PART 15 – I Had Learned to Live Without Answers, but the Name Zofia Made Me Realize How Much of My Childhood Was Still Waiting Inside Me

I began thinking about my two names.

Zofia.

Zoe.

For most of my American life, the second had been enough.

It was familiar.

It was easy.

It belonged to the woman I had become.

But the first name had never truly disappeared.

It belonged to the girl who had left Warsaw.

I wondered whether Stanislaw had continued calling me Zofia in his memories.

Perhaps he had never known that people in America used another name.

Perhaps he had remembered me exactly as I had been.

That thought made me smile.

I wondered what he would have thought if he had seen me as an old woman.

Would he have recognized my face?

Would he have recognized my voice?

Would he have remembered the girl who used to walk beside him?

I had no way of knowing.

My granddaughter asked whether I wanted to talk about the promise again.

I told her that I did not mind.

She asked what I had meant when I told him not to forget.

I thought about it.

I had meant exactly what a child would mean.

I wanted him to remember something funny we had said.

I had not expected him to take those words seriously for the rest of his life.

But perhaps he had.

I could not decide whether that possibility made me happy or sad.

It was difficult to imagine that something so small might have remained important to another person for so many years.

I told my granddaughter that I had never expected the promise to become a real arrangement.

She nodded.

Then she asked why the man had said I needed to keep it.

I had no answer.

That sentence was still the most confusing part.

I had no idea what keeping the promise meant after so many decades.

I had no idea what the stranger expected me to do.

I did not even know whether the message came from Stanislaw himself.

I was not going to pretend otherwise.

Still, I could not dismiss the words.

They had been chosen for a reason.

I spent some time thinking about the distance between childhood and old age.

When Stanislaw made that promise, neither of us understood how much could happen before we grew up.

We did not know about the lives waiting for us.

We did not know that my family would leave Poland.

We did not know that decades would pass without contact.

We only knew that we were friends.

And we expected to remain friends.

That expectation had been innocent.

Perhaps that was why it stayed with me.

There had been no complicated reason behind it.

No conditions.

No arguments.

Just two children who believed they could decide what their future would look like.

I looked at my granddaughter.

I told her that I wished I could have said goodbye properly.

She squeezed my hand.

Neither of us spoke for a moment.

I realized that I had carried that regret quietly for most of my life.

I had not been responsible for leaving.

But I had still wished things had been different.

Now, someone had given me a reason to revisit that unfinished moment.

I did not know what would happen next.

But I was no longer afraid of remembering.

Click here to continue reading: PART 16: The Older I Became, the More I Understood That Some Promises Were Remembered Long After the People Who Made Them Had Changed