The whistle blows and we are gone.

Arrive.  I take my first taxi of the trip to the hostel from the train station.  Drop my bags in my room, listening to the loud American voice out my window making blanket statements about not much at all.  I join them on the patio, –Caitlyn from New York City; Sertack, from India with his friend whose name I’ve forgotten.  Passing through this beautiful picturesque town in the Czech Republic.  We walk to the beer gardens, cobblestone streets curve endlessly.  Later at the picnic table overlooking the river, eating salmon and drinking smoked beer, I share his joint.  I stare at the bridge, the dusky blue gray sky, houses reflected in the inky black water, streetlights like fires burning.

A pigeon perches momentarily on the ledge of my open window interior double doors; all windows open to another, a narrow gap in between; I don’t know why.  Both are wide open, drying my underwear on a wooden hanger.  I take in my breath and wait.  Are birds in the house bad luck? He flies away.  Is that a sign?  A dirty city pigeon coming to tell me something.  As much as I long for them, signs scare me when they present themselves.

Morning bike ride before I leave, with Michal, my guide.  I don’t know where he will take me, soaring on bikes, high above the city.  We are somewhere looking down the views: bridges stretching endlessly across rivers, trees reflected in the water below, glittering green.  Today it is cool and my one heavy sweater buried in my  suitcase already waiting for the next place, in a locker at the train station.

I call my daughter because Carol left and somehow I felt connected to her even though I ditched her last night and almost ditched her again tonight.  So easy to slip into my old ways, to disappear, to withdraw.  This version of me, is always there waiting: I am here, I am here, saying I never went away.  And she didn’t.

Emma doesn’t answer the phone and I try to be okay with that.  I am too far away for anything else.  Besides what could I do if she needed me?  I’m lost too.

Today I went to the Jewish Cemetery, thinking of Sam.  I vaguely remember walking through with him years ago.  I text him a picture of the gravestones, the little rocks on the ledges.  He tells me they are to keep the souls in the ground so they don’t wander.  Wouldn’t you want to hear from a wandering soul? A soul you loved and still love.

I never dream of my father, nor feel him here.  When mom was sick and on the ventilator I saw him then, going into her room.  I told him that he looked good.  I don’t remember him saying anything back.  I will go and visit his gravesite when I am back.  Should I leave a stone, or knock them away to hear from him again.  Is it best to wander or be grounded?

Small moments  dissipate.  I remember bits of my time with Sam –in Rome, staying in some room somewhere, an old lady’s apartment, a pensione we found when we exited the train.  Sam always pulling me, and me following along, doing what he wanted, falling into him again and again, drowning.

Outside my window the boys downstairs holler, still hanging out the window drinking beer.

Dillard, on youth looking at age (her view of her parents):

“Our beauty is a mere absence of decrepitude; their beauty, when they had it, was not passive but earned; it was grandeur; it was a party to power, and to artifice, even and to knowledge.  Our beauty was, in the long run, merely elfin.”

Walked down to Old Town Center, the Jewish Cemetery.  I was lost a million times over.

All day I wander around in the rain.  Sit on a bench in some open square eating ice cream watching people, taking pictures of pigeons gathering in the street, a little girl throwing bread crumbs.  Her mother sitting next to me looks suspiciously at my phone, afraid maybe that I am taking a picture of her little girl.  She seems appeased when she sees the nondescript photo on my screen, just dirty pigeons eating bread.  She lights a cigarette and smokes it.  Doesn’t ask –is this okay?  Do you mind?  Her thigh is touching my own.   In America, obese people in small-town Walmarts wearing Spandex and seated in their motorized carts, navigate aisle after aisle, abundant.

Everywhere people are looking at maps.  The phones are no good.  I activate google maps and it has me walking in circles, turning into brick walls.  No one knows where they are going, no one speaks English –or if they do they are equally lost.  To everyone who has asked me for help, I shrug my shoulders, hands out what can I do.

At a cafe I disappear again.  Wine and spaghetti.  The sky darkens, opens.  A French couple sitting a table over invite me under the protection of their awning, which then starts to drip –big heavy drops and then more.  Two young American girls behind me chatter –my daughter’s age.  We talk.  I buy them both glasses of wine.  We discuss our lives, snap our photos with our smart phones to document our journeys.

Later, I meet Carol from Berlin for dinner –in what appears to be a similar café.  I discover in looking at the menu that it is exactly the same.  I have stumbled on a chain, like a Burger King or McDonald’s, only masked for tourists. We discuss our lives, but because we are older we don’t take our picture for Facebook.  (It’s distracting.  Too easy to just be lost in the make-believe world. Or am I lost in the world of make-believe here?)  I feel sad when Carol and I hug and part –on a big wide boulevard where I was lost earlier in the day, whose name I can’t pronounce.  She majored in English, her step daughter majored with a degree in graphic design.  Hugging her goodbye, I feel alone again, fearful –of things lost.

I wait.  I  have been here all along.

I have lost my map from last night’s excursions.  I wander aimlessly, half awake –three espressos later.

Carol from Berlin begged off last night.  To be fair, I was two hours late in touching base.  I am on Czech time, lazing the afternoon away drinking with Adam and Lindsay, Carol is far away.

This city is frustrating and beautiful in so many ways.   I could cry at its amazingness.  Loved, loved, loved our tour guide, Slyvie, and even forgave everyone for their political talk, for assuming everyone else thought like them.  People talk of world travels and having open minds.  Contradictions everywhere.  On one end of the political spectrum most keep their mouths shut otherwise viewed as pariahs, against everything and everyone, stuck in middle America thinking only of ourselves, gobbling up our lives in greedy gulps.

I just listen, liking the chatter of their voices as we sip the 50% proof brandy with an unpronounceable name in the Prague Hilton, so different I imagine from where I am staying, this hotel lounge where we three gather after our tour–Adam and Lindsay and me.  I am tempted to go to her room –as Lindsay graciously suggests when I need to use a bathroom in the cocktail lounge –“free” for guests of the Hilton but no w.c. in this fancy lounge. Instead, I roam the hallway on the 8th floor and duck into the w.c. reserved for the maids and people who clean the rooms, see our lives scattered about, our dirty towels on the floor.  I make my way back to the table where I find another aperitif that has less of a kickback than the first.  I am buzzed and high with the wonder of it all.

Annie Dillard writes of coming into an awareness of who you are–the baggage you never leave behind–no matter the artiface, the covering up, the glossing over.  I remember  a line from her book, An American Childhood: “Oh fleeting moment, stay.”  I have yet to read the entire book, but only a simplified version, watered-down, almost-empty; American education.  We are all asleep, slumped over in our chairs getting through the day, the week, the months, the years.  Kids indifferent in their cockiness, what do you have to tell me?  The teachers jumping around being judged on how much they can entertain.  Wipe the sleep from your eyes.

5:33 in Praha.  The frat boys hang out the window, half naked drinking beer.  There is no hollering when I walk past.  I have already disappeared.  To myself –sometimes–I am vibrant, sexy, alive.  The target of men in clubs or cafes somewhere: Milan or Paris, smoking cigarettes and drinking doubler espresso in the cafe downstairs, men trying to hug me, to pull me to them as I pick up my dry cleaning headed out to meet my boyfriend, flying in from another country to hop from here to another country  to another.  I remember making love on the mattress on the floor in the models’ apartment, the windows that were French doors.  I don’t remember the time of year. Cold. Someone I was unaware of until too late watched from across the way.  Now I peer out this window in Prague looking for something.

My sister and beer.  Her neighbors’ garden: Leave yourself open for whatever may come.

Berlin to Prague

I arrive at the platform. Early always.  Frantically search my bag –at the train platform, taking out item after item, convinced I’ve forgotten something, left it behind at the hostel in Berlin: something important–my money belt; my chargers; my phone; my favorite blouse hanging over some nonexistent balcony somewhere; a half-read book, the end forever unknown; details of my past that are important to remember to get to where I am going.  Somehow, despite my belongings spread out on the gray concrete, I wind up where I am supposed to be, carefully intact, waiting for what might come next.

Around me, people are lost in their electronic worlds; I am not there.  The journey scares me.  I’m frenetic, tumbling everywhere.  Arriving is less frightening than leaving: you stand still, observing.

The people around me are looking for something: coins, directions, whatever it might take to get there; a plaintive voice beside me asks (in some accent or another): “Do you speak English?  Can you help me find where I am going?  This place is too big, too confusing.”  I offer nothing, holding onto my belongings, arms aching, praying that whatever I might need will be there when I arrive.

I succumb to the temptation of the electronic world, beckoning, cutting me off from what’s right in front of me.  I get lost in the solace of home, my laptop beckoning as it does every morning looking at empty houses, homes for sale in my neighborhood, comparing what I have to whatever might be out there.

Years ago, with Sam, we arrived in this city before dawn; it was dark and bleak, and I choked on my coffee, what was always left unsaid.  We were disheveled and unwashed.  The city rushed; we never stayed in one place, just walked from train station to city streets; I felt unmoored, stumbling alongside Sam, my body mirroring the cold, the damp, the day.  I followed along, wherever he wanted me to be.

He disappeared from my life to reappear years later, the same and not the same.  A 62-year-old man with thinning hair and busty blond girlfriends; someone I never was and could never be.  I have disappeared.  At 56, I fade, am nothing,  light diffused, blurring everything.  I try to hold on to what might be.

The train on the next track snakes away.  I don’t know if I am moving or standing still.  The doors close seconds after it pulls into the station, no time for hesitation: Get on or be left behind, standing on the platform, bags in hand, arms aching.

An old lady pushes a walker to the bench where I am sitting, somehow making her way.  I give her my seat, and she thanks me.  Her accent mirrors my own.  She has oxygen tubes in her nose, and tells me her story.  Her children are grown–adventurers like she is far from her small town in Texas only miles from the Mexican border.  How did she end up here beside me? waiting for the train to take us to wherever it is we are meant to be.  When we reach our destination, I will abandon her on the platform.  I’m gone.  Something disappeared when I looked the other way.

Tall skinny trees zoom past out the window; quaint houses with pretty-colored rooftops.  I want to capture it, but the moment I reach for my camera it is gone.  Pathways cut between the trees, dirt roads where someone wandered.  The train lulls, the beauty of the moment right here.  A sign.  Of what I am uncertain.

You wake up to yourself.  You fall into it, like a murky pond that somehow reflects back all you are meant to be.

I pick up my camera; what was here a moment ago is gone, like the boy with the balloon at the train station: it popped making us all jump: what could it be?