Every Sense Brings Me Back
A return to Prague.
I walk into our small rented flat and I'm immediately greeted with the smell of laundry detergent, the very same Czech brand that we used when we lived here almost seven years ago. The grocery store too, smells of breads and deli meats and cheese from an earlier life. One inhale as I enter the musty and damp underground metro is like diving back into the waters of my late twenties. The soothing voice of the recorded metro announcements is familiar, comforting. The chiming bell that signals each stop and the hum of the tram clicking across the tracks is a well-played soundtrack. I speak sing-song language here to every waitstaff, every grocer, each shopgirl. They understand me, and every interaction feels like a triumph. I've not forgotten, this is a part of me. Even the jostling uber car that climbs over the bumpy cobblestone streets is all part of the play: Act I - The Great Remembering. There is rain on my skin as we run from the castle to the restaurant in the middle of a storm, the rush of wind from the train as it glides towards us, and a beam of sun that follows my face as I walk back and forth across the Charles Bridge again and again in those two weeks. Every sense brings me back here. To a city that I lived in then, a place where I visit now, and a dream that I see when I close my eyes.
Beautiful photos, this was a nice read. I know the feeling of the little triumph of “it’s still there, I still remember!”