3/17/05

This was my favorite night in the Czech Republic.

In March, after months of coat-wearing, the cold broke overnight.

We went to the biggest park in Prague, the one where people kiss their girlfriends under trees on the first of May. I had a tiny, unsubstantiated crush on that boy with the camera.

Petrin Hill smelled like dirt and rain. We climbed all the way to the top.

Then we came down.

That boy left to sit in a bar with a girl with a lip ring. I turned out not to care.

We walked back across the bridge to Old Town Square, where everything that ever happened happened. It’s emptier at night, without all the tourists and the carriages and the men selling pastries from carts.

I climbed a statue of the Czechs’ most important religious figure. His name, like everyone else’s, is Jan.

Drunken Englishmen stomped around the Easter market and we stole ribbons off the trees.

Eventually we walked home because we’d already been everywhere. Our legs hurt in the best way.

–

This is what this summer was supposed to be like, back when we all promised each other we’d be in the city: magical, serendipitous, full of New York. We forgot that not having work makes you broke, and having work makes you tired, and living in a borough makes it harder to spontaneously walk into a good time. Prague was a playground. We didn’t have jobs, we hardly had schoolwork, and if we wanted, we could go to other countries on the weekend. I knew coming back to America would be a reality check, but I didn’t expect it to hit so hard.

Before I left for Europe I thought I couldn’t wait to graduate. Fall was my hardest semester yet and the fewer of them left, I figured, the better. Now, though, that my senior year starts in less than a month; now that I actually have to start researching my thesis; now that Kristi has registered for the GREs and is already planning on getting a couple of degrees in France before coming back for her doctorate; now that it’s August and I still don’t know what I want to do with myself ever, at all, and I know that even if I want to go back to school it won’t be next fall; now that it’s a solid fact that the people I care about here will not all be here after May–now I’m scared.

There are things that I want, but they’re all relatively short-term. School has been such a given for such a long time that I never really thought I had to do anything else. I do want more school, ultimately. I just don’t know what I want it for.

I’ve never been good at keeping planners because I have a calendar in my head. It’s laid out in boxes. It reads left to right, like a regular calendar, but the future stacks up on top and the past fades away at the bottom. I can see a whole year at once, if I want, and it’s fine, and I can remember where things go, because there are always bookends to keep things from falling out or getting too involved. September, December, January, May. I don’t know what happens if I don’t have an academic calendar. I don’t know what I do if September comes and nothing changes, or maybe something changes in July.

Maybe it’s early. I still have nine months. Maybe I’ll be inspired. Maybe I’ll run away. I don’t know. It’s like I used to see the future all stretched out in front of me and now it’s just

I miss Europe.