Grey's Journal:
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This week I traveled to Prague. My explicit goal was to visit `Darby' and to see the city she loved. But, there was also an implicit agenda I tried not to think about. Darby and I broke up over instant messenger a few weeks ago. Even in the best of circumstances, text conversations are a wildly unreliable medium for communicating the subtleties of an emotion. Smilies help, but IM is best at factual information exchange and blatant flirting. When handling a delicate matter like a relationship, both parties see subtle insults and hear unintended inflections in benign messages like: Hey, you feeling OK? :)Though neither she nor I said it, we both knew I was leaving London and going to Prague so we could settle the state of `us' face to face. * * *
Whenever I travel, I overestimate the time I need to get to my destination - like a man taking a 2-inch stack of napkins when all he ordered was a cheese sandwich. My flight to Prague left Stansted Airport at 18:15. Working backwards, I want to be there at least two hours ahead of time. 16:15. It takes the train 45 minutes to get to the airport from Liverpool Station. 15:30. I round that up to an hour, just to be safe. 15:15. It takes 20 minutes to get from where I live to Liverpool, but that I also round up to an hour. Again, just to make sure I have enough time. 14:15. I give myself an extra 45 minutes for the unexpected. 13:30. I’m packed, and out the door five minutes early at 13:25. The result is an annoyed ticket agent wondering why I’m at the airport trying to check in for a flight that doesn’t board for three hours. A flight that hasn’t even left where it currently is to get to here. I’m very happy with that, but most people seem to think of airports as purgatory. A boring, white, nowhere land between two destinations, a place to spend as little time in as possible. But for me, they are an old friend. My mother is a flight attendant, so I feel like I grew up in airports. I know to come prepared. I never travel without at least two books, a pad of paper, and a music player. "Don't you get bored?" Ask my friends. "Nope. I'd just be reading or writing at home anyway, I might as well get there early so I can’t possibly miss my flight.” * * *
"Has any unknown person asked you to take anything on this flight?" When Darby passed through London on her way to Prague two months ago, she over packed for her easyjet flight by 10 kilograms. Instead of paying the high baggage fee, she gave me her backpack to bring to her later. Since she was not an unknown person to me, I answered, "Nope." “Are there any dangerous objects in your bag?” "Nope." "Did you pack your bags yourself?" I reflexively answered ‘yes’ while thinking, as I always do, `What stupid questions. Who is going to give the wrong answers.’ But then I realized I just had. I packed my bag, but not Darby's. I hadn't even looked inside hers. All I knew about the bag’s contents was what she told me: her pills were inside, and she needed them. From the loud rattling noise the bag made, there sounded like a suspiciously large number of pills in the backpack for such a small girl. I began to imagine that I was the mule in a yearlong plan to smuggle drugs into the Czech Republic. Darby was not my girlfriend in Geneseo because she loved me, but because she worked for a Prague drug lord and needed to earn my trust, so I would visit her and carry un-inspected cargo. Our entire relationship had been a sham: a set up for this moment. I was now sure there were 10 kilos of narcotics in the bag. Perhaps these three silly questions were to protect me from myself. To make me think twice about bringing something on an airplane because a beautiful woman asked me to. But, it was too late to turn back now. "Yes, I packed my bags myself." Two hours later, I passed through customs with Darby's backpack. I did my best to look innocent. I walked as confidently as I could through the 'Nothing to declare' doorway. A guard made eye contact with me, and I had a vision of spending the young years of my life in an Eastern European jail, yelling lines from a bad movie. "I'm an American citizen!" and "Let me contact the US embassy!" But the bag was not searched, and I made it through. I never looked in the bag, I didn’t want to know the answer, and besides, worries like this add an element of excitement to an otherwise boring life. * * *
Right off the plane, Darby had a list of warnings for me. "Shh! Don't speak so loudly. You want to avoid loud English here." "Huh?" "The gypsies will target you. I had my watch stolen off my wrist in a bar last night. I didn't know until it was gone." Unbeknownst to her because of this comment, I spent the rest of the trip frisking myself. I checked for my wallet, passport, and MP3 player by taping a gentle rhythm on my pockets every time someone bumped into me. It made a nice little rhythm: Bump! Tap! Tap! Tap! Bump! Tap! Tap! Tap! "Not to mention the cops," She continued, "They'll stop you and give you a fake ticket. They're very corrupt and you have to bribe them." It seemed that she went on for quite some time about everything that was dangerous about the country. Then she turned to me with excitement in her eyes and said "I love it here." * * *
Prague is in the finalists for 'quaintest eastern European city'. Low white houses capped with red tile roofs cover the area. The streets are a collage of white, red, and pink cobblestones. ``This city goes well with fall,'' Darby observed. It also contains the must-have feature of any cute city: hilly terrain. While this gave me omnipresent, panoramic views, it also gave me sore knees. The most interesting structure in the city is the radio tower. Apparently, the Soviet Union ordered its construction, but left the design to the citizens of Prague. As an odd joke, they made it look like a nuclear missile. It’s five times the size of the nearest building, so from any place in this small, quaint, peaceful city, you can turn and see the faux-weapon looming over you. I thought it was creepy at first, but I grew to enjoy its presence. The city is perfect for Darby. She loves the romance of it all. It is a human sized city; if she lived there for a year, she would know it completely. Every winding, narrow road, every hidden, smoky café, and every little theater. The language is surprisingly beautiful and she threw herself into learning it. But, it is not a city for me. While beautiful, it is more provincial than I would like. The population is homogeneous and not very friendly. I smiled to people on the street and in shops, but it was never returned. The waitresses were universally uncaring and unfriendly. But what struck me the most was the quietness of the people. When walking on the street, it seemed that everyone was whispering to each other. Even if they had been speaking English, I would not have been able to overhear a single conversation. Of course, in that situation, I had to respond in kind, so Darby and I whispered to each other on busy, but uncomfortably mute streets. I couldn't live with that. I’ve had to reduce the volume of my voice enough in London, this level of quietness made me feel like I had a secret I couldn't reveal to anyone. I felt guilty for no reason. * * *
On the train ride back to my hostel on our last day together, Darby said "Common! Let's get off the tram for a moment. I want to show you something." We got off, and she led me away from the busy street, into the darkness of a nearby park. This went against all my instincts. Thou Shalt Not Go Into A Park After Dark was a commandment anyone who grew up in the shadow of New York knew. Mothers told their children that the park was where all the bad people went at night. Where they went to catch people foolish enough to go for a stroll after 10PM. Despite my better judgment, I trusted Darby in her city and followed her into the blackness. I did not, however, go without protest. Darby then took it upon herself to add more fear into my mind. "See that building?" She pointed to a grey, utilitarian structure receding over our shoulders. "That's the Ministry of the Interior -- where the secret police worked. It was supposedly abandoned 15 years ago." The lights were on. Now, in addition to the muggers, thieves, and rapists I had expected, I added soviet spies to the list. We continued through the darkness, Darby leading me by the hand. We reached her destination: a thirty-meter tall metronome. It was on the top of a cliff overlooking the city. The lights of Prague reached our eyes. The city stood on the bank of the river below us. Two stone angels guarded the entrance. Darby sat on the ledge. The city of her future before us, and the metronome counting down our remaining time behind us. "Isn't it beautiful?" she asked. I silently nodded. Darby found her place. We loved each other, but we recognized that our time together had come to an end. We were living different lives in different lands. Staying together would only hold us back, and we would resent each other for it. We decided the only way to save our relationship, was to end it. I shed a tear in the darkness she did not see. But my sadness at the loss of us was eclipsed by my happiness that she found her place in the world. |
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mailing list. Copyright © 2005 Wellington Grey  This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License. |
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