OSTRZEŻENIA I INNE OPOWIADANIA

This book was not written to make evenings more pleasant.
It was written because I cannot remain silent when I see how easily people grow accustomed to evil, how quickly they get used to lies, how willingly they lease out their reason to loud slogans.
It grew out of anxiety.
Out of anger.
Out of helplessness.
And — paradoxically — out of the belief that not everything is lost yet.
“Ostrzeżenia” is a collection of short forms born from one source: thoughts that keep returning like an irritating fly.
Because sometimes the most frightening things do not arrive with a bang. They come softly. Through what is left unsaid. Through indifference. Through “this does not concern me”.
Through laughter at the wrong moment, through looking away. Through failing to learn from a painful past. Through yielding to manipulation.
These stories are like dreams, but not the gentle kind. Rather the kind after which you wake with your breath racing and stare into the darkness for a long time, trying to understand whether it was only a dream or a warning.

Sometimes history enters a person like a splinter. One sentence, one image, one face, one gesture remains and begins to work inside you.
In my texts, time is at work.
History is at work.
Memory is at work.
Fear for the future is at work.
And so is the question: where are we heading if we keep choosing the easier version of ourselves?

I do not offer cheap, instant solutions in these stories.
I do not promise a “happy ending”. I am looking for something else: the moment when a person might stop.
Say STOP!
Before telling another lie. Before believing another lie. Before opening their mouth. Before raising a hand. Before looking away. Before clicking “share” and adding another brick to the wall of stupidity that will eventually crush us all.

There is a “warning” in the title, and warnings are meant to be heard in time.
The trouble is that people have a strange trait: they pay attention to warnings only after the fact. Then they are as useful as all their money in a coffin.

This is not a volume of moral tales.
It is a volume of questions.
Sometimes dressed in metaphor, sometimes in grotesque, sometimes in cold realism, sometimes in an apocalyptic dream. There are stories here about prophecy and religion, about blindness that sees more, about a stone that remembers better than people, about an end of the world that needs no archangelic trumpets for Armageddon, about stupidity with imperial ambitions.
There are also quieter, more personal texts in which I shout less and listen more — to myself, to the world, and to what lies pomiędzy a pomiędzy…

I write in short forms because a short blow can be stronger than a long argument.
Because sometimes one sentence can open a crack in the mind. And I would like something to crack in the reader’s mind — not from pain, but from awakening.
If you feel discomfort after reading — good. Discomfort can be the beginning of new thinking. If you feel anger — good too, as long as it builds rather than destroys. If you feel afraid — remember: fear makes sense only when it leads to courage, not escape.
And if something makes you furious — stop, think, and calmly ask yourself why.

I do not know whether literature can change the world. I know it can change a person.
And a person — if they choose to — can change everything!

If we do nothing, the future will be written in someone else’s hand and in our blood.

This book comes from the depths of my mind.
But I wrote it with yours in mind!

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