my proper name. Not the diminutive. The whole thing. Polish syllables, sharp and clear.

In Gdańsk I am steel. I am resolution. I write until my wrist screams. Nobody calls me little anything. This is where I was born. This is where I learned to breathe. But even here, something pulls. Always pulling.

Once a year, I cross an ocean. The plane tears me apart. Reassembles me at thirty thousand feet. I land in Toronto and you are waiting. Same smile. Same eyes that see straight through me. You have lived in many cities. You understand the splitting. The continual translation of self.

We walk Queen Street as we once walked Długa. The air tastes different here. It is full of possible futures. You show me your new life. Your Canadian friends. Your Canadian dreams. I try them on. They almost fit.

For two weeks I am wholly yours. We stay awake until the sun arrives. We share secrets in Polish that your English-speaking friends will never understand. I am your anchor to before. You are my bridge to elsewhere. We are each other’s proof that home can be a person.

But the plane always calls me back. Always.

The worst part is the forgetting. How quickly I lose pieces of myself. In Germany, I forget how to be serious. In Poland, I forget how to be soft. In Canada, I forget that I belong anywhere at all.

People ask where I’m from. I give different answers depending on the language they ask in. Each one true. Each one incomplete.

At night, I dream in three languages. Wake up not knowing which country holds my body. Check my phone. Read the news from all three places. Feel responsible for everything. Tethered to nothing.

I am here. I am elsewhere. I am never fully anywhere.

The ghosts of my other selves follow me everywhere I go.

A Note From Our Guest Judge, Eman Zabi

I was particularly drawn to Selves because of how it captured the experience of living between languages, cultures, and selves. The story’s exploration of how language shapes personality and memory felt bittersweet and familiar. I appreciated how it explored identity not as a fixed state but as something constantly in translation: the act of switching languages as an involuntary form of reinvention. I enjoyed how this piece sits in the tension between fragmentation and wholeness, suggesting that we are not one self but a chorus of them, each formed by the geographies, people and languages that have held us.

About Paulina Jarantewicz

I am a Polish aspiring writer and engineering student. Though English is my second language, it has become my primary voice for creative expression.

Find Jarantewicz on Substack: Paulina Jarantewicz.

This piece piece was written in response to the prompt Here and Elsewhere.