Letter from the Threshold

Cartographies of Elsewhere, Dispatch 00, Danuta's Flights

In a few days, I will cross a border.

Not just the kind marked by lines on a map, but one more elusive—the border between the known and the unspoken, between my life as it has been and what it might become when I step beyond its habitual contours. I’ll be traveling across continents, yes, but also across silence, memory, and longing.

This is the beginning of Danuta’s Flights, a literary travel journal kept in fragments, a field notebook of sorts, but one drawn more from inward weather than from coordinates. I will write to you from wherever I am: beneath foreign skies, at tables shared with strangers, or beside the soft rustle of a book in my lap.

I will write to remember what cannot be photographed.
I will write to preserve the trace of a voice, a question, a moment that might otherwise vanish.
I will write to listen more deeply.

You won’t find travel tips here.
Instead, I offer small essays, meditations, dispatches, shaped by landscapes, by stories overheard, by questions. Some will come with images, others will arrive as letters with no pictures at all—just language, and a desire to connect.

Right now, I am gathering things. A passport, notebooks, the books I want to read while traveling. My mother’s ring with a pink stone.
I am gathering courage, too. More about courage later.
And quiet.

This space is for those who believe that travel is not escape, but encounter. That elsewhere is a kind of mirror. That every departure is also an act of attention.

Thank you for stepping into this threshold with me.

With gratitude from just-before-leaving,
Danuta