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„No Words Needed”

The rain traced slow patterns on the glass as I finished typing the last paragraph of my college essay. The sound of fluorescent lights humming above me made me feel trapped in a bubble of stillness—a small administrative assistant with too many thoughts and not enough distractions. I had quit two of my three jobs when the semester began; only this one remained—poorly paid but better than nothing. The office was empty except for me, the space between four and five in the afternoon seemingly suspended in time. The administration textbook lay open beside my keyboard, pages marked with yellow highlighter, but I couldn’t focus on it anymore. Instead, I watched raindrops race down the window, merging into larger streams that distorted the view of grey panel blocks outside...

In that quiet moment, with my work done and nothing else to occupy my mind, I found myself thinking of Sebastian again.

Second year of college, and still I couldn’t escape the pull of him.

Still, after everything.

I sighed and pushed my hair back from my forehead—a nervous habit I’d never been able to break. The phone on my desk hadn’t rung in over an hour. The filing cabinets stood in neat rows, documents organized alphabetically yesterday. On a day like this one, there was nothing left to do but remember, really.

Three years ago. That’s when it all began.

I was seventeen, living in my parents’ apartment in Białystok, finishing high school. My mother had left for Germany first—she found work cleaning houses, sending money back every month. The envelope would arrive with her neat handwriting on the front, sometimes with a note inside telling me to eat well, to study hard, to be a good and responsible son.

My father left the country just a year later. He got a job driving trucks across Europe—the pay was better than anything he could find in Poland. Better for all of us, they said. And I had to accept it.

But as a result, I became effectively alone in our family apartment. Pani Krystyna, our elderly neighbor, checked on me occasionally, bringing soup and asking about my grades. She meant well, but she never really asked the right questions—like whether I was lonely, whether the silence in the apartment was sometimes so heavy I felt it might crush me.

Weekends and holidays, I stayed with my aunt and uncle in Hajnówka. They were teachers—practical, warm people who explained the world through everyday examples. My uncle would talk about pressure while changing a flat tire; my aunt could turn making tea into a lesson about boiling points. In a way, they became my second parents, more present than my real ones, though I’d never admit that aloud, as it might offend my mother.

Anyway, they couldn’t help me with everything. Not with English, at least. And mid-way before my junior high school finals, they asked their neighbor’s son to tutor me instead.

That’s how Sebastian entered my life.

He was three years older than me—twenty to my seventeen—tall with light brown hair that caught golden highlights in the sun. He wore rectangular glasses with silver frames that made him look older, more serious. When he took them off to clean them on his shirt, which he did often while thinking, I could see his hazel eyes more clearly. They were guarded, intelligent, assessing.

“You’re smart,” he told me during our second lesson, sitting at the small table in his family’s living room. “You just need to stop translating everything in your head first.”

He had finished high school with flying colors but hadn’t gone to college. Money issues—it was too expensive. Instead, he tutored students in English and German, preparing them for exams, and repaired broken electronics on the side. Phones, computers, small appliances—he could fix almost anything with his precise hands and quiet concentration.

Our study sessions quickly became the highlight of my weekends. We’d sit at the table in his family’s apartment, books spread between us, and what should have been dry grammar exercises somehow transformed into conversations about everything else, always in English. Sebastian was passionate about military history—World War II, Napoleonic wars, medieval battles. His eyes would come alive when he talked about strategy, about the clean logic of war games.

“You like this stuff too, don’t you?” he asked once, noticing my interest.

And I did—or perhaps I learned to, because he loved it. After classes, we started playing strategy games together, hunched over a board or sitting side by side at his computer. There was a particular intimacy to these games—I learned how he thought, how he reacted under pressure, whether he was aggressive or cautious. He was methodical, patient; I was more impulsive. He would laugh at my riskier moves, but not unkindly.

“You need to think three steps ahead,” he’d say, his finger tracing a path across the board, or pointing at the screen. Sometimes, when we sat close, our arms or knees would brush, and I’d feel a small jolt that I couldn’t name yet.

The English lessons continued, but they became almost secondary. Sebastian would correct my grammar almost absently as we discussed history, music, our families. He noticed things about me that others didn’t—how I bit the inside of my cheek when I didn’t know what to say, how I arranged objects on the desk in perfect alignment when I felt anxious.

“You’re too hard on yourself, Aleks,” he told me once, watching me beat myself up over a mistranslated phrase. His voice was soft in a way I hadn’t heard before. “You’re doing fine, trust me; better than fine, actually.”

In his family’s apartment, the light would shift as afternoon turned to evening. His mother would bring us tea in glasses with metal holders, the traditional Polish way. Sebastian always added two spoonfuls of sugar to his—a small rebellion, he said, against his father’s insistence that sugar was bad for them all. I watched his hands stir the tea carefully, and felt something stir inside me, too.

I genuinely didn’t know then what it was—this feeling that made my chest tight when he smiled at me, this heightened awareness of where he was in a room. It wasn’t just that he was kind, or that he saw me when I felt invisible to everyone else. And it wasn’t either that he was the first person in a long time who seemed to care whether I was okay, internally.

It was something else... something I couldn’t name yet. Something that made me look forward to Fridays, when I would take the bus from my parents’ city, Białystok to Hajnówka, watching fields and forests scroll past the window, my heart beating faster with every kilometer.

The study sessions made my least favorite subject bearable. More than bearable—I found myself studying English vocabulary at night, not because I cared about the language, but because I wanted to open up more, and see approval in Sebastian’s eyes. I wanted him to think I was smart, interesting, worth his time as a student.

And sometimes, when we were deep in conversation, I’d catch him looking at me with an expression I couldn’t read—something curious, something almost tender. Of course, it would vanish as quickly as it appeared, replaced by his usual attentiveness.

But I’d seen it. I’d felt it. There was something special between us, something, we were yet to explore...

*

The rain had stopped outside the university office window now. I blinked, coming back to the present, to the empty administrative department with its humming fluorescent lights and ringing phones. Three years had passed since those first English lessons. Three years of hope and heartbreak and something in between that had no name.

I saved my essay and closed the document. The clock on the wall showed five minutes to five—nearly time to leave. I gathered my things: the textbook, my notebook with its broken spiral, my mp3 player with its scratched silver case. Outside, the wet streets of Białystok reflected the grey sky. The rain had passed, at last, but the air still felt heavy with moisture. Heavy with memory. Classic for my country.I pushed my hair back from my forehead again and locked the office door behind me, continuing to reminisce... 

*

The closer it got to the exams, the more I fell apart under the pressure. Sebastian noticed it right away during our study session that April evening—noticed how my hands trembled slightly as I turned pages, how I kept making the same mistakes over and over. I hadn’t slept properly in days, the looming finals casting long shadows over everything else.

The fear of failure sat heavy in my chest; not just my own disappointment, but the thought of my parents in Germany, working those thankless jobs so I could have opportunities they never had due to my grandparents’ poverty...

Sebastian set down his pen, the sound sharp against the quiet of his family’s living room, and looked at me through those rectangular glasses. “We’re done for today,” he said simply. “You need a break, Aleks. Let me take you somewhere.”

“Somewhere? Where?” I asked, the words coming out more desperate than I intended. I pushed my hair back from my forehead, trying to mask my anxiety.

“There’s a military fair in the forest this weekend. Tanks, obstacle courses—it might help take your mind off things.” He was already collecting our books, sliding them into his olive-green backpack with the efficient movements I’d grown to recognize. “Plus, it’ll be more interesting than conjugating English verbs for another hour when I can clearly see that your heart’s not in it.”

“Mhm,” I nodded, grateful for any escape from the suffocating worry. We left his family’s apartment, descending the five flights of stairs in a companionable silence that felt like relief after the intensity of studying. Outside, the evening air was cool but not cold—April in Hajnówka carried the first real promise of spring, the forest awakening from its winter sleep. And yet, it was quite cool, so, I was grateful for my windcheater.

The military fair was set in a clearing not far from the edge of Białowieża Forest. It was old in a way that made human concerns feel temporary—the canopy so dense it created its own twilight even in daylight hours. Birch trees stood like pale sentinels, their white trunks almost luminous in the fading light.

As we approached, I could see tanks parked among ancient trees, their metal hulls incongruous against the backdrop of primeval nature. Boys and young men in military surplus jackets milled around the tanks, some climbing up to pose for photos. An obstacle course had been set up in another part of the clearing—ropes to climb, walls to scale, mud pits to cross. White-and-red flags fluttered from makeshift poles, and somewhere a radio played popular songs that blended with the chatter of the crowd.

“This is exactly what you need,” Sebastian said, nudging my shoulder with his. “No English, no finals, no future to worry about—just tanks and forests and stupid boys pretending to be soldiers.”

I laughed despite myself. He had a way of making things simple, of cutting through the tangle of my anxieties to find something solid beneath.

As evening deepened into dusk, the organizers lit bonfires around the perimeter of the clearing. Sebastian and I found a log to sit on, the bark slightly damp beneath my jeans. The fire crackled and popped, sending sparks spiraling upward into the darkening sky. Around us, the crowd had thinned; families with children had gone home, leaving mostly groups of older teenagers and young men passing bottles back and forth.

“Wait here,” Sebastian said, standing up. “I’ll get us something.”

He returned with two plastic cups of beer mixed with raspberry juice—piwo z sokiem, that distinctly Polish combination, sweet and dangerously drinkable. “This will help you relax,” he said, handing me one. “Forget the finals for once, eh?”

The first sip was sweet on my tongue, the raspberry masking the bitterness of the beer. I wasn’t much of a drinker—never had been, my dad would’ve beaten me black and blue with his belt for it—but tonight, the alcohol was a welcome buffer against my anxieties. We sat in silence for a while, watching the flames dance, sipping our drinks. The fire warmed my face even as the night air grew cooler behind me.