M.

To Prague, say, why not, and stay, yes, not just go but stay. Alone, too, fuck it. For how long? Who knows. Why? Because it’s … adjectives, superlatives, demonstratives… and, well, the airport is a cab/train ride away and my bag’s somewhere around here but who needs it. Could be there in a day—anything less seems too close, anything more too arduous, but I’m just making excuses for reasons already given.

Yes, go to Prague alone in a day and wander and work and bump into Tomáš and Teresa and Sabina, say, who knows, and maybe fall in love with all three for the hell of not being able to help it and I’ll put accents over the a and s in mischa like mišchá and never write another word again and it’ll all be fine and well and good because Love is greater than love since it has a capital L, they’ll tell me, just stay with us and be with us and live with us in our beautiful old familiar enchanting elsewhere city and I’ll buy it because I’m a fool for enchanting elsewheres and accents and capital Loves and the wisdom of fictional characters, have been.

But no, no, that’s not quite right—mostly right but not quite—and capital Love is spent, sorry to say. I love this, I’ll tell them, writing this, saying this, thinking this that and the other steeped now in past and place and poured out in new surroundings, loving all this in lowercase, sometimes hating it in capitals, being this and dreaming more, fearing less, flawed and incomplete and hopelessly possible. Or possibly… nevermind.

The point, I’ll tell them, is that I said I’d go and I went and then the going will be history and nothing less than this will matter, nothing more will need to, at least for a while, maybe a long one, and they will love and listen to my nonfictions and fictions alike and understand and say “yes, we understand” and they really will and they will remind me

to look back—“remember, look back,” they’ll say and I will, I will, introspective wolf in retro sheep’s clothing, listening back and looking not so much behind as There, back to a place that was once itself an elsewhere and can never be again because I was-there and I made it out, not wholly disenchanted, miles and months between adding up to bigger things like distances and time and I’ll see

everything I left through everything I brought and everything I brought through everything I left, bi-nocular. And I’ll see that what was close still is, but differently, and will be, differently, but always, and that’ll be a start. Page one, in fact, perhaps, and then what, lowercase love, then what to do but page two, starting right in the middle, just because I went

and wrote it out in both directions, all directions, and called it something interesting and meaningless like the history of coming back when all I meant

was how I got through now, knowing I made it all up, dreaming.