the weight of awkwardness

On the following day, I woke up to find many of the guys at the party from the night before still in the apartment.  We rubbed our collective eyes until we were awake to wash the dishes, clean up and eat and drink all the leftovers.  The dirty dishes disappeared with the wine and beer and vegetable pies, the only thing that remained was a new row of empty bottles lined up against the recycle bins.  I had some time to kill until I met with Jitka (my hostess) and we would go off to Plzen to watch a Tata Bojs concert. I walked around Jijkov, looking for a coffee shop.  Though there are plenty of coffee shops and bars in the area, and I’ve even seen them with my own eyes, I somehow missed them all and ended up in a park.  After getting through the park, I decided to head on to find the train station and missed it to the north, where I found a barren pedestrian wasteland of high, barbed wire fences and towering superhighways.  I felt as though I had suddenly left Europe and all its cozy alleys and returned to the States.  In instants though, I was back, with towering Baroque buildings all around me again. 

We met at the train station, with Jitka running in minutes down.  “I’m always running late, almost missing everything.”  “You might use some time management skills.”  “You’re doing the serious thing again, aren’t you?  You’ve got the serious face.”  

Silence.

She laughed.  “Yup, the serious face.”  

We kept on to the train, with time left.  We talked for most of the way on the train.  “There’s some people who want to improve Prague,” she told me.  “Most of them have been living in Prague before.  It’s the new people that come here and want to improve, the people from the smaller Czech towns.”  


When we had arrived at Plzen, I had decided that we shouldn’t do the brewery tour of Pilsner Urquell.  Instead, we wandered around the old town center and walked through a town fair, where there was a band playing covers of Czech rock songs.  “Every time I come here, things have changed,” she told me as we walked around, huddled in our jackets.  I was drinking a beer and she was drinking a hot wine.  “It doesn’t feel like my home any more.”  

“I know what you mean,” I told her.  “My old home town, Tulsa, didn’t feel like home anymore last time I was there.  My home there was gone.  Buildings and cafes were all different.  But many of my friends were still there.  Now they have families, homes.  But it’s not my home.”  I stared off, watching children jumping up and down on some bungee trampolines set up in the square.  “But that’s the nature of cities and homes.  They’re always changing and living.  If they stop, they’re dead.  I’d rather my friends different than dead, and I’d rather my cities changing than dying.  I sometimes imagine myself on a train with a great darkness behind me.  At each train the station stops, I can see the darkness growing.  One of these days, when the train is resting at a stop, the darkness will catch up and devour us all.  We can’t slow down, we can’t stop, or we die.” 

We went to the concert that night with one of her friends.  A girl who was studying psychology in school and was doing her thesis on Ripley’s gender role in Alien.  Certainly a non-conventional thesis, which is what I found greatly attractive about her.  “But girls don’t usually like science fiction,” I said to her, taking a huff from the cigarette she had handed me. 

“Now you’re assigning me a gender role?”

“Fair enough, but I’m not the one doing the assigning.”

The concert was Tata Bojs.  Their music isn’t for everyone, it’s a kind of poppy version of LMFAO.  Their performance is better than any of the recordings I could find, but for the sake of example, I’ll post one of their main hits right below. 

The next day, I departed Plzen without Jitka, as she was going off to meet her sister in the countryside.  I was returning to Prague, where I would meet up with Pavlos, who had flown in the night before.  We met at a metro stop, after I stood around waiting in the chill, wondering if he received my last text about where I was standing.  He came up the stairs and we embraced.  I pulled two beers from my deep jacket pockets.  “You sure we can drink here?” he asked me. 

“There are no public drinking laws here.  Welcome to Prague!” and we clinked our drinking receptacles together, my bottle against his tin can.  We stood before a large contraption with solar panels and a spinning wheel that blew soap bubbles.  The bubbles sailed across the air and were popped by the fingers of a little boy in a red jacket, who was giggling as he ran in circles, destroying the little soap globes, an Angel of Death against cleanliness. 

When we at last made it to our new hostess’s place, there was another guy there as well.  “I don’t know why I can’t stay another night,” he said.  One of the hostesses wasn’t there yet, a girl named Kamilla.  “I mean, last I saw Kamilla, she was okay with me, we were on good terms.”

“Just Kamilla wasn’t very happy with you.  I know she wouldn’t want you to stay,” Annette, the blonde haired girl said, trying to get him to pack up his things earlier. 

“What exactly happened?” I asked the guy, an American.

“I met a girl last night and stayed at her hostel with her.  You know, we hit it off and everything.  I just forgot to call them, my couchsurfing hosts.  I mean, I guess I should have called.”

“For one thing, we told you we didn’t want to stay up all night,” Annette said.  “And we didn’t know if you were coming back our not.”

Through the entire conversation, there was a frost of awkwardness.  The air was thick with the weight of the awkwardness and even breathing became hard.  I didn’t understand why it was like that exactly.  That night, we all (minus the guy) went to an all you can drink club event.  The girls got hammered and we had to virtually carry them home to make sure they were safe.  The next day, Pavlos and I went out exploring some more, and when we came back (we were supposed to stay another night), there was that awkwardness again, except this time between us and them.  Maybe it was the apartment that just made everything permeate with this general discomfort about life.  At this point, I didn’t even want to stay at the apartment again. 

“Maybe we’ll just stay at a hostel,” I suggested as we all stood crammed in the entry hallway.  The girls hadn’t really invited us in, but neither had they really said that we couldn’t stay another night.  “It’s no problem again.”  So we grabbed Pavlos’s things and went off to find a hostel.