A Week in Prague

The tension is palpable, the air buzzing with excitement and doubt, as we’re sitting opposite to each other on a small terrace on the bank of the Vltava. It is late spring, and the sun has not yet set, but it is low enough, so that I have to squint when I look over the river. The water glisters in its warm light and playfully catches and reshapes it into ripples. It took us a while to actually find a place to sit down. I guess the Czechs, or at least the people of Prague, are not big on terraces. The only places we could find, where one could sit outside to eat and drink, were the overpriced and obnoxious cafés around the Orloj clock on the big town square. The kind of place where the seats are filled with Americans and the staff looks at you with disdain. We had walked through the streets of Prague for over an hour until we finally found something. It’s smaller and cheaper and the food looks alright here, and the people around us speak Czech, not English. She stares at the hills behind me on the other side of the water, seemingly in thought, her pupils dilated in a distracted look. Her fingers trace the foot of the full wine glass before her. Our food has not yet arrived.

A strange confliction has crept up on me. I am, I want to be, taken by the idyll of it all, yet my mind runs off with its thoughts and fears. She has been off for a while now. In the past week I’ve found that she can get this way. She gets silent. She speaks but she doesn’t really talk to me anymore. She is guarded. It’s usually one of those silly things. It often happens when she’s hungry, but I feel like there is more to it now. I know that her mind easily wanders, and often not to good places. We’ve sat here for a while and I have been wanting to ask her about it the whole time, but I’m afraid of what will follow if I press her about it, afraid for her to confirm what I already know. I want to take another sip because my hands are awkward and restless and I don’t know what to do with them, but I’m already halfway through my second glass and she hasn’t drank any of hers since we toasted and took a sip together. 

“What is it?” I ask, gently, because I really care. I want her to feel better, even though I know what she’s thinking about.

Her gaze remains on the hills. “Nothing,” she says calm but melancholy. 

“Hey, come on,” I say, and I extend my hand across the table. She doesn’t take it. “It’ll be fine, come on.”

Still, she doesn’t respond.

“Is it him?” I finally ask.

She shrugs. “I don’t know.”

“It’s okay,” I assure her. “I don’t mind.”

“Don’t you?”

“No. I just want you to feel better,” I say, but I don’t even know. It’s not a lie. I want to talk about him, because I want to know exactly what is going on. However, his constant presence which has been looming over our week together bothers me. I want to be alone with her, the two of us, but he must be addressed.

Only two months ago we sat in class together, next to each other in the back of the lecture hall. She leaned in just a bit too close and looked over my shoulder while I was booking tickets to America on my laptop. She knew why, whom I was going to see. And she must’ve seen the price, over 1500 bucks for a round trip. It didn’t seem to bother her. 

“Where are we going?” she asked. 

“I don’t know where we are going,” I replied. 

She just smiled. “Then what are you booking tickets for?”

“America. For me,” I needlessly clarified.

She rolled her eyes. “Well, I’m not interested in America.” She pretended to return her focus to the class, but her lips curled into a smile and she didn’t move even a bit away from me. Her arm burned against mine. I couldn’t drop it.

“Where did you want to go?” I asked after waiting a while, hoping for her to give herself away.

“I don’t know,” she said, feigning indifference.

I smirked. “I thought so.”

“Well just click anywhere on the map then, and we’ll go wherever the cursor lands.” She looked at me, her eyes bright and confident. 

I opened the map and clicked somewhere random. We landed somewhere in eastern Germany. There wasn’t much around that we recognized. “I guess we could go to Prague,” I said, figuring I would call her bluff.

“I would love to go to Prague,” she said plainly instead. “I have never been.”

The American girl I was seeing back then, was less than thrilled. She insisted that I had crossed a boundary. “Where are you going to sleep? In the same room? In the same bed?” she had yelled at me as we were on the phone one late evening. We were separated by an ocean and didn’t see each other much, and with every hint of infidelity—this wasn’t the first—she felt her grasp on me slipping. 

“Probably not. I mean, the same room maybe. Not the same bed,” I said, trying to sound nonchalant, hoping to convince her it all wasn’t that strange.

“You’re going too far,” she insisted.

“Don’t you trust me?” I snapped back. I knew it was unfair of me to say. It wasn’t like that. I guess I just knew that it would give me some breathing room, shift the focus onto her. I felt in control again.

“Of course I trust you, but I don’t even know her!” she said in a high-pitched voice. It both affected and irritated me. She sounded so desperate to make me understand and so hurt that I didn’t.

“She has a boyfriend, too, you know,” I continued

“That’s not the point.”

“Of course that’s the point!” I retorted.

“I just—” she stopped. Her voice faltered and she let out a slight sob. “I just think it’s weird that you would go on vacation with some other girl, sleep in a room with her for a week. She sees you more often than I do.” Her voice had suddenly softened. She didn’t sound so offended anymore, so wronged. Just sad.

“Well, what do you want me to do? Should I just not go?” I finally said when I was fed up, knowing very well that she would never go as far as to forbid me anything.

Back when we started planning this trip to Prague, even I wasn’t aware of everything between us. I think neither of us were. But things developed rapidly. Both convinced that we were nothing more than friends, me and this girl, the source of the American’s jealousy, we saw each other more and more often. We had weekly classes together and, although usually I neglected to show up, I made an effort to come whenever I knew she would be there. Afterwards we’d hang out at the university bookstore. We both seemed to be eternally in search of a specific book at that time. Then we’d go for drinks, or I’d walk her home. She asked me for help with her coursework and we met up to study together for exams, while normally neither of us would study very much at all. One evening we met up to get drunk and watch movies. My American girl was so pissed. She didn’t trust me, being drunk in a room with this girl, for one second. In the end neither of us really drank much of anything. We just didn’t get around to it. During the movie she wound up in my arms and we were both afraid it would stop if we interrupted, or even brought attention to it, and so neither of us wanted to get up to get another drink. After the movie we got talking, and then both of us just forgot all about the drinks. The conversation kept us up until three in the morning. We were having a great time and had gotten tired, and so the boundaries gently faded. Eventually, at an unguarded moment, she kissed me. When it happened, neither of us were very sure what to do next. I ended up staying over, despite her boyfriend knowing I was there. She slept in my arms.

Of course, it changed something between me and my American girl. Although I never told her about the kiss, things suddenly seemed irreparably bad. Or maybe I only saw it now. Or maybe I just wanted it to be irreparable. We broke up not long after. Even though she was always afraid it would end, she didn’t see it coming, which made it all the more painful. When I said I couldn’t do it anymore, she pleaded that if we both wanted it, we could just make it work. After all, weren’t we in love? She had been completely infatuated with the idea of us, a perfect love. A love like in the books she read, deep and all-consuming. I had love for her too, of course, but from the very start I always held back. I knew she wasn’t who I’d end up with, and she felt it. I said all that she wanted to hear and then all she didn’t want to hear, too. In the end, our love consumed itself.

The kiss had caused a rift between her and her boyfriend as well. When we awoke the next day, in the early afternoon, I went home and she called him. He came over a couple days later and she confessed everything to him. At first, he seemed to take it well, said he didn’t mind, didn’t see it as anything serious. Eventually, though, the rot surfaced. Although he wanted to be okay with it, pretty soon he found that he wasn’t. He tried to ignore it, but she felt it. Then the arguments started. He became jealous when she texted me or met with me after class, but knew he couldn’t forbid her. They had big fights about us after which she would turn up at my place so I could talk to her about it and comfort her. I had started to hope that she would break up with him, and every time she asked for my advice, I was torn between telling her they were going to be okay and telling her to put an end to it. When she stopped crying, we kissed, and we slept together, while her boyfriend remained alone at her place. We had never actually gotten around to booking that trip to Prague but one day, after a particularly bad fight, she stood on my doorstep with a packed suitcase. We left the next day.

“I’m not going to wait for you,” I say. I feel the urge to make it sound harsh, because I want to be harsh, yet at the same time I want to pull my punches, not to drive her away.

She reacts accordingly. “What do you mean?” she says, pretending not to understand. But her eyes harden and her tone is too deliberate. I want to say something, something in my defence, something that sounds harsh but very justified, but as I prepare to do so she continues talking. Perhaps she realized that she gave herself away because there is no false confusion anymore, she speaks clearly and equally as harsh. “I don’t expect you to wait for me. I didn’t ask you to. Of course you don’t have to.” 

There is a balance somewhere, between standing up for myself and pleasing her, and I cannot find it. I am constantly afraid of scaring her off, driving her away from me or back to what she knows. 

“I just mean,” I continue, “I’m not just waiting around for you to break up with him.” I realize I’m repeating myself and she’s getting ready to say something, so I staunchly keep talking, hoping to say something which reflects how I feel and makes her see my point. “Like, at some point I might move on. And even if you break up with him that doesn’t mean you just get to have me.”

“Have you? You think I want to have you?”

I want to say that yes, I do, at least I hope so, but clearly I’ve put it wrongly.

“I just think that if we’re both single, at some point we’ll have to see about us. It doesn’t automatically mean that we’re together.”

“Do you not want to ever be?” Her voice is still hostile and she eyes me sceptically.

“No, I mean,” I stumble over my words, unsure what I’m going to say next. “I can see it happening. Us, I mean. Of course. We’ll have to see. Like, we’ll have to start again, with a clean slate. We’ll have to see if there’s something there. Between us. We’ll start over, begin anew.” With every word I say, every time I attempt to explain myself, I feel like I am digging myself a deeper hole. 

Her face has, by now, gone from a hardened, frustrated stare to a softened, weakened state. She averts her eyes and looks back over the river. Then she lets out a sigh and puts her head down, staring at her drink. 

“Come on,” I try, “You know what I mean.”

“It’s just…” she finally says. Her voice is soft now. She looks increasingly anguished. I feel like it’s my fault. 

“It’s your decision,” I assure her, still hoping to pull her away from him without wanting to push her towards any decision that’s not hers. 

“I know that it’s different now, but he always meant a lot to me. He still does. I love him so much.” 

Despite their inevitability, those words still hurt me. I don’t react and I’m pretty sure that she can see it. “I really needed him. Back when it started, I mean. At that point in my life, he was what I needed. Nobody else could ever have helped me like he did. I don’t know if I’m capable of just throwing that away.”

“Well,” I start cautiously, unsure whether I mean what I’m about to say. “I don’t think I can just be friends anymore. Go back, I mean, to how it was.”

Her eyes lock onto mine. “Well then what am I supposed to—” she stops and looks away again. She continues then, having recomposed herself. “I used to be so sure about him, but I don’t know if we’re going to make it now. If we break up though, and nothing is waiting for me…” She nervously plays with her fingers, fixating her gaze somewhere at a non-existent point behind me. “If you’ll move on, and then you don’t even want to be friends… I don’t want to lose you both.”

I look at her, nervous and doubtful. Everything she says instils in me a sense of hope and dread all at once. There’s so much I want to say, yet I feel the desperate need to keep my cards close to my chest, play it safe. I feel like we’ve both drowned in our own words and their meanings and our thoughts. I think back to when this all started. On my relationship which I then knew would end. It had become so endlessly complicated to me. I had this desire to escape but I didn't want to at the same time. I felt I was at once the unstoppable force and the immovable object. She, I thought then, was my escape, the fresh start I had craved for so long. She pulled me away from that total indecisiveness which I had felt for years, about everything. Finally, I stood on the precipice of a new beginning.

Now I have that feeling once again. The need to escape, to be pulled away. The hope has built in me, over the past weeks, that she will do that once more. 

“I kind of thought you were done with him. Fed up. You’re always talking about him so negatively,” I say hesitantly. 

“You just hoped I was,” she says. Her hard eyes soften for a moment and her serious face gives way to a brief smile.

“I just want for it to be possible,” I tell her plainly now. “That we might work out, together, eventually.”

“Me too,” she says.

She sits back in her chair and sighs deeply. She throws her hands lazily in her lap, her chest and shoulders sink. A certain pressure releases in her as she seemingly deflates. “I don’t want to go back,” she says, looking at me and smiling wanly.

“Yeah, me neither,” I say, and I smile back, very consciously, wanting to be relieved of my thoughts, my mind still very much occupied. It helps somewhat. The tension, which hung like an obtrusive fog between us, seems to slightly lift as we both decide to be okay. “It would be easier. It would all be okay then,” I say.

“It’s all okay now,” she says. Her leg softly touches mine under the table and I feel her skirt flow past my ankles.

“It seems so simple here. If it were possible, we would start anew here.”

“We’ll start anew at home,” she says calmly, reassuringly.

“You think so?” 

“Yes, either way, we will start anew.”

The sun has finally set on us. The kind, red sky warmly lights up her face. It colours her hair in a sweet orange. I see the waitress coming up to us across the terrace with two plates in her hands. The tension is gone now. She relaxes back into her chair. Her rushing thoughts seem to have come to a conclusion. We will speak no more about this for the remainder of this evening. The two remaining days of this week will feel like a dream. Then, we will go home and whatever comes next will begin.