Friday, July 31, 2015

Le fin

Some days you find exactly what you were looking for in a blog post you never posted. I cant promise this means I am back, but I certainly hope this means I've gotten closer to finding what it is I was so convinced I'd find in Denver. At the very least, it's a decent (and unedited) reminder of why I am currently here, and not abroad. And also why I have a certain tattoo on my shoulder.


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I'm not going to post this until later, but right now I'm sitting in the Vaclav Havel airport, waiting to depart Prague for perhaps the final time in a long while. I certainly don't want to say I'll never return - I love Prague, and I was quite comfortable here. It's a city I'm well suited to.

But it's time to close this chapter.

The blogging I did in the last 10 months was negligible compared to how much blogging I did while I was studying here. And that says a lot. Study abroad was so intense. Every week something new and big happened, everything from trips to break-ups and back-togethers. This time, though, I was living a normal life. I paid rent, I worried about bills, I worked a job I loved on a whole but some days came home too exhausted to move and cranky. I dated a little bit, though my life was largely independent of the kind of maintenance required by serious courtship. I cooked for myself and sometimes for friends, I drank too much some weekends and others never even left my flat, and so the slow march of time consumed 10 months without much of anything happening.

Which was exactly what I wanted. What I needed.

If you go back and look at the first post I wrote after I moved back, I write about being haunted, about ghosts of my first stay here clutching me with cold iron hands, outlining voids I thought I'd filled. It was hard, but more than that, it was supremely unpleasant to feel exactly how little of the magic I'd been able to dispel in Denver. But now, the spell is broken. Leaving, I felt no need to visit any specific place one last time, no need to get one last plate of food at a restaurant or do one exclusively Czech thing one last time. I wanted to see people, prioritizing relationships over stuff. And I can take relationships with me.

The comparison of this time versus the last time I left, though, makes me giggle. My last 24 hours in 2012 were characterized by wandering the city one last time, one last meal,  one last shag, and one last mental break-down. There was a rose, and a slow dance on a bridge, and about a thousand "I don't wanna go!"s. This time, I packed, I napped, I split a bottle of wine a student gifted me with a friend as we walked by the river, talking about the things we got, the things we'll leave, and how excited to be going home we are. The rose this time was a gift from a student, the meal was a plate of pasta at a cafe I'd just found, no dancing, and no tears. We got a beer at the gypsy bar, a glass of wine at Sherlock, then today Nate came over and helped me load all my worldly possessions into a cab. And in that cab, I couldn't help but notice that the drive towards the airport in May of 2014 was not empirically different from the drive into the city in August 2012. We took the same route, and the weather and time of day was basically identical. The only thing that'd changed was me.

I've spent two years of my life on this city, between living here and wishing desperately to be here. So what did I get out of it? Mmmm, a good many things, a tattoo, a scar, a handful of funny stories to tell at parties. But most important, for the first time in a long time, I'm not scared. I'm not scared of what comes next even though I have literally no idea what it could possibly be. I don't have a job or a place to live, but I know it'll all work out. If I could do this - change who I am so completely, mind, body, and soul, and I could do it on the other end of the globe in a city largely indifferent to my existence where I couldn't speak the language, I can handle whatever comes next. My mom got me a ring that Christmas after study abroad when my mantra had become, "Everything's changed, and I am so scared." The outside reads "Love Life" which is fine, and I do. But I've never shown the inside to anyone until last night, on the bank of the Vltava watching the lights turn on on Charles Bridge. It reads "Be Brave" and I've worn it every day since moving here. I guarded the fact I was scared, but now that I'm not scared anymore, I'll let you all in on the secret: the decision to move back to Denver has been the first decision in my life I've never once second guessed, and for the first time in my life, I'm not scared of the change charging down the barrel right now.

Mam krasny zivot, friends.