She Speaks in my Metaphors

Taken From the Czech Files--February 3 2003

"I sat down to write something meaningful today. Something to quench those age old desires and wrangle my restless pen. I want my introspection back. All I seem to be able to do is peer out the windows onto the square below, and watch the snow fall nearly horizontally from amarylis shaded eyes. The houses in the hills sit like snow globe entombed residences, too perfect and powder covered to actually exist. The double-viewed windows of the old town hall glimpse west, returning with the familiar sleepy heavy-lidded grey skies, the ones dogging me almost with out end since early October. I wonder if it's the honey I smell, or the ice.

I'm thinking about Communism and the passing of time. So much is unevident, everything with its shiny new coat of paint. But who's ever to say in the shapeshifting realms of cause and effect? Fifty years is no lifetime, the sun again rises. For those lost in the dark there was no return. For those casting aside the history , flames swallow that dubbed too true to remember. I'm thinking about time and history, this endless day morphing in the confines of my starved imagination. The people keep coming hurrying off to meet their history, while women in pointy black boots and skirts slit up to here push Woodrow Wilson baby carriages and night falls with the subtlety and grace of collecting dust. I've lost control of my pen, no longer honed after years of practice my mind spinning in space flirting with all directions and I can't hold on to anything long enough to transcribe. So much for meaningful. The lights are slowly coming on across the way, one after another spreading the mosaic conformism across the hillside.

How does it end?

I'm not the rebel fleeing from reality to the safety of unknown oblivion. I'm not the lowly heart searching the hovels of Africa for my long lost spiritual redemption. I'm not the wanderer searching for the family I never had, though maybe I should be. I sit and sip my tea, listening to the carousers jokes which make no sense and I wonder on reentry and its propensity to be the very same thing, only in a language I have a better handle on. Where do I run to? In a small town the size of Prague, where do I hide?"