12. Polish Pyramid Goodbye

Before we start, just a heads-up. This chapter of the story gets heavy, and includes themes of mental health and grief. If you need to, come back when the time is right. Also, if you haven’t heard the previous episode, The Philosopher and the Artist, go listen to that episode first. Ok, here we go…

12: Polish Pyramid Goodbye

Tiled walls. A slow-dripping faucet.

I stand at the sink and my body sways, sleep deprived. I’m somewhere far away.

On the counter’s my phone, with an unexpected message from Weronika: Hi Jonny. I’m very very sorry, but I’m bringing very bad news.

I have no idea what it could possibly be. Bad news? Very bad news.

Welcome to Go and Find Out. I’m Jonny Wright.

This is a story of losing yourself in the world.

I left my home, my job, and the USA in order to learn the old-fashioned way: with first-hand experience.

In these episodes, I ask big questions about life, not from an armchair but from roadsides and mountaintops, from temple halls and dance halls.

Join me as I hitchhike around the world, embrace the unexpected, and let go, one step at a time.

If you’ve ever thought about living a life outside the box, keep listening.

Because it’s never too late to begin your next adventure.

You don’t need to hitchhike around the world. The adventure is right in front of you.

Let’s go and find out.

We step inside the old schoolhouse and the air changes texture—a cool quiet, full of wood and tobacco and a faintly herbal waft.

It’s been a whole year since Weronika, and Tomasz, and I formed our trio and stumbled through the Polish art museum. A lot changes in a year.

Weronika leads me past the kitchen, past a sunlit hallway where two terriers doze on the tiles, and up a narrow staircase. The steps are old pine, worn soft in the middle. Each one gives a sigh as we move up.

At the top is the attic. A big open room with slanted ceilings of wide planks and light pouring in through the west-facing windows. It smells like varnish and beeswax and—is that ink? The space is open, the edges littered with sculptures and half-finished paintings, and candles in absurd shapes. There’s a fat wooden desk tucked under one of the windows, and the light hits it like an altar.

And suddenly, Weronika’s whole aesthetic makes sense. This rough, elegant nonchalance I’d tried to figure out since Kraków—it all snaps into place. Of course. This is where she’s from.

Her parents are tattoo artists, some of the first in Poland after the Iron Curtain fell. And they smuggled equipment in from England and France, turned this old village schoolhouse into a studio, and then a home. Right now they’re away at a tattoo convention.

Weronika shrugs as I take it in. “It’s a mess,” she says, without apology.

I shake my head. “It’s perfect.”

She drops her bag on the desk, lights a cigarette, and sits on the big wooden chair.

I hear heavy footsteps. Tomasz bursts through the door, his chestnut hair in all directions. He's smiling, from his blue eyes to his outstretched arms. He looks a little gaunter than the year before, but he’s happy.

The gang’s back together.

That next day, for one sharp day, everything is almost too good, too sweet.

It felt like the pendulum had stopped, mid-swing, and for a moment we were weightless. But of course it never stops for long. You can feel it in the silence.

The pendulum has to swing. And I can feel something coming, or maybe it’s something…leaving.

Saturday, a few months later.

Weronika finished her day of teaching, and thought of Tomasz, far away in Krakow.

“It was Saturday. I was at work, and I wanted to discuss with Tomasz the conversations I had with my students. So I called him. And he was kind of upset, but also sleepy… He said he was still sleeping.”

That day, something was off. He wasn’t himself. But Tomasz was often not himself. And then he said something that made the conversation stick in her mind.

“He said he had had a bad day, and he was not sober… I don’t know, he took something. He said he would call me later.”

He did call again, that same day. But by then, he was spiraling.

“He was in a kind of paranoiac state. He had those states, sometimes. It was hard to tell what was real and what was fiction… His fear and pain were always real. But the cause—it was hard to know where it started.”

She tried to stay calm and talk him down.

“He sent some code to my phone, because he couldn’t receive it himself. He had blocked his phone. He was blocking his accounts on social media, because he had some kind of paranoiac idea that someone was trying to take some information from him or something.”

It sounded like a familiar pattern—one of the old ones, one she’d seen before.

“I was irritated. This talk took more than half an hour. And I was rushing somewhere—I was going to swim in a swimming pool. And I was a little angry that again, he has a problem, and he calls me, and wants me to resolve this problem… no matter how I feel.”

That was Saturday.

The air smells of sun-warmed dust and Weronika’s tobacco. A bee floats against the windowpane. Morning dew brightens the fields, everything shiny and growing, sunflowers popping up along the quiet lane. And somehow, we’re all together again—Weronika, Tomasz, and me. It’s been a year since Kraków, but despite the time that’s passed, there’s been no accumulated rust. Like someone pressed pause and now simply pressed play again.

We each have something we’re working on. Tomasz is writing about Kierkegaard. Weronika’s drafting a review for an exhibition opening this weekend. I’m writing about dust moats—how they hover in the light. Nothing we’re doing is coordinated, but it feels like it’s part of the same project. Because of the same faith: that if you look long enough at the thing that magnetizes you, some truth will rise out of it. Eventually.

There’s a kind of joy in that belief. A sense that something is happening, even if we can’t say what. We don’t talk too much about the state of the world. We’re not working on big political ideas. Our conversations loop around obscure philosophers, dream images, theories of beauty. And the throughline is laughter. Tomasz makes a joke so layered and strange that Weronika and I just look at each other in baffled awe until she finally says, “Wait, what?”

The words we write for now are private . But the proximity matters. Just knowing someone else is nearby, pacing or typing or scratching out a line. Friends creating beside one another. Coexisting in the pursuit of expression.

But of course, we can’t stay in the attic forever.

Tomasz starts to stir. First the pacing. Then the declarations. He wants to go somewhere, and not just anywhere.

He wants to visit the Polish pyramids.

Months later: Sunday.

Weronika, still on the phone with Tomasz in Krakow, who sounds unhinged and unwell.

“But I said what I could. I told him he could come visit me. That he should eat something. That he should call me later. And we said goodbye.”

On Sunday, nothing. No texts. No call. No one else heard from him either.

So on Monday, Weronika got on a train to Kraków.

“I thought I will make some drama. I was going to tell him he’s a stupid little kid, and he should eat something healthy and stop worrying about himself so much. I thought I’d spend a day or two cooking and cleaning and making motivational speeches. So I wasn’t that worried.”

This wasn’t the first time she’d had to pull him out of his own mind.

She took the five hour train south, and walked from the station, the same way she had the day I first met her. But this time, there was worry inside her.

“When I came to his flat, I saw the light was on. And I felt relief—because he’s inside.”

But he didn’t answer.

“I started knocking at the doors. Nothing. I knocked on the windows. Still nothing. I couldn’t look through, because he always kept the curtains drawn. Always trying to stay invisible inside.”

As the birds sing and Weronika and I rinse lunch dishes in the sink, Tomasz throws open the back door and walks toward the garage. He’s calling today a pilgrimage.

‘I remember that Tomasz had some aphorism that it’s important to make things important. Like the importance lays in that effort of making them important. And I agree in a way.’

He’s fully committed now. The Polish pyramids, he insists. We have to go. No further explanation. He’s already yanking open the garage, dragging out the old Opel Astra, clearing junk off the passenger seat.

Weronika and I exchange a look, something between amusement and resignation. Once Tomasz locks onto an idea, it crystallizes into ritual. You don’t say no to a ritual. You grab your water bottle, lace your shoes, and climb in.

Weronika rides up front—she has her PhD but never learned to drive—and I take the back seat. The doors clank shut. Tomasz mutters something about “ninety meters long, Neolithic burial site,” and we’re off.

The road peels away under us—gravel to asphalt, then narrow farm lanes between endless wheat fields. The car hums and creaks. The sky is glassy and white. Tomasz jerks the wheel left and right to avoid potholes without slowing down. He monologues the entire way—about language, about sacred geography in Slavic folklore—and somehow also about Kierkegaard.

I half-listen. I’ve learned to float in his thinking, to catch pieces as they pass. What I really pay attention to is Weronika’s face, silhouetted in front of me as she looks out the window. Expressions move across it—respect, irritation, amusement, constantly vacilating. She doesn’t say much, but you can tell when she’s had enough. She leans her head back against the headrest and disappears into the passing fields.

It’s our last day together. Tomasz is going back to Krakow. I’m heading south, to the gathering in Macedonia. To the great, gleaming fire. Weronika has classes starting back in Poznań. We haven’t said any of that directly, but it rides along with us in the car. The ticking clock, faint and steady.

We pull off the road into a little clutch of pine trees. Tomasz parks, kills the engine, and steps out. The heat is dense. The car clicks as it cools.

Months later: Monday, 6:30 PM.

Weronika stood outside Tomasz’s apartment in Krakow, in that same courtyard where the two of us had become friends. She knocked and stepped back, expecting it to fly open any moment. No answer.

She kept knocking. Fifteen minutes. Thirty. Maybe more.

“I felt like I was the main hero in some not good film, about criminals or something… Like in those films, they always get inside closed flats very easily. It’s not that easy. And you feel like really stupid, because you know it’s a very serious situation, but still in the back of your head you have this scenario that now you’re that person, and you cannot act this in proper way, and you in fact don’t know what to do, and I was even scared to be too loud or to knock too loud.”

Finally, she remembered that the neighbor had a spare key.

“So I knocked to her, and she gave me them. She was also really scared because she heard that knocking, and She said the light has been on for a few days, but she hadn’t seen Tomasz out.”

Weronika went back with the key and unlocked the door.

“So I just opened the doors with the keys and it was like, awful. Because the flat was completely, like in scratches. It was a mess. It was usually a mess, but that was an extreme mess. Like somebody was looking for something. Everything was upside down.”

She stepped into the kitchen. Then the second room.

Lady ferns and ostrich ferns delicately wave, as the insect hum gets louder and louder. We follow a narrow path into the woods. It’s only a short walk, maybe ten minutes. Then we see them—long low mounds of stone rising out of the ground like shipwrecks beneath a thin layer of earth. Ancient graves, covered in moss. They’re older than Christianity, older than Poland itself.

All that stone and months of work to build, and for what? To preserve the dead. To make their mark permanent. I step forward and brush against the stalks poking through the stones. You can’t stop one thing from becoming another. This place was meant for the dead, but look: now it’s for all these waving, buzzing, growing things.

We stand there in silence for a moment.

Then Tomasz says, “Okay. We’ve seen it.”

He’s dead serious.

“You want to go?” I ask.

He shrugs. “Yeah. We’ve seen it.”

‘Usually I had the impression that it was more about getting to the thing than having this thing. Like the adventure of being on the way to something.’

Weronika just smirks and shakes her head. She knew this would happen.

I follow them back to the car.

Months later: Monday, 7:15 PM.

The bedroom was a wreck. Books and papers scattered all across the floor, furniture knocked over. Lights still on, their lampshades crooked.

And among the wreckage there was one object that caught Weronika’s attention, in the middle of the room.

“And Tomasz was just laying there, on the floor. With his back naked. In his pajamas. And he was like one thing among plenty of different things lying on the ground.”

She touched him once. His skin was firm and cold. Then she stepped outside.

“Then I went out and I locked the door and I couldn’t go inside anymore.”

The courtyard looked just the same as before, orange shimmering squares of windows looking down at her. But for Weronika, everything was different.

“So I remember that I was standing on the stairs. The same stairs that we were sitting together and talking. And I was smoking a cigarette and I was thinking that ‘I’m standing on the stairs and smoking a cigarette. And then I thought that it’s weird that it’s an extreme situation and I am standing on the stairs and smoking a cigarette and thinking about this, and ad infinitum. ”

She didn’t know what to do. She didn’t even know how to act like someone in shock. The movies had trained her for this, maybe. But when the moment arrived, she didn’t feel like a tragic figure. She just felt… confused. There was a body just inside.

The glare of sun on water splinters in constant fireworks. It hurts my eyes, but it’s hard to look away. On the way back from the megaliths, we’ve stopped at a lake Weronika used to visit when she was a kid. It’s small, surrounded by reeds and pine trees, tucked behind a sleepy roadside town.

Tomasz grabs red and white popsicles and an energy drink from a convenience store and meets us down by the sand. The sun is high. The sky is bleached pale. The lake barely ripples.

Weronika dives in immediately, long strokes slicing the surface. She swims like her body knows this water better than it knows the air. I walk in slowly, wading, then splashing, letting the droplets sting my face.

Tomasz sits on the sand.

He doesn’t like water. That’s what he tells us. Always had a thing about it. He watches from the shore, sweaty and stiff, cracking open the can. His face pulls in on itself. I know that look—he’s not just hot. He’s annoyed by his own discomfort. He wants to want to swim. But his body won’t go.

“He had so many hang-ups, and it was sad, because sometimes his limitations were so obvious. But he would rather sit and sweat than do something that scared him. Even if it was good for him.”

Eventually, Tomasz forces himself into the water. He walks out to his knees, mutters something profane under his breath, then lowers in like he’s entering a vat of acid.

Weronika and I watch him from farther out, and applaud. He flinches every time a wave touches his chest.

Still, he does it.

For a moment, we’re all in the water together. I look up at the yellow beach. Tomasz’s can of energy drink is half-buried in the sand, his towel slumped beside it like a forgotten flag. There’s the three of us. Floating.

Month’s later: Wednesday.

After I heard what had happened, I found myself in a narrow bathroom, somewhere far from home, and far from Poland. Tiled walls, a slow-dripping faucet. I stood at the sink and looked into the mirror. Not at myself, exactly. Just… into the glass. I had the sense that if I looked hard enough, some shape would appear.

I kept seeing him. A dozen versions of the same moment. Tomasz lying peacefully. Tomasz in a scene of chaos. A chair pulled back from the desk. Blood on the floor. A crumpled note. Nothing at all. The images flickered through like a slideshow, each one more vivid than the last.

“So I was like naming all the acts that I was making and so on, and that was weird and creepy, but also very natural, because what else to do?”

I was doing something similar. Not naming my actions out loud, but looping thoughts, looping feelings. Trying to assign meaning. If it was overdose, I should feel helpless. If suicide, maybe guilt. If murder, then what—anger? Grief at the randomness? I kept reaching for the version that would tell me how to feel.

We drive Tomasz to the train station.

The town is midsize, barely a car on the streets. We park just outside and walk with him through the underpass, then up onto the platform. It’s quiet. The kind of summer evening where time feels like it’s holding its breath.

Tomasz has one suitcase. He rolls it behind him, slightly crooked. He’s grinning. Energized. Already half in the next chapter.

He paces the platform like a boxer warming up. Weronika watches him with the smallest shake of the head, some cocktail of affection and exasperation. He’s already disappearing into the future.

The train arrives.

There’s a hiss, a gust, the slow glide of steel. Doors slide open.

He turns to us, lifts his hand. “See you,” he says.

We say nothing. Just wave.

He steps over the threshold.

Tomasz stands in the doorway.

He turns to us, squinting into the light, one hand still on the rail. He’s not in a rush. There’s that grin again—mischief, anticipation, and a flicker of nerves. But mostly, momentum. As if he’s already gone.

And we’re still here. On the platform. Watching him.

Monday, 7:45pm

She called emergency services.

“They asked me if he was still alive. And I knew he wasn’t. So they didn’t come. They just sent the police.”

That was it. The police asked her name and number. And then she was allowed to go home.

In the days that followed, the police opened a case. The apartment was examined. A mess of evidence, or maybe just a mess. It looked like someone had torn the place apart looking for something. Which led to speculation—break-in? Assault?

But there were no signs of forced entry. No missing items. No evidence of another person.

Then came the autopsy.

Isn’t it strange how we let this one fact, the cause of death, determine so much about a life?

Tomasz had died of a heart attack. He had a genetic heart condition no one had been aware of. It was sudden and severe. His body had given out.

He wasn’t murdered. He didn’t overdose. It wasn’t suicide.

And what did heart failure have to do with the young scholar’s life? Did it put the final piece in the puzzle? No, there was no resolution in it. If only stamping “natural causes” on the file was the same as “The End” appearing on a movie screen.

Tomasz’s was a life so paradoxical that I hoped it would be fixed by one brilliant object. One great idea would be enough to gather all the other bits and shreds together and call it ‘meaningful.’ But that’s not what happened.

If only his brilliance had coalesced into a published novel, then we could look back and say, ‘what a beautiful gift he gave us. Look at this life, these 33 years, lived to bring us this one shining thing.’ But that’s not what happened. That’s never what happens. It’s only the us left behind who mythologize. Life is a lot messier than our romantic notions.

It was the first time a friend from the road passed. It was when I realized that saying goodbye, waving as the train doors shut, can be saying goodbye, letting that person take their leave of life itself. All journeys come to an end.

And while we’re here, before the doors shut, we’re left with the chance to live in the fragments, the feelings and mistakes, the unfinished brightness.

That’s it for this episode of Go and Find Out. Thanks for spending this time with me—seriously. It means a lot that you’re here, listening to this story.

I’d love to hear from you—thoughts, stories, weird travel tips, whatever’s on your mind. Drop me a line at goandfindoutpod@gmail.com, and I’ll do my best to write you back.

This show is created by me, Jonny Wright, with music by me unless otherwise noted.

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But more than anything, I hope this episode sparked something—however small.

A question, a dream, a reminder that your life is still unfolding.

The only real adventure we have is right now.