Everything changed in 2022, and there is not a gram of exaggeration in that sentence. This was no difficult patch or moment of uncertainty, but something that smashed life into pieces and demanded that it be reassembled without any guarantee it would ever work as before. It rearranged the people around me too. Some vanished, others came closer than ever, and suddenly it became clear that closeness and distance had very little to do with where anybody had stood before.
I do not want to tell the story of the accident here. I have done that, and anyone who wished to read it could. This is not about the impact but what remains after everything has gone quiet and you are alone inside a reality you never chose.
Music remains inside that reality.
Before the accident I built no philosophy around it. I did not force analysis or pretend every track was a major event. I simply listened. Something was felt or it was not, sometimes more and sometimes less. Certain things went deeper while others passed by. That was enough.
What happened later was not that I suddenly began to listen differently. One specific song simply returned again and again, stubbornly and without asking permission.
After the accident, I often went back to Kortez's Jak dobrze, że Cię mam, whose title means "How good it is to have you". I had known it before, while life was still intact, but only later did it become more than a well-written song. It ceased to be a choice and became a need.
You could see it in one simple gesture I repeated more often than I care to admit. I pressed repeat and stayed in the same place again, then again, as though those few minutes contained something unavailable anywhere else.
I remember lying there after everything, unable to do many of the things that had once been obvious, while the song played once more. For those few minutes, I realised I did not need to manage, explain or prove anything. Strangely, that was enough.
The hardest blow came later, when I saw my Staś and Anielka and understood how close we had been to a world without me, or without one of them. The border between what exists now and what might have ceased to exist entirely had been so thin. The song stopped being a source of temporary calm. It acquired a specific meaning that could no longer be heard and then forgotten.
There are moments when you look at your own children and have no grand words or conclusion, only the plain knowledge that you are here and that this was not inevitable. Then you return to the same song because it alone can carry what you cannot arrange into sentences.
I remember another moment too, when I tried to return to "normal life", play something new, see what was happening and become again the person who lives inside music and understands the scene. Within minutes I would notice that it all passed around me and no longer worked as before. I returned to the one song because something there was still in its proper place.
Only then did I understand that this concerned neither taste nor choice.
It concerned need.
Repeat was no convenience or habit. It meant stopping in a place that remained bearable when the rest of the day could become too heavy. From outside, that may look banal. Inside, it works differently. Sometimes you need one thing that will not change after everything else has.
Something else arrived with the accident, something I had never considered: the way the body reacts to sound. Music turns out not to be something you merely hear. It is physically felt, sometimes too strongly, sometimes too heavily, sometimes with such force that you must turn it off because you cannot carry it.
At other times, one song does more than anything else. It gives you something impossible to name, although you know precisely that you needed it.
Music repairs nothing, of course, and I will not pretend otherwise. It does not reverse time, mend relationships or restore what was taken. Yet it can stay beside you without tiring you, making demands or asking questions for which no answer exists.
I would not say I listen better now. That would be a lie. I listen with a different weight inside me. Certain things remain longer because of it, while others cease to exist altogether.
Perhaps that is why this one song stayed for so long. At some point it stopped being only a song and became the thing that was present when I needed it, without interpretation or the elaborate superstructure we so easily create when everything is fine.
When it is not fine, the simplest things remain. Sometimes they are enough.
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